Best of Cerulean Sanctum

My Hope for What the Church Will Be, Part 1

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As someone who revels in the outdoors, most of my hobbies get me out into nature. I've been birding since I was fourteen, taught outdoor education in zoos and camps, and would rather spend a night out under the panoply of the heavens than any stuffy old bedroom.

When I consider the heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the moon and the stars that Thou hast appointed, what is Man that Thou art mindful of him, and the son of man that Thou dost care for him? Every time I catch a glimpse of the night sky, Psalm 8 rolls off my lips from out of my heart.

I recently added geocaching to my arsenal of outdoor activities. Together, my son and I have found 55 hidden caches in our area in our first six weeks. It's a challenging activity and a whole lot of fun.

Geocaching presents another intriguing benefit. Not being in the typical workplace, I've witnessed my personal network dwindle to only a handful of names. Since I have no hobbies that require other people to make them happen, I decided to attend a geocachers meet-up to broaden my contacts and get my face out there.

Last Friday, my son and I met up with our fellow geocachers. About 33 people showed up. Curiously, I knew most of them by their "cache name" nicknames as I'd already come across their log entries in the caches and in the electronic logs at Geocaching.com .

I was new. No one knew me. Everyone greeted me and my son. We were immediately welcomed into the greater body of local geocachers.

Time ticked on, but none of us noticed. People shared their exploits. Stories about hard-to-find caches abounded, including one notorious one that had sent my son and me sliding along with trees and rocks for about a hundred feet when the hillside we were standing on collapsed. (Yes, very scary, but God was faithful and we were remarkably unhurt.) When I got engrossed in the conversation, the lady presiding over the get-together spontaneously watched my son so I could hang with the veterans and soak up the geocaching wisdom. And while the meeting felt like a throwback to the kinds of engineer parties I remember in Silicon Valley (I now know the hot sport for techies in my area), everyone was glad to have me there. They clued me in to insider talk, showed me their collections of treasures harvested from various caches, and made me feel like I'd been a part of their little cadre forever. We had to leave a little bit early, so we didn't get to see the gifts handed out to those geocachers who had achieved certain milestones (like 1000 caches found). That would have been nice to witness, though.

Driving home, I couldn't shake a few thoughts about that meeting:

  1. Though I was a sheer beginner, no one looked down on my lack of experience and feeble knowledge. They respected me for how far I'd already come.
  2. People made sure my son and I felt included.
  3. The wise among them wanted to let me know their secrets.
  4. The host looked after me, took care of my child so I could learn more, and dropped me an e-mail later to say how glad she was that we'd been able to attend.
  5. People there were genuinely excited about what they did and shared stories that bolstered comraderie and the activity itself.
  6. Anyone who shared in the love of the activity was welcomed. Old people, families with young children—it didn't matter.
  7. If people didn't immediately grasp all the rules, that was okay. Questions were eagerly answered and without judgment.
  8. The very best among them were esteemed for what they'd accomplished. 

You can probably see where I'm heading, so I'll just say it:

Wouldn't it be great if all our churches in America were like this?

Honestly, a geocache box is nothing in the scheme of things. Geocaching will pass away like all things in time. But why then do we Christians, the ones who are ambassadors of the Living Christ, seem far less excited about Him than these geocachers do about a piece of Tupperware hidden inside a hollow log in the woods?

Wouldn't it be great if our meetings were filled with people talking about what Jesus meant to them? Unity, Mercy, LoveWhat He'd done in their lives today, yesterday, and the day before that? If people can get excited about finding a 35mm film canister wedged in a woodpecker hole, why do we seem so bored with Jesus, who is Lord of the Universe?

We wonder why it's harder and harder to get the lost to take notice of Jesus. I can say with all honesty that if we were as excited about Him as these geocachers are about their sport, and we conducted our meetings as welcoming and as informative as that geocachers get-together, our churches might be packed—or at least people wouldn't write them off so easily.

If you're a Christian, then you have a built-in network of people who should be on your side for eternity. Yet all too often that network suffers in comparison to some of the networks the world has to offer.

When his buddy upchucks the evening's revelry, the barfly cleans him up. When the drug addict has no place to sleep, he calls another addict who lets him crash at his place. The bartender, out out on the town on his own for once, leaves his waitress a big tip because he knows how it is.

The Bible says this:

For the sons of this world are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than the sons of light.
—Luke 16:8b ESV

The sons of this world get it. They know they have to fight for everything because they have nothing else to back them up. That's why a real friend means something. A real friend will cover your back.

We take for granted what the Lord bought for us when He created the Church.

That's where we'll pick up in the concluding part of this pre-hiatus series. Look for it before the week is out.

The Real American Christian “Either/Or”

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Yesterday, I promised that the last few posts here before I go on break for a month would be incendiary. Thus begins the fire…

Those familiar with Cerulean Sanctum know that one of my pet peeves is making Christianity into a set of “either/or” dichotomies. One of my favorites to skewer is the classic “Doctrine or Good Works” silliness that seems to be the hallmark of great swatches of the Godblogosphere. In fact, I would say that “Doctrine or _______” is the classic formula for most of these false dichotomies.

But as I get older, one true “either/or” emerges as so unyieldingly true that it functions as the bellweather of what we in America consider right and good. Unfortunately, I believe we fall on the wrong side of the either/or.

In recent days, there have been two great posts over at The Thinklings, one of the first blogs I linked to here at Cerulean Sanctum. The first includes a quote from Soren Kierkegaard on Christian scholarship:

The matter is quite simple. The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand we are obliged to act accordingly. Take any words in the New Testament and forget everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly. My God, you will say, if I do that my whole life will be ruined. How would I ever get on in the world? Herein lies the real place of Christian scholarship. Christian scholarship is the Church’s prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we can continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming too close. Oh, priceless scholarship, what would we do without you? Dreadful it is to fall into the hands of the living God. Yes, it is even dreadful to be alone with the New Testament.

The second post discusses all the “young dudes” and quotes a well-known pastor on how the Church in America can’t live without them:

The problem in the church today is just a bunch of nice, soft, tender, chickafied church boys. 60% of Christians are chicks and the 40% that are dudes are still sort of…chicks. It’s just sad.

We’re looking around going, How come we’re not innovative? Cause all the innovative dudes are home watching football or they’re out making money or climbing a mountain or shooting a gun or working on their truck. They look at the church like that’s a nice thing for women and children. So the question is if you want to be innovative: How do you get young men? All this nonsense on how to grow the church. One issue: young men. That’s it. That’s the whole thing. They’re going to get married, make money, make babies, build companies, buy real estate. They’re going to make the culture of the future. If you get the young men you win the war, you get everything. You get the families, the women, the children, the money, the business, you get everything. If you don’t get the young men you get nothing.

At first glance, they seem unrelated. But that’s only because we’re missing the true “either/or” here.

Jesus makes that dichotomy clearer:

Do not labor for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give to you.
—John 6:27a ESV

The “either/or” I’m talking about here is money or ministry.

When we wonder why the Church in America is so ineffective compared with the Church in other nations of the world, the reason can be summed up simply: we chose money over ministry.

Many Christian writers have lamented the increasing loss of men in our churches. We’ve got books seeking to explain why men are bored with church. Great minds wrestle with the malaise that’s settled over the typical Christian male in America. Not that I’m a “great mind,” but I’ve talked about this in great detail, too. (See the post category “Men” in the sidebar.)

This is where Kierkegaard comes in. We talk and talk and talk about ministry, but we don’t do any (at least not much that amounts to anything like what you see in China or South America right now), for no other reason than it forces us to decide the question of money or ministry. So we numb ourselves to the reality of what the Bible repeatedly says on this issue because if we come to the conclusion that ministry comes first, our neat little Christian American world straight out of a Thomas Kinkade painting MUST come to a crashing end. Or as Soren so ably notes: “My God, you will say, if I do that my whole life will be ruined. How would I ever get on in the world?”

The easy choice...To the “dude” mentioned in the other quote above, choosing ministry first means an end to the fast track to the corporate boardroom. It means obscurity and lack of earthly success and worldly power. It means no bestselling book on how it was done MY WAY. It means no pneumatic, bleach-blonde trophy wife; no McMansion; no 401k; no vacation home in the Bahamas; no outrageously fast sports car or freeway-churning, Mini-Cooper-consuming, 4×4 SUV; and it means a whole lot less of everything that America has come to stand for in the beginning of this new millennium.

Choosing ministry scrambles everything that “prominent pastor” wants to leverage. The hotshot young men he claims he wants so badly will be boat anchors in his church because they already made the choice and money came up the winner. Sure, these young dudes may conjure up some business-variant church program that will look good for a couple years in the church before it sinks, fruitless, into oblivion, but then what?

The real men who chose ministry? Few limelighters want them. Ministry isn’t sexy. It looks bad on a résumé. The world considers Christian ministry and thinks, What a massive waste of time.

Sadly, that’s what 99.9 percent of Christian men in America think, too. And it’s one of the reasons they’re bored, and why the Church is so ineffective.

The man who chooses money first MUST spend all his waking moments doing everything he can to ensure the steady supply of money comes in. What ministry can he possibly do? Something’s gotta give and it’s the ministry.

It’s not all the men’s fault, either. The juxtaposition of Christianity and shopping that seems so natural in the lives of so many Christian women has much to explain why Christian men chose money first. You can’t read a blog by Christian women and not stumble upon the criteria they use to judge a man to be a proper Christian husband, the first being—always—that he be a good provider.

But when did being a provider get the “good” modifier? And what determines “good”? Is that the difference between a no-name handbag from WalMart versus one from Saks with a Versace label on it? To butcher the title of a famous novel, the devil may wear Prada, but so do a lot of Christian women.

It’s hard to avoid the strange Evangelical definition of manhood we’ve developed. Evangelicals affirm that men are called to be the prophets, priests and kings of their household, but a lot of Christian women have tended to de-emphasize the prophet aspect of it to focus on the king—or perhaps that should be “captain of industry,” instead. Yet what soul-stirring, repentance-laden prophetic message can be expected from a man who’s always thinking, How can I make more money so my wife can buy more of the stuff that makes her happy?

The best blog entry of 2006 goes to Michael Spencer over at Internet Monk. In fact, I would go so far as to say that his post “American Idolatry: The Good Life” is the single best blog post I’ve read in five years of blog reading. There is NO HOPE for the Church in America if we don’t start saying yes to ministry and no to money. God’s taken His Spirit elsewhere, and not only do we not realize it, we simply substituted Him for whatever our money could buy. (Although that’s been tried before—unsuccessfully: Acts 8:18-24.)

Now you might find this odd in light of last week’s posts, but honestly, I’m not immune to this problem. I freely admit that I’m trapped in the middle of this either/or. It eats at me day and night. What scares me is that for all those Christians who choose ministry over money, they won’t find support from other American Christians because other Christians can’t understand their rejection of money. That’s primarily because those others don’t have their hearts and minds focused on eternity. They’re focused on the moment because, in their own view, Christ simply isn’t compelling enough to warrant so extreme a response.

But the response is EXTREME. It means death. The cross says, Now here you die, here and now. All your desires, all your hopes, all of you. It also means real life. Have we tasted it?

We talk about counting the cost. It’s great talk. Everyone feels good talking about it because it sounds spiritual, makes us look devout, and smacks of ministry. But then, as Kierkegaard so ably notes, we go back to our cushy, monied lives, look in the mirror, and then immediately forget what we look like.

But God knows.

God help us.

Reality, Part 1

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What now?In the nearly three years that Cerulean Sanctum has existed, I've posted many times about the disconnect between the American Church and economic issues. We've approved of Crown Financial or Ron Blue budget classes because they cater to the individual making personal decisions (reinforcing the stereotype that Christianity is all about "a personal Jesus"), but we're pathologically quiet about macro monetary issues.

I believe this to be an enormous mistake. If the Church cannot speak to larger issues than personal ones, we will increasingly be seen as irrelevant. We may already be there.

Many blanch at the mere mention of relevance, but I think that what is at issue here is not relevance per se, but the fact that we Christians in America can't seem to live out what we believe on any scale beyond the personal. That gives Christianity the sheen of being a religion that might speak to me, but can't speak to my neighborhood. In lieu of this, our faith falls into a category of just another personal decision, like whether to shop at Target or WalMart.

Gasoline is poised to spring up to $4 a gallon in some parts of the country. To the minimum wage earner, this translates into heightened desperation. Many people who work minimum wage jobs are forced to live outside the more costly areas of town, necessitating longer drives. If I make $6 an hour and have a forty mile round trip to make every day, I'm in trouble.

When I lived in Silicon Valley from 1996-2000, the cost of living was so exorbitant that the average two bedroom apartment rented for more than $2000 a month. No one making less than $15 an hour could possibly live there. Those folks lived in outlying areas and suffered through daily one to three hour commutes from up to a hundred miles away. I once talked to a Safeway grocery store clerk who commuted an hour and forty minutes one way to get to work every day. Now ask her to pay $4 a gallon for gas.

Ford announced record losses last week. They piggybacked a historically large recall on top of that bad news. Their bonds are junk. Toyota just passed them as the second largest automaker in the world. And carmakers aren't looking to build more plants in the US, but in China.

The sheer number of companies in this country that depend on Ford for business should give us pause. The sheer number of Americans who are now paying spiraling prices for every staple of life that is transported by oil-consuming vehicles should start us talking.

But the Church in this country has nothing to say about any of this.

When my wife and I moved into our house five years ago, gas in our area was about $1.35 a gallon. The digits swapped this year and the price of gas this last Saturday was $3.15. We own a thirteen-year-old four-cylinder pickup truck that gets about 22 mpg on the highway and a compact car that gets about 38 mpg. In 2003, we spent about $290 a month on gas under normal usage. We now drive less than we did then, but with inflated gas prices, we're at nearly $600 a month now.

We're not rich; nor are we poor. Kissing $310 a month goodbye hurts. It hurts even more through the ripple effect. The cereal we bought two years ago for $1.50 a box is now about $2.75. Multiply that ad infinitum.

We hear about a good economy, but the real facts are depressing. The latest numbers reported one year ago show that while Americans did enjoy more income, with steadily rising salaries, factoring out the top one percent of wage earners nearly eliminated all gains.  In fact, 99 percent of Americans enjoyed a 1.5 percent increase in salary over the dog days of the last recession. The 12.5 percent increase in wages among the top one percent accounted for the offset. Translation? The rich got richer and inflation ate the average family's wage increase.

Being better educated didn't help, either, despite the prevailing wisdom. Salaries for college educated Americans declined in 2004.

And don't talk about savings. Last year, Americans on average saved zero percent of their income. Nothing. This year, economists are already saying that we could be looking at a negative one percent savings rate. 

The figures cited here are the most recent we have. And that's before gasoline above $2 a gallon and Ford and GM bonds falling into the basement. 

Yet what are we as a Church doing in light of this? Not one thing that I can see. Did we champion the recent push for an increase in the minimum wage? (In Ohio, the $4.25 state mandated minimum wage hasn't changed since 1990!) Certainly no Evangelical worth his conservative salt mentioned this lest he be lumped in with Jim Wallis. Are we Christian conservatives true to our nomenclature by calling for conservation of resources? All such calls that I've seen have been lampooned. What are our plans to help each other cope with looming economic disaster for many households? Or is the mantra we're chanting in our churches today, "Every man for himself"?

I don't know why we're so shortsighted.

I want to tell you something you may not consider: There are people in your church who are really smarting from this increase in the cost of gas that is progressively trickling down into all goods and services. They're wondering how they'll cope. With China and India industrializing faster than you can say "globalization," capitalism's market forces dictate that demand drives price, and that demand for oil will only increase. What then, if salaries do not keep pace? As we've seen, they aren't.

I'm not a fearmonger. I'm only calling for common sense. Our churches MUST speak to this reality and start doing something immediately to ensure that the least of those in our churches are not bankrupted by forces they cannot control. Because right now, someone in your church is weeping over bills they could easily pay two years ago, but not today.

That person might even be you. 

More tomorrow…