The Best of Cerulean Sanctum 2007

Cerulean Sanctum logo When people come to Cerulean Sanctum for the first time, they’ll read a post and wonder what else is here. Most find the link in the sidebar for “Best of Cerulean Sanctum” and check out a few of the archived posts of the past. I know this because WordPress’s stats tell me they do.

I think it’s important, too, for a blogger to keep in touch with past posts. Some posts are like old friends, while others vanish into the ether. I’ve been blogging since a few days before 9/11, so I’ve written many posts, the majority of which I’m sure I can’t remember offhand.

But the Best Of posts stick because they’re, well…the best things I’ve written here. Many received a majority share of comments from readers because the featured topic touched people. Some are simply controversial. Some discuss subjects that go unmentioned in the Godblogosphere. And some capture lightning in a bottle, reflecting the Lord’s quickening of the best of the writing skills He gave me.

In years past, I’ve grouped my best post together under a variety of headings, but I’ve never done a list of my own personal favorites. What were the posts I liked the most? Well, let’s kick this off with those select Best of the Best.

Dan’s Best of the Best of Cerulean Sanctum 2007

100 Truths in 30 Years with Christ
How do you sum up a life in Christ? This post attempts that feat. The hard-won lessons and the accumulation of wisdom never come easy. I pray each person that reads this post can take away a few nuggets.

The World’s Best Bible-Reading Program
I never thought this post would be the phenomenon that it’s become, but I’m glad for it. We go through our Bible-reading plans and one-year Bibles, yet so few of us glean deep truth from these arbitrary and casual approaches to reading the Bible. Most of us will be Christians for decades before we pass into glory, yet we don’t come to the Bible with long-term discipleship in mind. This reading program addresses that glaring issue.

The Holy Who?
The second most commented post of the year, this one touched off a firestorm on a number of other blogs and got people talking about the Holy Spirit. Just who is He? And why have we tended to ignore the Third Person of the Trinity?

The ChristCon Con
Another huge Christian conference/convention/event is coming to town. They seem to come with great promises and leave with a whimper. Yet we mark up our calendars and spend millions of dollars to attend them. What is the fruit? A look around should tell you the answer.

Fumbling the Torch
As I see it, one of the greatest losses to my generation of Christians (and generations that will follow me) is the previous generation’s failing to pass on their knowledge of Christ. Every day, we lose touch with the generation before us and the godly wisdom they acquired. How could it happen? This post discusses that how.

The Two Christianities & The Two Christianities: Comparison Table
Two other posts that got plenty of others talking. Has American Christianity bifurcated into two separate branches with entirely different worldviews? I believe it has. What do you think?

Welcome to Jerkville, Population Me
Being a jerk comes easy to some of us, especially when we’re confronted with the harsh realities of life. Lay down my life? Esteem others better than myself? Well, it’s a lot tougher than it sounds.

A Letter to Rich, the Young Ruler
Wherein I send a letter to a well-off young American who, tonight, may have his very soul required of him. You may even know him yourself.

The Church God Uses
Ekklesia is the Greek word for the Church. We attend church every week, sometimes more than once in a week. Some of us live and die by our churches. But what is the Church that God uses and how can we be that Church?

Choosing Your Canaan
Be in the world, but not of it, right? Yet how do we live out that practical wisdom? This post asks that hard question and comes up with controversial answers.

Those are my picks for the top posts of this year.

The Best of the Rest

On Pastors:

I wrote on pastoral ministry a couple times this year and both posts resonated with people. One addresses how we treat our pastors as fellow believers and the other looks at the ridiculous ministry load we place on them:
The Pastor: Not One of Us
Killing Him Softly

On Community:

Rodney King once asked if we we can all get along. Should it be so hard? That denominations skewer each other should appall us all. That we fight so easily over petty things should shame us. That we continue to talk about community yet live in antithesis to that talk should drive us to the altar for repentance.
Throwing Stones in Glass Houses of Worship
What the Other Guys Taught Me
Radical Thoughts, Real Community
Why We Need Each Other…
Love Your Lord? Love Your Staff!

On Men:

Several of the posts I wrote about issues confronting Christian men received plenty of feedback. Men in the Church face a number of trying issues. These posts address some of those intractable problems.
The Gospel of Manliness
Nowhere Men & Nowhere Men—More Thoughts
The Cash Value of a Man

On Charismatic Issues and the Holy Spirit:

As a believer who upholds the modern workings of the charismatic gifts of the Holy Spirit, I wrote several posts addressing the mishandling we give those gifts and how poorly we understand the Holy Spirit’s work in the believer’s life.
When the Spirit Falls
A Lesson on the Spirit from the Three Little Pigs
The Spirit Has Left the Building
And Now a Word from Our Sponsor…
Following TBN Off a Cliff

On Discernment:

For all our talk of knowing Christ, why is it that we don’t seem to be able to hear Him very well? Listening to the Lord and testing the spirits to see if they are of Him should be bedrock to our faith.
Dissing Discernment
Guidance the Monty Hall Way

On Our Status As Believers:

Sometimes we Christians fail to understand who we are in Christ and the intimacy we should have with him. This failure colors the way we live out the Faith before the world.
Sinners or Saints?
OT Christians vs. NT Christians
In the Bedroom

On the Richness of Living the Christian Life:

Being a Christian means more than doctrinal adherence. It means an intimate walk with God. It opens our lives to richer experiences of truth. It takes a drab world and colors it through God’s goodness to us. Yet sometimes we settle for so much less than God’s best.
Wonderland
Blind, Deaf, and Dumb
The Half-Born
The Wrong Toy in Your Happy Meal
The Marriage of Word & Image
The Jesus Love Revolution
In My Little Kingdom (and Yours)

On Issues Facing the American Church:

Because this blog focuses on issues facing the American Church, I’m going to write about those issue. Seems obvious enough. The follow posts tackle a wide variety of topics that we must confront if we’re to be salt and light in a dying world:
Church Growth Movement Fall Down and Go Boom!
The Question No One Wants to Ask…
Two Halves of the Whole Gospel
Need? What Need?
One Simple Word Modern Evangelicalism: An MAO Inhibitor?
Caltrops on the Road to Glory
Kingdoms and Bitterness The Church of Gil Gunderson
Sex and the Created Order
21st Century American Evangelicalism: The Ne Plus Ultra of Christianity?

I’ll end this 2007 edition of the Best of Cerulean Sanctum with two posts.

Many of you reading this blog. As Christians who blog, we have an enormous responsibility to the Lord. For this reason, our every word should matter for the Kingdom.

How to Be a Godblogger Who Matters…

And on a personal note, I had a chance to get behind the wheel of my dream car. It may not seem like a big deal to some of you, but I saw something bigger in that experience. I hope all of us have dreams and that God teaches us His unique truths through our experiences of receiving those dreams—and also in muddling through when they fail to come to pass. The Lord is good.

Lessons from a Dream Car

Thanks for being a reader. Be blessed!

The Church of the Redundant

MC knows the score No one wants to think about a pastor dying unexpectedly, but what if yours did?

The church I attend had their 46-year-old pastor die of cancer a few years ago. It wasn’t completely unexpected, but he’d appeared to make a full recovery—only to succumb shortly after returning to the pulpit. People were shocked.

Now the elders in my church held the church together for a year or so while they sought a new pastor. My wife and I came on-board right as the new pastor was called. We feel blessed by this timing.

Some churches don’t recover, though, when a pastor dies or simply leaves for greener pastures. Or the children’s ministry director steps down and no one wants to step up. Or the worship pastor follows that dream to stardom in Nashville and the worship band sort of “goes to seed” in the aftermath of that departure.

It seems to me that a good many churches out there are cults. Not like Jehovah’s Witnesses, but cults of personality. They revolve around a few dynamic individuals. Should something happen to those dynamic individuals…well, you can see the handwriting forming on the wall.

It should never be that way.

Blame it on something in the drinking water in America, but we don’t do a very good job seeing ourselves as replaceable. Worse, people in leadership positions in churches take this to the extreme and find ways to keep from grooming successors. That dog-eat-dog, business world, CEO model permeates too much of our thinking, making us resistant to doing what’s best for the church, even if that best may not be the best for us personally.

The Bible has this to say,

Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life.
—John 12:24-25

The church that makes a difference is the one that understands that nothing good from anything that hasn’t died first. In this case, the truth is that I, along with you, must die to any preconceptions I have about “my ministry.” It’s not my ministry anymore than it is yours. It’s the Lord’s. And He only works wonders when the people trust Him enough to do it His way.

When we build our churches on a handful of talented individuals, we only set ourselves up for failure. Our goal instead should be to build a church where each person is replaceable, no matter how much a person might give to the ministry of the church in terms of time, effort, and money.

You see, when we’re dead, none of that worldly striving for position matters. It no longer becomes “my ministry.” The goal isn’t to play out my ministry, but to ensure that Christ plays out His, even if it means I wind up martyred for it. Because I’m replaceable.

Viewed that way, our entire perspective on how we disciple and raise up leaders must change. It forces us to see every person in the seats as a leader on some level or other. It means that anyone should be able to step up into any position within a church at a moments notice. And that’s because God often taps people for ministry on a moment’s notice.

Instead, we’ve created a model where a few of the dynamic people carry those who are all too willing to take up space. And this is what passes for church in far too many congregations out there.

Or we have the reverse where the leadership doesn’t resemble the boardroom of Procter & Gamble, so a handful of self-appointed leaders in the pews clamor to do it their way. Talk about toxic! So much for dying to self and putting the needs of others first.

When you look around the world at places where the Church is growing exponentially, it’s largely in those places where the Christians understand that everyone should be replaceable. The leaders realize they may not be around tomorrow, so redundancy is key. The Enemy can’t cut off the heads of leadership because, like a hydra, more will just grow out of the stumps.

But we’re not at that place in the U.S. Our own history of self-made men and pioneers makes that kind of selflessness impossible without a serious overhaul of our own identity as Americans. But our identity is found in Christ, not the Founding Fathers. And even they were pretty selfless when it came to founding this country.

I suspect that Darwinistic survival of the fittest concepts drive too many of us for us to see ourselves as redundant. But I also think that’s the only way we’re going to weather the storms that come our way as a Body of Believers in America.

Should it be so difficult, really? I don’t think it needs to be. It just means putting down “me” and taking up the cross. It means not thinking more highly of ourselves than we ought and esteeming others better. It means working to ensure that no one in our churches is irreplaceable. It means making disciples that conform, each and every one, to the image of Christ and not our own image.

I started out 2008 writing that this needs to be a year where we listen to the Holy Spirit like we’ve never listened before. I also think that 2008 is the year where the Church in America gets serious about laying down self. If it’s about maximizing the 401k plan, then we’re not going to work to make ourselves redundant. If it’s about maintaining a pretty Evangelical kingdom of our own making, then we’re never going to be humble enough to say, “Lord, here I am. Use me up.” We’ll never make ourselves expendable for the only Kingdom that counts.

Aren’t we all tired of living for ourselves? Aren’t we all a little bit burned out of rushing to and fro to keep the world’s plates spinning?

So where do we go from here, army of the redundant?

When You’re Tired

'Sleep' by Salvador Dali I’m so tired right now, I can barely type. I wasn’t going to blog this evening (I’m writing this around 10:30 PM on Sunday), but as I sat here bleary-eyed, a couple thoughts came.

We’re barely into a new year and the big “R” word—Recession—blares from the front page of the newspaper. The economy in my area is already on the downswing. Companies have frozen hiring in most cases. A quick look at Monster.com for my area shows a depressing increase in junk jobs (“Make Millions from Home Licking Stamps for Envelopes!!!”). Folks have that flinty stare, the kind of look reserved for bothersome teenagers blasting hip-hop out of their cars. Except folks stare off into nothing, as if to warn away life itself.

Everyone talks about the price of gas (“Yeah, but waddya gonna do?”), the out-of-touch presidential candidates (“Yeah, but waddya gonna do?”), and that nagging fear that things really ARE not as good as they used to be (“Yeah, but waddya gonna do?”). The voices all reflect two states of being: helplessness and tiredness.

And it does seem to me like people seem stricken with tiredness, as if we could all hibernate and sleep through whatever it is that’s afflicting us right now. A Rip Van Winkle sleep. The sleep of the not-quite-dead, yet not-quite-alive.

But that’s the sleep of the damned, if you ask me.

We are the Church of the Triumphant Lord Jesus. It’s not time to be drowsy. It’s time to trim the wicks and check our supplies of oil. The world may be in the throes of somnambulism, but we Christians can’t sleepwalk through life. We cannot allow the enemy to lull us to sleep through materialism, through the threat of losing all the cheap junk we’ve accumulated for ourselves, or through the threat of threats. The gates of hell were not built to withstand the onslaught of even one wide-awake Christian on fire with the Holy Spirit.

Do we believe that?

Tired? How can we be tired when we’ve been asleep for so long!

The old Christian band Harvest had an album called Only the Overcomers. If the times are threatening, it’s time for the overcomers to stand up and be counted. It’s time to roll up the sleeves and get to work.

I asked last Friday about the pressing needs you all felt at your churches. I ask now: “What’s your next step?” How will you overcome that issue? How will you be the source of change for the better in your church?

Because the days aren’t growing any brighter. The Bible promises that darkness is coming. And we also know that when darkness comes, the tendency is to sleep. It’s natural. That’s what the world will be doing, just more so.

What will the Church be doing?

Cerulean Sanctum

Looking for the 1st century Church in 21st century America

Month: January 2008