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We Need a Gospel That Speaks to Failure

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Again I saw that under the sun the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to those with knowledge, but time and chance happen to them all. For man does not know his time. Like fish that are taken in an evil net, and like birds that are caught in a snare, so the children of man are snared at an evil time, when it suddenly falls upon them. I have also seen this example of wisdom under the sun, and it seemed great to me. There was a little city with few men in it, and a great king came against it and besieged it, building great siegeworks against it. But there was found in it a poor, wise man, and he by his wisdom delivered the city. Yet no one remembered that poor man.
—Ecclesiastes 9:11-15 ESV

We hear a lot about the sovereignty of God. How He is in control of all things. When good things come our way, we rejoice, and it’s ridiculously easy to feel the favor of God’s sovereignty in a moment of joy. His blessings are raining down. His will is at work. And we know it.

I’ve been in Christian circles all my life, so I’ve witnessed the myriad ways we respond to God and to other Christians. I’ve seen that thrill of experiencing God’s will.

But I’ve also seen what happens when His will appears to us to go “awry.” I’ve seen how we Christians respond to failure, and I’ve concluded that more than just about anything, we need a Gospel that speaks to failure.

You won’t hear much about failure in the American Church. In Evangelicalism in particular, failure gets held at arm’s length, as if people who fail do so because they’ve acquired a disease. FailureWe’ve made failure into some kind of plague. “Don’t come too close! I might catch your failure and it will ruin my perfect little world!”

We live in a country where failure isn’t an option. Every system we’ve erected in America extols the self-made man and kicks the failure when he’s down. While we venerate the rag-to-riches stories and laud everything that led to those riches, we come up with excuses to explain the mirror opposite, the riches-to-rags story.

The American Church acts more like Americans and less like the Church because we adopt the same belief about failure as the world does. Failure makes us squirm. And though we’re all ready to jump on the “God is sovereign” bandwagon when blessings rain down from heaven, failure presents a problem for us.

When blessings come, they come solely by grace. We don’t truly merit blessings. God offers them to us out of the grace and riches of His heart. Or so we say. But what happens to our view of God’s sovereignty when failure strikes? What becomes of His grace when someone’s life winds up in the toilet?

Many American Christians believe failure results from something the failing person DID. Yet if we claim to be people who truly live by grace, acknowledging that we did nothing to deserve the benefits of grace, why then do we approach failure with a morbid works righteousness? The response to failure in people’s lives seems to abandon God’s sovereignty and grace to become a legalistic list of activities the person who failed must now undertake in order to dig himself out of his hole. The Gospel we’re so ready to trumpet in good times suddenly gets turned on its head, and grace goes out the window.

Think about it. Our business failed because we didn’t pray hard enough. We need to pray more. We got a chronic illness because we didn’t read the Bible enough. We need to read the Bible more. We lost our home because we didn’t tithe enough. We need to tithe even more.

Yet blessing was all of grace and not because of anything we’ve done? Curious dichotomy, isn’t it?

Sadly, we only like one side of the coin when it comes to God’s sovereignty. We’ll take the blessing, and our church will love to gather round us then, but how to explain failure in light of sovereignty? If failure IS a part of God’s sovereignty, why do we address failure so differently from how we deal with sovereignty in the midst of plenty?

Remember Job:

But [Job] said to [his wife], “You speak as one of the foolish women would speak. Shall we receive good from God, and shall we not receive evil?” In all this Job did not sin with his lips.
—Job 2:10 ESV

Why is it then that the American Church talks like a foolish woman when it comes to failure and the sovereignty of God?

Yes, some failure clearly stems from sin and a lack of faith. We all understand this. Our problem becomes one of ALWAYS applying that standard to every case of failure we encounter. Case in point: what was Job’s sin?

We see our faulty mentality at work in the following Scripture:

As [Jesus] passed by, he 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.
—John 9:1-3 ESV

That’s God’s sovereignty at work.

The problem goes beyond merely accepting God’s sovereignty even in the midst of failure. Our response to failure either takes the form of piling on a list of things for the failure to do in order to fight against the sovereignty we supposedly uphold, or we act in another faulty way.

Consider this famous person of faith:

Jesus looked up and saw the rich putting their gifts into the offering box, and he saw a poor widow put in two small copper coins. And he said, “Truly, I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all of them. For they all contributed out of their abundance, but she out of her poverty put in all she had to live on.”
—Luke 21:1-4 ESV

We tend to comfort ourselves by believing that people who have failed in the world’s eyes will somehow rise up out of their failure so long as they have faith and persevere. Yet I’m not certain it works that way. The poor widow who faithfully gave all she had may have been putting in all she had for a long time. We probably weren’t seeing a one-time event; she faithfully contributed not once, but every time she visited the temple. Faithfulness tends to be a pattern of life, not an isolated incident.

Yet by all standards of Jesus’ day (and ours), that woman was a failure. No husband. No money. Failure. And we’re not given any assurances from the Luke passage that her condition changed immediately after her contribution. (We can only hope that she became a believer and was cared for by the early Church.)

The poor wise man in the Ecclesiastes passage that begins this post fell back into obscurity after rendering his faithful deed. He got his pat on the back and that was it. One day lauded by the city, and the next forgotten by everyone. Success for a moment, but a failure otherwise.

Notice that many of my failure examples so far in this post have dealt with money. In America, success equates to money. Sadly, the American Church has bought this lie. As a result, our standard for spiritual success and maturity automatically means passing the wealth test.

Too accusatory? Well, consider this. Your church is looking for new elders. Which of these two 40-year old men has a better chance of becoming an elder, the self-made man who runs his own company OR the fellow who works the night shift as a convenience store clerk? In the split second (Blink!) you thought about that pair, did class distinction enter into your assessment? Has anything been said about the spiritual maturity of those men? Don’t we assume that one is more spiritually mature simply because he runs a successful business, while the other only makes $8/hr.?

Did Jesus ever think that way? He summons the less esteemed to the head of the table, while one who believes he belongs in the place of honor is sent down. The beggar Lazarus, whose sores were licked by dogs, winds up in heaven, while the rich man suffers in torment. Jesus said nothing about Lazarus’ spiritual maturity, did He? But Lazarus is the one in Abraham’s bosom. Obviously, failure and poverty have nothing to do with one’s eternal destiny and spiritual depth.

Why then do we place such an emphasis on success and pour so much contempt on failure?

We need a Gospel that speaks to failure. I don’t believe that most churches and the Christian people who comprise them deal with failure biblically. Instead, our models for responding to failure are psychobabble self-help tomes, blithering business books, and positive confession self-talk. We talk, talk, talk about grace and sovereignty, but find them in short supply when confronted both with people who did dumb things and failed and the innocent bystanders pumped full of rounds by the world’s drive-by shooting.

So we must ask, What does a truly biblical Gospel that addresses failure look like?

Please leave a comment. I’ll consider what readers say and comment in another post on this topic in the future.

Silencing the Voice of Hearsay in the Church

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I suspect Cerulean Sanctum will be delisted from a number of blogrolls after this post, but I need to write it. Put on the seatbelt and hang on.

Recently, Tim Challies had an interesting post entitled “Body Piercing Saved My Life,” a review of a book of the same name by Andrew Beaujon, a frequent contributer to the secular music magazine Spin. Christian rock music intrigued Beaujon, so he decided to get the real scoop on the genre. He went to concerts, talked with fans, attended several churches, interviewed the artists, and delivered his book, a firsthand account of what he learned.

In the end, Beaujon didn’t have a life-changing conversion, though he grew to appreciate Christian music through the time he spent examining it.

On the heels of Beaujon’s book comes a much-anticipated book from a renowned Christian author and pastor. He attempts to expose what he perceives as truth-mangling in the Emerging Church (EC), ripping into its questionable theology and practice. The Godblogosphere’s already quoting excerpts from the book, some blogs claiming it will deliver the final word on the EC.

I’m no rah-rah fan of the Emerging Church. Like a lot of reactionary movements, it’s underdeveloped in many ways, off completely in others, and right on the mark on a few select issues. EC proponents offer both enlightening critiques of institutional Christianity and brain-dead ones. As with any critical movement, I weigh their rhetoric against the Scriptures and the illumination of the Holy Spirit, then discard the dross. In truth, I’ve learned a few things from the EC concerning Evangelicalism’s shortsightedness. I’m a wiser Christian for those insights.

Over the last five years, I’ve interacted with hundreds of people in the EC. I’ve written on the EC several times here at Cerulean Sanctum (“That Other Standoff,” with embedded links elsewhere). I know something about it, though I’m by no means claiming to be an expert.

But this new book IS written by someone many people consider a bastion of truth and expertise. In fact, truth is the subject of the book. Plus, his offering isn’t a haphazard blog post (like any of mine or yours), but a book-length examination of truth problems in the EC, and postmodernism in general. For these reasons, what he says ought to be better thought-out, researched, and double-checked.

What I would like to know then:

Before he wrote his book, did this prominent author/teacher/pastor…

…personally sit down with EC leaders and get firsthand answers to his concerns?

…personally talk to a wide range of real people who left “traditional” churches in favor of Emerging Churches to find out why they did?

…personally talk to a wide range of real people in Emerging Churches to see what their doctrinal stances truly are?

…personally visit a wide range of churches under the EC umbrella in order to see if they might not be “One Size Fits All” in doctrine and practice?

I really want to believe he did. I hope that every question I asked above can be answered affirmatively.

For any book that’s ultimately about truth, second, third, and fourth-hand reports (or sound-biting unclear quotes without getting a firsthand clarification) simply won’t cut it. WhisperThat’s particularly true when millions of people will be affected by some major Christian leader’s withering assault.

I’ve been a Christian for 30 years. In that time, I’ve been shocked how easily we condemn other Christians on what amounts to hearsay. Even though the biblical standard is two or three witnesses, we know how two or three witnesses worked at the trial of our Lord! I think the Christian standard must be higher than that.

The Church of Jesus Christ is founded on relationship: our relationship with the Triune God and with each person He indwells. Because we are supposed to be a community free of rancor, the Lord commanded that if we have something against our brother, our best response is for us to stop what we’re doing and go make peace with that brother face-to-face. We don’t send emissaries and don’t write notes. We go in person.

Rather than write a book on contemporary Christian music from indirect sources, Andrew Beaujon (an unbeliever, remember) put his person on the line and went to see for himself. All through the Gospels, people who encountered Jesus, especially those on the receiving end of miracles, said, “Don’t take my word for what He did. Go see for yourself!” That admonishment carries some weight.

It would be terribly ironic if a book about absolute truth contained nothing but indirect reports on supposed malfeasance. I’ve read far too many Christian books that attempted to uncover the truth about a leader or movement, then failed to contain any firsthand accounts by the author. Such books are nothing more than venom.

Are we seeing for ourselves? Or we are crafting “truth” out of hearsay?

_____ & VIOLENCE

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I'm sitting in my office watching the icicles shiver on this second December in a row of brutal cold. My brain numbed along with the rest of me, I'm dying here attempting to come up with something to write about.

Oh, what the hay, let's talk about sex. Actually, let's talk about the Christian writer's plight of writing about sex. Or the inability to write about it. Or…whatever.

Contemporary Christian fiction, by all accounts, has plumbed every topic, sinful or otherwise, known to man. Adultery, miscarriage, thievery, dementia, fraud, pedophilia, murder, terminal illness, infertility, racism, pornography—you name it and someone's written about it. Gone are the days when most Christian novels dealt with virginal teen schoolteachers coming of age on the windswept Kansas prairies.

In an effort to figure out the inexplicable Christian fiction market, I've read through more Christian novels this year than all previous years combined. I suspect a good thirty novels or so. Bloody KnifeThrough my readings, I've found a curious trend that reveals much about the current mindset of Evangelicalism 2006.

More than anything else, the books I've read showcased violence. Not simple acts of heroism defending a lady's honor with a punch to some malefactor's snoot, but visceral, gory stuff. Bombings, knife fights, kidnapping and subsequent murder, degrading sexual assaults on women, lynchings, impalement—the list goes on and on.

We Christian writers seem to have no limit to how much violence we can pack into a page. Not much is left to the imagination, either. You can almost see, feel, hear, and smell the blood dripping. And the books keep selling.

So the violence portion of the old "sex & violence" mantra is alive and well in today's Christian fiction. We don't appear to have any qualms showing human beings hacking, slashing, crushing, and exploding other human beings.

But sex….

While many Christian novels deal with sexual topics, a quick read through the books themselves shows sex depicted almost as hearsay, as if a fourth-hand rumor that…well, people "do it", ahem…trickled down to the author from the cousin of a friend who knew a guy in college who once talked with someone who touched a naked body. Chastely. Because they were a doctor. 

This is not to say that authors aren't talking about sex, but they seem to be doing it in a way that sounds like what you hear in a fourth grade boys locker room. It's all a little dirty and we can't say too much without snickering or getting embarrassed.

I've noticed this to a great extent in novels written by men, though I can't tell you why. Men may lack the peculiar romantic verbiage so well cultivated by the fairer of the species. Perhaps editors, sensing a particular squirm factor in anything that even remotely smacks of Song of Solomon, ask for sanitizing rewrites that bind the author hand, foot, pen, and keyboard. Whatever the case, it comes off forced.

Curiously, when you look at major political talking points in Evangelicalism, sex appears at the core of almost every ballot initiative, signature collection, and protest. Major hot-buttons like abortion, homosexual marriage, sex education, and abstinence promotion all have sex at the center. Meanwhile, we seem mum on the environment, fighting injustice, advocating for the disadvantaged, and so on.

In the same way that writers can depict the goriest details of violence because it's not on our approved sanitation schedule, we blanch at any honest look at the intimate lives of our characters. We can write about dysfunctions, but we shy away from depicting normal sexual relationships. And even when we write about broken sexuality, we back off in a way that we never do when writing about a villain filling a victim full of lead. We end up capitalizing our violence and slathering whiteout over anything "naughty." 

I don't think I'm arguing to sex up our fiction. We have a tendency to go overboard in Christian circles when we see an imbalance. I simply don't understand our flinching at sex and our wholesale embrace of blood and guts. That dichotomy paints a disturbing picture of modern Evangelicalism.

Or maybe I am arguing to deal more bluntly with sex in our fiction. Porn use among Christians runs rampant. And while that topic's not a new one in Christian fiction, even when it's discussed, you can hear the tap-dancing shoes clicking away. We can't bring ourselves to discuss raw subjects in a way that uses the words of the disease. I recently wrote a short story dealing with the cancer of pornography and its insidious effects. An editor deemed it quite sellable—just not in a Christian market. Too much raw truth too quickly. A group faint by the faithful wouldn't be pretty.

We might well know the dirty details, we just can't bring ourselves to face them without the proper shielding. Recently, Mark Driscoll caught all sorts of flak for saying that perhaps some pastors stray because their wives don't take care of their appearances. Outrageous? Yes, a little. But I can promise you that even as some folks were harumphing over Driscoll's baldfaced commentary, inside they knew better. Outrage is only outrageous when it strikes close to home.

In the end, I don't understand the dichotomy. Why does violence come so easily, yet we tiptoe around honest sexuality? Dismemberment flows unimpeded from our pens, but not a gentle, knowing caress between a married couple. Does that honor the Lord?

The comments section is now open for flaming.  😉