Month: October 2006

The Great Giveaway, Part 2

Standard

The Great Giveaway

The second of a three-part review (Part 1, Part 3 ) of David E. Fitch's The Great Giveaway: Reclaiming the Mission of the Church from Big Business, Parachurch Organizations, Psychotherapy, and Consumer Capitalism.

The middle three chapters:

    3. Leadership
    4. The Production of Experience
    5. The Preaching of the Word

 

Leadership 

Overview

In this chapter, Fitch laments the moral failures of today's pastors, claiming that much of the problem is due to Evagelicalism's fascination with pastors as CEOs rather than faithful shepherds. The "Pastor as CEO" model isolates the pastor from the rest of the fellowship, making him an outsider who must never falter. That perfectionistic ideal helps foster the very moral failures it seeks to prevent. It creates ministry class distinctions and reinforces the negative industrialized ideals of modernism, warping leadership into nothing more than science, efficiency, and "please the shareholder" thinking. Church Growth principles are largely, though not entirely, to blame for this transformation of pastoral leadership.

The penetration of modern business practices into church leadership turns Christianity into a set of techniques. Discipleship and leadership become nothing more than behavioral responses to proper programming rather than a living, vital faith. The Church cannot be the Body of Christ if it is founded on business ideals coated with Scripture to make them palatable. Scripture is our only source for leadership and discipleship, not TQM, ISO 9001, or whatever Jack Welch blabs about in his book Winning. 

By creating CEO pastors, we ensure the false idea that only one person is in charge. Only one person has the correct interpretation of Scripture. Only one person is equipped to minister. This fosters a passive congregation that acts as an audience,  giving away its responsibility to be a community of faith. All church life exists in community, and the pastor must be treated as a co-equal in that community. He must be allowed to stumble and to also seek, just as the individuals in the community do. Ministry is a community activity, not just something done by pastors. Interpretation of Scripture belongs to the community, too, not the pastor alone.

The model for real pastoral care is found in servanthood, not CEO-dom. Fitch longs for greater emphasis put on ordination as a rite into true service. He believes that too much had been made of pastors knowing facts from the Bible, and on seminary graduation, than on an ordination process with effective oversight. We make pastoring too much a science and a professional credential than a practice of humble service to others.

Fitch also wishes to see seminary training take on more of a monastic living style than being simply a time to perfect doctrine. Seminarians would live in groups, farm, cook meals, and eat together. In addition, they'd be expected to take part in group prayer times, participate in confessional and accountability groups, take care of children, serve the poor, and live out their beliefs in genuine, humble service. Pastors should also be a part of confessional groups after seminary. Fitch also recommends that pastors be bivocational to better understand the daily lives of their congregants. Any pressure this puts on a lone pastor would be dispersed by eliminating the concept of a church served by only one pastor. Instead, churches would be better served by teams of leadership and not a pastor alone.

Comments

I thought this chapter was brilliant. While Fitch may have attributed too much of today's pastoral problems to business practices, his practical solutions are right on, more than covering his narrow focus. We must do something to cure our seminaries of their one-sided leanings toward the purely rational and didactic. Too much of what today's seminarians learn is theoretical and not enough practical. The return to a more monastic type of seminary would better turn out servants and not CEOs.

Giving church control to congregations and not one or two individuals is also critical. While many churches believe they do this with their pastoral staffs, too often it's more like the king and his court than a parliament of leadership equals. As for the idea of bivocational pastors, I know that too many pastors have been so insulated in the pastorate they lose all touch with what working people face in the cut-throat business world we have today. Being bivocational also reinforces the idea of servanthood, since few vocations will find a pastor dwelling in the corporate penthouse. Being one of the tiny cogs in the corporate machine would go a long way to waking up Church leaders in America to the moral disaster we've created with our modern business practices.

 

The Production of Experience

Overview

Are we worshiping God or creating personalized experiences? Fitch claims that Evangelicalism has veered into selfishness by overemphasizing the role of the individual. Modernism exalted the individual, but worship must be a communal activity, "Us," not "Me."  Modernism's conceit here is that one person can possess all the truth. Fitch says that the truth of the Gospel is meant for communities, and it is within community that heresy is fought and the truths of God best revealed to each person.

In this chapter, Fitch delves deeply into postmodernism, showing that, if left to its own, the modernistic individualism that so permeates our churches today ensures everyone hears a different Gospel. He takes on the subjective way in which we worship and communicate the Gospel, claiming that we're only fragmenting the truth of God in a consumeristic fashion. He writes that we need to recover narrative preaching and an understanding of the Gospel as a redemptive story that includes you and me. Framing what Christ did within history ties us into the traditional church of our ancestors.

His remedies for glitzy, experience-driven churches are old school. First, he longs for a return to liturgy (though he allows for a modernization) because it grounds the church meeting in shared worship and meaning. Rituals and rites of passage have their place in the Church, but Protestants gave them away in their mad rush to distance themselves from Roman Catholicism. Fitch also argues that Protestants mistakenly gave away symbols, art, music, and all things beautiful in their worship, sterilizing it from the rest of culture. He also desires a return to a Church calendar, at least in part, where churches better follow Advent, Pentecost, and some other regular seasons that have been abandoned in most Evangelical churches. Along those same lines, he believes Evangelicals have cheapened the meaning of the communion meal, relegating it to a few words spoken over grape juice and crackers rather than the meaningful meal it once was.

Comments

Anyone familiar with "Ancient/Future" discussions within the Emerging Church will recognize much of Fitch's commentary. He decries the shallowness of Evangelicalism created by false pietism and rugged individualism. In that, he's largely right. Evangelicals have run screaming from anything that smacks of the ritualistic group-think of Roman Catholicism, save for some Evangelical Lutheran, Anglican, and Episcopal churches that still practice many of the unifying rites and rituals he recommends.

Having grown up in an Evangelical Lutheran congregation, I can honestly say that I do miss seasons like Advent and Pentecost. I do miss some, though not all, of the ritual practices. I agree wholeheartedly with Fitch that our church services today have been stripped of far too many elements that help root us in Christ and in community. The Old Testament practices of worship resemble the old school style more than what most Evangelical churches practice today. God, obviously, is not against ritual.

Despite my agreement with some of Fitch's ideas here, this chapter (and the one following) were by far the most turgid and philosophical. While he may be a good church practice analyst, Fitch struggles in places in The Great Giveaway to get his points across in a cogent and accessible manner.

The other lack comes from Fitch not addressing the flaws in his solutions. Many Evangelicals fled the kind of church Fitch advocates. But Fitch doesn't deal with the lacks in liturgical churches heavy on "symbolism and meaning" that led to their diminishment today. While any thoughtful reader will be able to fill in the blanks here, some acknowledgment by the author would better help readers develop a true Evangelical practice that avoids what killed liberal Protestant churches that still practice liturgy.

 

The Preaching of the Word

Overview

Expository preaching fails because meaning is not universal. What the pastor preaches and the congregant understands are not necessarily the same thing. This only sows confusion and discord. Cultural and societal standards also create different meanings within a Scriptural passage. The Asian, African, and American will not interpret the same passage the same way because their cultures are different.

Fitch asserts that modern science governs the way the Bible is interpreted today. But processing a passage through a specific set of exegetical lenses cannot guarantee the correct interpretation of meaning. For this reason, Fitch  decries the Reformation's idea that each person can correctly interpret Scripture. With so many interpretations of a single passage abounding today, how can anyone, especially a preacher, be more than just a picker and chooser of this interpretation or that?

Seeker-sensitive churches accuse Bible churches of keeping the Bible shrouded so that those outside Christ cannot understand its message. Bible churches accuse seeker-sensitive churches of watering down the Gospel. Fitch claims both are missing the point.  The preaching of the Word must be seen in a communal context in which its meaning is held by the community that submits to it. Because meaning is held by a community, it is self-correcting of wayward individuals. No one person has "cornered the market" on a passage's meaning. The community, not the individual, does the interpreting.

Fitch advises that we recapture the narrative value of Scripture that draws the individual into a shared understanding. While expository preaching hands the listener a to-do list, narrative preaching puts us listeners in the story of God's redemptive acts so that we can better understand who God is and how He can use us in His story. This type of preaching resists forcing Scripture to be interpreted by culture rather than the other way around. Likewise, narrative preaching allows prescriptions (to-dos) to naturally follow description, the way the Bible lays out truth.

In the practical vein, Fitch asks that we return to lectionary reading that follows the church seasons. We should also return the speaking of the Word in our meetings to the congregation, rather than simply the clergy. Call and response uses of the Scriptures help the people absorb that they are responsible for what they hear. The application points of the typical expository message must return to a more holistic design that asks something of the gathered hearers immediately after the message. Fitch also calls for dialogue between the preacher and congregation after a message to better promote understanding, retention, and action. All interpretation must be tested by the congregation as a whole and not one individual.

Comment

Ah, Jacques Derrida! He raises his ugly, meaningless head again.

This chapter of The Great Giveaway is, by far, the most labored and least successful in the book. Problems abound on nearly every page. Fitch goes too emergent here, too conceptual, too philosophical, too buzzword, and ultimately derails.

Words have meaning. That meaning may vary from culture to culture, but where Fitch sees this as a lack in expository preaching, I see it as a strength. The African or Asian preacher has something to teach me about a passage that I may not have heard through my American cultural lens. Whereas Fitch sees that as a testament to the weakness of exposition, I see it as a strength. Fitch commits a grave error here by saying the whole of Christendom cannot hold multiple interpretations of the same passage. I see no problem with that, even if they appear to conflict. If anything, denominations that hold to one approved interpretation are much more likely to miss the nuances that make the Bible profound. The Bible is rich. It has rich meaning. Yes, no one person has a handle on all its truth, but together we get a better vision of its depth.

Fitch also holds the local church in too high esteem for its ability to rightly divide Scriptures. What's to say the church across the street doesn't have a different interpretation than what my church community decided. In truth, that's how it is now from church to church, so how is Fitch's recommendation better than what is already going on? 

While it may be a logical fallacy to equate the two, the poor understanding most Christians have of the Bible today parallels the demise of expository preaching in many Evangelical churches.  Somewhere in those two facts lurks a correlation. Nor is narrative preaching a surefire hit. I've been in churches that preach like Fitch recommends and Biblical knowledge can be just as sorely lacking as anywhere else. Nor is this a prescription against heresy. Again, witness liberal liturgical churches and their horrendous ability to self-correct using the type of preaching Fitch advocates.

This chapter of the book doesn't work—period. I didn't follow most of Fitch's points because he didn't make them as clearly in this chapter as in others. Either the argument is too subtle for his writing style, or else Fitch doesn't have enough ammo to fight the fight he picked. Either way, too much of this chapter reads like mumbo-jumbo. Considering I'm already familiar with complaints by the Emrging Church against expository preaching, that's a sad indictment of this chapter. Worse yet, some of Fitch's recommendations for practice (while nice to have in a church) aren't prescriptive for the ills Fitch himself exposes earlier in the chapter.

While I agree that expository preaching as it's done today is not as effective as it could be, I don't have good answers as to how to better it. Nor does David Fitch.

So we end this second part of the review on a down note. But stay tuned, because Part 3 of this review will cover what I believe to be the best portion of The Great Giveaway.

The Great Giveaway, Part 1

Standard

The Great Giveaway David E. Fitch’s The Great Giveaway: Reclaiming the Mission of the Church from Big Business, Parachurch Organizations, Psychotherapy, and Consumer Capitalism is the best Christian book I’ve read since Nancy Pearcey’s Total Truth. A fantastic primer discussing how the Church must live in a postmodern age, The Great Giveaway examines the ways the Church bowed the knee to modernism and gave away her soul. By allowing alternative scientific approaches to spirituality to trump the Gospel of Christ, the modern Church distanced itself from historic faithfulness. In keeping to this premise, The Great Giveaway does not attempt to critique postmodernism, but finds the everlasting truths of Christ and asks how they reveal themselves in this age.

If that sounds like emerging church rhetoric, trust me, it’s not. Fitch manages to step out of the emerging church versus traditional church battle and show where each is lacking. What makes The Great Giveaway better than all the books critiquing the American Church today is that Fitch not only sees the problems, he offers the best solutions I’ve encountered. (Much of what you’ve read on Cerulean Sanctum since the inception of this blog is mirrored in the pages of The Great Giveaway, so if it sounds like I’m tooting my own horn here, I’m trying to be as objective as I can under the circumstances.)

Is this a perfect book? By no means. Serious flaws spring up here and there. A couple months ago a commenter asked how I could recommend flawed books. (I had issues with some of the concepts in Randy Frazee’s two books, though I recommend them highly). I’d like to turn that around and ask what books besides the Scriptures are without flaws? Discernment, so utterly lacking in the Church today, necessitates that we read every book by every author—our favorites or not—with an eye toward error and truth. Real discernment is not blanket condemnation, but rather wrestling with ideas with the aid of the Holy Spirit and the Scriptures.

The Great Giveway features the following chapters, and I’ll deal with each in turn this week:

  1. Our Definition of Success
  2. Evangelism
  3. Leadership
  4. The Production of Experience
  5. The Preaching of the Word
  6. Our Understanding of Justice
  7. Spiritual Formation
  8. Moral Education

 

Our Definition of Success

Overview

Fitch begins his book with an easy target: “Megachurchianity,” as I call it. Numbers, he writes, do not translate into faithfulness. Church Growth Movement thinking owes more to business principles than Scripture. The result of working toward bigness is a consumeristic outgrowth of church that places rugged individualism and business efficiency at the core of church health rather than faithfulness to Christ. Faithful churches instead center their life in Christ and genuine community. That community is measured by real relationship with fellow believers that speaks hard truths into people’s lives, sees the need for confessing sin in a grace-filled local body, and calls on church members to partake in discerning prayer needs for each person’s life and the church as a whole.

Comments

Since most of the people who read Cerulean Sanctum agree that an obsession with numbers tends to curtail real discipleship, I have little comment. The Great Giveaway starts with an easy target and doesn’t add much to the discussion. We agree that consumerist Christianity fails. We know how megachurch religion missed the boat on every living and active part of the Church. Fitch doesn’t add much to the conversation. Think of this chapter as a touchstone for everything else that follows.

 

Evangelism

Overview

Fitch points out that postmodernism is the death-knell to evangelism that relies solely on apologetics. Postmoderns are not impressed by talk that does not follow walk. In fact, walk is proof of talk. Postmoderns are much more willing to listen to Bible truth when that truth is preceded with Bible walk.

Evangelical obsession with evangelistic methodology comes at the expense of real relationships with people. We’re more interested in getting someone saved than being their friend. The days of that thinking are numbered, though. What people today need to see in Christians is the actual living out of the evidence of Christ in us. This puts the evangelistic onus back on the community of believers rather than the individual. Individuals can still attest to Christ by their own life changes and Christ working through them, but the real power is in a transformed community. The early Church’s influence came about because people saw Christ in that community.

To that ends, hospitality, praying for others in need, showing mercy to those who desperately need it, and bringing justice to those without it are stronger evidences of the veracity of Christ than merely running through The Four Spiritual Laws or The Romans Road. Fitch by no means subjugates the Scriptures to experience, but instead shows that love overcomes roadblocks that enable the truth of Scripture to permeate the hardened hearts of people today. It’s the sun that melts the snow in Isaiah 55:10-11.

In an age when we in America have virtually no sense of real community, developing a worshipful community that embodies genuine relationships that alter how we live every day should fuel our evangelism. Fitch also seeks to recover the importance of our baptism into a worshipping community, stating that too much attention has been put on one singular act of conversion and not enough on the kind of long-term discipleship that Christ calls for in the Great Commission. He also sees Church planting as the healthy expression of a growing church rather than the tendency to grow into a megachurch.

Comments

We need to always be careful when someone states that God’s Word needs outside proof to be reconciled as true. Postmodernism’s obsession with avoiding absolute truth is infamous, but I don’t believe that Fitch is saying that walk makes talk true. God’s Word is true by itself. However, to a generation raised on hearing the Bible constantly—who can truly escape it in America?—but without seeing it practiced much by the Church, we need to consider how we walk out what we believe in front of others because our walk is supposed to be a reflection of the truth of the Gospel.

The failure of church bodies and individuals to live out what they believe is largely responsible for the mess we see both inside and outside our churches. Call it sin, unbelief, or laziness, but whatever the label, we blew it.

I agree with Fitch on most every comment and solution he offers in this chapter. We Christians do need to start living as an alternative community within the larger society rather than finding the church co-opting that society’s patterns of living and broken solutions to problems.

If I have one problem, I don’t believe that planting more churches is the answer. We have enough churches. Now if an existing church is growing so large that it naturally must subdivide, that’s a different response than simply planting churches. I think Fitch favors subdivision, but he doesn’t make that entirely clear when he discusses church planting.

 

The review of The Great Giveaway continues with Part 2 and Part 3 .

One Moment in Time—and Beyond

Standard

I believe it was an International Bible Society study that showed that nearly all people who become Christians do so by age nineteen. That figure stunned me at the time. We've got to get people young, folks. That's why bringing young people to Christ is so astonishingly important.

But another figure hidden in that survey speaks just as loudly. If the average American today lives to at least eighty, the IBS survey also tells us that the person who comes to Christ at age nineteen will spend sixty years or more in discipleship.

Think about that figure—sixty years of following Christ after conversion.Real life sliced and diced

The image at right puts this in perspective. The slice of pie that comprises a person's pagan life before Christ consumes about a quarter of life. Following after Christ takes up three-quarters. The moment of conversion, though crucial, is but a mere slice.

Yet you would think that conversion, that one moment in time, is all there is to the Christian life. Given how we Evangelicals devote so much time, energy, and angst to conversion, you'd think that the sixty years afterward are a drop in the bucket. In the Godblogosphere, the handwringing over conversion (and the theology behind it) weights it even more. Discipleship may seem an afterthought.

I'm saddened when I get e-mails from folks saying all their church ever talks about is getting people saved. Don't get me wrong; it's excellent that churches preach the salvation message. But most of the people in the church are already saved, so what help do they get in actually living out their conversion if they hear the same salvation message over and over again?

The Bible says this:

And this is eternal life, that they know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.
—John 17:3 ESV

And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.
—2 Corinthians 3:18 ESV

I didn't know my wife the first time I met her. In many ways, I still didn't know her even on our honeymoon. Learning who she is will take me the rest of my life because the depth of her personhood will only be revealed in time.

The same goes for Jesus Christ. Most of us have barely scratched the surface of what it means to know Him. Yet the Bible says that knowing Him IS eternal life! It's not escaping hell, it's knowing the person of Jesus Christ. Deep calls to deep. If Jesus Christ and a hundred Jesus impersonators were put into a lineup, would we be able to pick the real Jesus out of the crowd of imposters? Think hard about that question.

Likewise, our conversion to Christ does not end our growth as Christians. Too often, though, our churches act like they have no more to tell us once we say yes to the Lord. "Just don't do bad things now" is the extent of the post-conversion advice.

But the Bible says that we're supposed to be changing from one degree of glory into another, a process that will take our entire lives. That is if we surrender to that process of Christ making Himself in us. For it's His glory that shapes us over those sixty years.

Too often, our discipleship is self-centered. Life becomes nothing more than the avoidance of pain and the accumulation of comfort. But we can't walk the narrow path staring into our navels; we'll wind up in a ditch.

For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.
—Ephesians 2:10 ESV

And as you go, proclaim, saying, "The kingdom of Heaven is at hand." Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out demons. You have received freely, freely give.
—Matthew 10:7-8 MKJV

For the Son of Man shall come in the glory of His Father with His angels, and then He shall reward each one according to his works.
—Matthew 16:27 MKJV 

If you're a Christian, you're a new creation. And what were you created for? Good works in Christ. The real disciple of Jesus Christ spends his or her sixty years after conversion walking out a discipleship that is other-centric. It's centered on the Lord and on the ones who are dying around us. Yes, we can read great treatises on theology, accumulate vast libraries of Christian thought, attend Christian conferences one after the other, but if we're not freely giving away what we freely received, then we'll spend sixty years wasting God's mercy. Instead, we must be focused on others to ensure that the reward we have in heaven is great.

We all know "Away in the Manger." There's not a three-year-old out there that doesn't learn this Christmas carol first. As a result, few think of it in terms of theological depth. The final stanza says it all:

Be near me, Lord Jesus, I ask Thee to stay
Close by me forever, and love me, I pray;
Bless all the dear children in Thy tender care,
And fit us for Heaven to live with Thee there.

Our sixty years of discipleship is meant for one thing: to fit us for Heaven to live with Christ eternally. What you and I are doing right now in this moment of time is shaping our eternity. Don't be deceived. Following Christ was never intended as fire insurance. Instead, it's meant to remake citizens of Earth into citizens of Heaven.

Are we giving away our life here so we can take on new life? Can we with all certainty pick Jesus out of the lineup? He may not look like an itinerant rabbi, but the homeless man drunk outside our office building. How then will we know Him unless we do the good works that encounter Him? Are we spending all our time looking at our conversion when we should be focused on our inheritance?

Sixty years is at once quite long, yet so very short in the eyes of eternity. In truth, our lives are not so much like a pie chart, but a never-ending timeline that began a breath ago. In a flash comes conversion, but then we live out the eternal consequences of our discipleship.

It's about learning to be a disciple, giving away freely what we were freely given: love, mercy, and grace. Let's not waste our sixty years.