No “I” in “Church”

There is no individualized Christianity.

Yet you wouldn’t know it, especially in today’s Evangelicalism. Your own “personal Jesus” rules still. Wallenda Human Tightrope Pyramid It’s the Church about Me, not about Us.

Almost all the language of the NT books following the Gospels accounts for a group, rather than individuals. Paul writes primarily to churches, and when he does write to individuals (such as Timothy), it’s mostly on how to care for a group of people. In Revelation, the Lord addresses churches when He reveals His praise and His correction. Consistently, the language of the NT possesses a bent toward the group.

There are some who would claim that the great difference between the Old Testament and New is that God’s power rested on Israel, a nation, in the Old Testament, but now that power dwells in individuals. However, this is a faulty interpretation. Today, God’s sufficient power dwells in the whole of the Body of Christ. First Corinthians 12 gives us the context for Body life:

For the body does not consist of one member but of many. If the foot should say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. And if the ear should say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would be the sense of hearing? If the whole body were an ear, where would be the sense of smell? But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose. If all were a single member, where would the body be?
—1 Corinthians 12:14-19 ESV

Built on the idea of the power of the individual, America has fashioned an ideal lifestyle that says, “I can have what I want as long as I work for it.” The American Dream has little place for others, though, just my dream at the expense of anyone who should get in my way. Sadly, this American rugged individualism is at the core of everything we do. We abide by that unwritten rule, living with an understanding that cooperation will get us our basic needs, but if we truly want the best stuff, it’s every man for himself.

The Bible says this:

All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all.
—Isaiah 53:6 ESV
Every way of a man is right in his own eyes, but the LORD weighs the heart.
—Proverbs 21:2 ESV

We are in love with our own way. Unfortunately, the Isaiah passage equates going one’s own way with going astray.

Mix the American Dream with modern Evangelicalism and you get a Christianity designed for individuals, not community. Well intentioned Christians advocate that we find God’s will for “my life.” We are told to insert our name into God’s promises to claim our destiny (even if those promises were to groups, not individuals). We receive a pseudo-Gospel focused on the individual, rather than the group.

As a result, we become a loose collection of body parts. It doesn’t take a visit to an abattoir to show the foolishness of that position, though. There is no life in a liver here, an ear there, and a box full of feet mixed in with disconnected hands.

When we were dead in our sins, we were individuals. But the whole point of dying to self at the cross is that we die to self. When we’re born again, we’re born into a community. Dead to sin—individual. Alive in Christ—community.

What if we start reading the Bible with an eye toward Us rather than Me?

Take a verse like Romans 8:28. We all know it, but I’ll include it in context anyway:

And he who searches hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose. For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. And those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified. What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things? Who shall bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died—more than that, who was raised—who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us.
—Romans 8:27-34 ESV

Note the language. It’s not about individuals here. It’s about the whole, the saints, the elect, many brothers, us—not self, not me.

Now how do you read Romans 8:28? Take a look at that word “those”. Isn’t the good supposed to exist within the group? Doesn’t it also make the “work” mentioned there something that operates within a group through a process, rather than to an individual through loosely connected happenstance?

When you read the Bible at your next quiet time, read with the intent of the Author. That intent is toward community, not individualism. If we’ve committed eisegesis here, it’s by reading American rugged individualism into everything the Bible says. When we do that, though, we miss God’s best, His radically great intentions for us all.

Our failure to understand the community language of faith has had devastating results:

3. We’ve missed the entire point that God has chosen to work His will on Earth through the Body of Christ.

Israel comprehended “sin in the camp” but we have no clue how that applies today. When the concept of corporate sin is eliminated, we no longer account for the sins of the collective body of Christ. Another believer’s sin becomes his issue alone, and not mine. However, as the Bride of Christ, should we not ensure the purity of all our parts? When we don’t care about other churchgoers’ sin and the lifestyles they lead, we dishonor the whole Body, ourselves included.

Because we modern Christians fail to grasp the concept of corporate sin, we also absolve ourselves of the sins of systems. We rarely question systems for this reason, and that is not God’s intent that their sheer size and power should cow us into ignoring their sins. Think the corrupt Roman Catholic Church of Martin Luther’s day. Think ungodly business practices and governmental injustice in ours.

Is your church struggling? Start dealing with corporate sin.

Do you have life insurance? Health insurance? Does it cost a lot of money? Have you ever asked yourself why you have it?

The reason you have it is because you’ve been taught you can’t count on anyone but yourself to provide should disaster come. Certainly you can’t count on the church to provide for you. But that is not how the Bible reads:

And with great power the apostles were giving their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all. There was not a needy person among them, for as many as were owners of lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold and laid it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need.
—Acts 4:33-35 ESV

That’s the second most neglected passage in the Scriptures, folks. We Americans gloss over it instinctively. Remember, too, that the Early Church was getting this direction from the Holy Spirit and the words of the Scriptures as found in the Old Testament. If we are to provide for our families, and Christ has given us a new family in the Body of Christ, then we are worse than unbelievers when we fail to provide for that new family, the Church.

James puts it succinctly:

If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace, be warmed and filled,” without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that?
—James 2:15-16 ESV

That idea in James transitions into a final idea. Because we have eschewed the concept of a truly functioning whole body Church, we’ve forced God’s providential hand. How does God provide for people since the Ascension of the Lord? Through the Body of Christ. He has called us to a ministry, His ministry, to feed the poor, clothe the naked, and to work His work on the Earth. We are fellow laborers with Him as Paul writes in his letters to the Corinthians:

For we are God’s fellow workers.
—1 Corinthians 3:9a ESV
Working together with him, then, we appeal to you not to receive the grace of God in vain.
—2 Corinthians 6:1 ESV

Again, the Lord speaks through James:

Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world.
—James 1:27 ESV

Read all of Matthew 25, too.

Much like Satan tempted Christ to hurl himself off the temple spire, we tempt the Lord when we ignore our role in serving others within His Body and those who are yet to know Him. When the Lord has so ably equipped us to do His work and meet the needs of others, we’re wrong to expect Him to rain manna down on the hungry when He has charged us to feed them. Unmet needs within the Body of Christ are unmet because God told us to meet them with the riches He has already provided us, but we instead chose to expect Him to do it Himself. This is not to say that God does not provide supernaturally, but more often than not the provision is right in our own hands; we are simply unwilling to part with it.

We must eliminate this devilish idea that the Church is Me alone. It’s Us and always has been. When we finally burn our self-centeredness perhaps we will see Christ work in His Body the way He has always wanted, so that

If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together.
—1 Corinthians 12:26 ESV

Tags: Body of Christ, American Dream, Individualism, Church, Faith, Christianity, Jesus, God

On Millstones and Disconnects, Part 2

Today, I’ll wrap up my rant that began in “On Millstones and Disconnects, Part 1” with the hope that we’ll find a better way to bring biblical truth into everyday reality.

Recently, I was prepping for a small group Bible study I would be leading, when I pulled out some old reference material I had from a well-known, well-funded, conservative Christian organization. Their emphasis is on preventing further erosion of a particular societal and biblical norm. I’ve had a lot of respect for that group over the years, and they were formerly headed by theologians I admire.

As I was looking through one particular section of the material, I ran across something that was highly condemning. Worst of all, it was highly condemning of our situation. So I contacted that organization to tell them our story, to ask them what we should have done differently, and to ask what their organization was actively doing to ensure that no family found itself in the same situation we face, the very situation they condemned.

Their answer was to recommend a book on how to find a Bible-based church.

Total. Absolute. Disconnect.

Here’s what I would love to see the Church do. I don’t think any Christian pastor, teacher, parachurch organization, or Christian group should ever admonish people on any topic unless they have some means of drawing alongside those folks to ensure they have some means to carry out that admonition.

If we oppose abortion, we better provide some way of helping pregnant women take care of the children they’re considering aborting should they elect to keep them.
If we want dads to be more available for their families and their churches, we better provide a way to help them cut back their hours at work without losing their jobs.
If we want moms to be at home with the kids and dads to be the breadwinners, we better provide a way for that to occur in families who are fighting for their economic lives in the midst of massive upheavals in a new global economy.
If we want to reach the lost, we better provide a way to live out the Gospel instead of just talking about it all the time.
If we say we want to instill a Christian worldview in people, then we better be able to speak to any issue, no matter how divisive, difficult, or sectarian it might be.
If we want people to fall in love with Jesus, we better provide a way for them to be head over heels in love with Him to the point that nothing else in this world matters but Him (even our lives, our families, our worldviews, our money, and any other thing that doesn’t belong to us but to God alone).

But instead, we love those easy answers. We love telling people what they should be doing, even if we make no provision to help them to do what we say. It’s all deserving of having a millstone tied around our necks and a permanent dunk in the ocean. Just how many people are we causing to stumble because we tell them what they must do, but provide no clue how to do it?

I’m going to pick on a pastor/teacher/author now. I want to say ahead of time that I believe his books are important and that everyone reading this should read them. I have no personal grudge against him, but I want to use his advice as an example of how we can make it hard on people to meet the expectations that Christian leaders suggest.

Randy Frazee, who has now moved on to Willow Creek, wrote two good books. The Connecting Church is about reaching out to our neighborhoods, opening our homes and lives to our lost neighbors. Making Room for Life is about adopting a Hebraic daily schedule that shuns the 24/7/365 lifestyles we’ve adopted. On the surface both of these books are outstanding in that their focus is exactly right. I would recommend that everyone read them, if only for the issues they raise.

But Frazee’s books reveal a stark idealism that afflicts the modern American Church, creating more disconnects than they resolve.

The first disconnect is that Frazee, like many pastors in this country, has been professional clergy most of his life. Career pastors have no personal experience with what it’s like to live—like most people do—in the real business world. For instance, Frazee says that employers will have no problem if you let them know ahead of time that in order to maintain a proper Hebraic daily schedule you’ll only be working 40 hours a week or less. What planet is he living on? The average work week is 50 hours and people who don’t work it are the first ones gone when the downsizing comes. I’ve seen that a million times. Same goes for those who work from home. They have no office presence, therefore no political standing in the cubicle farm, so they’re the first ones cut when “dehiring” rolls around.

Locale is an issue, too. Frazee says that we should live within about fifteen minutes of where we work. But now that companies have no employee loyalty, career experts are claiming that people should be happy with two to three years in a specific company before they be required (or elect) to move on. I’ve never once had a job within 15 minutes of my home; most have been 40 minutes or longer. If by this standard I can expect to have more than a dozen jobs in my life, that would necessitate moving a dozen times or more to be true to what Frazee presents. Now ask what kind of lasting fellowship anyone can expect to enjoy when one is moving around that much! Worse yet, if we factor in Frazee’s The Connecting Church ideas here, how can we possibly have any Christian impact in our neighborhoods if we’re forced to move all the time just to find work or to be close to it? Frazee himself left Texas for Illinois for work-related reasons. How did that affect the neighborhood he lived in, the one he described in his book?

Just today, I spoke with a man who has seen his regular overtime cut back to zero. As a result, his wife, who was working part-time, is now having to work full-time for them to make ends meet. When both spouses are working like this, how do they have time for their church, much less for a Connecting Church like Frazee describes? I don’t know. That’s the disconnect. Those spouses instead become two ships that pass in the night, one working day shift and another working night. It’s a miracle they can keep their own family together much less be actively reaching out to meet the needs of other families in their neighborhood.

This same man told me that everyone he knows is struggling with lost wages due to changes in the economy. The Wall Street Journal just last week trumpeted the fact that Silicon Valley is hiring again. Hurrah! But wait. The average salary in the Valley is now $69,000 a year compared to the $80,000 a year it was eight years ago. Is this progress? Gas is running $2.50 a gallon where I am. I can only imagine what it costs in California. And we got out of California before the electricity rates doubled. Honestly—and some of you in other parts of the country may not grasp this—$69,000 a year is NOT a livable wage for Silicon Valley. Even $80,000 is shaky. (Our rent alone on a two bedroom apartment was $1950 a month when we left in 2000. Taxes, too, are insane in California. ) With those salaries, both spouses work or they have to leave town. And if their specific work skill is linked to Silicon Valley, where else do they go that’s not similarly oppressively expensive?

It may seem I’m talking too much about economics and jobs. But many of the issues that confront the Church today are rooted in the fact that our employment (with commute) takes up more time during a week than anything we do. Most everyone I know barely has time to do anything but work. Families that were adamant about having only the husband work (because this is what the Christian message is) are now requiring mom to work full-time just to make ends meet. What does that mean for volunteering at church, or for spending quality time with our families, or any of the other myriad things Christian radio, our pulpits, or Christian books tell us we must do in order to be good Christians?

The disconnects are massive. We need more radical answers. To the organization who told me the answer to our problem was finding a Bible-believing church: I haven’t run across a single Bible-believing church that is speaking radical answers to these issues. If an organization such as their own that exists solely to provide biblical answers to these issues can’t speak to them in a practical way, then how is any heavily diversified church going to, no matter how Scripturally accurate they are?

Here’s what I see:

Some Christians force themselves not to think about these disconnects and are just carried around on the winds of change, even if those winds blow them into a foul place.
Some Christians think about these disconnects, but they routinely fall back to doing it the way that they’ve always done it, even if that way doesn’t work anymore.
Some Christians fall into a sort of Christianized fatalism, saying there’s nothing that can be done, so they’re just putting in time till heaven rolls around.
Some Christians self-destruct because they can’t make what they’re hearing from Christian leaders fit with their own daily reality.

Want to know what’s truly sad about those folks? None of them will make a lasting difference for the Lord in their generation. Instead, we need Christians who are willing to acknowledge reality, address it in the light of Christ’s truth, and provide biblically-based, practical solutions to entrenched problems, changing the world in the process.

Those kinds of Christian change agents are rare because they must speak against the prevailing wisdom, which is actually no wisdom at all. Sounds like a prophet, doesn’t it?

Lord Jesus, send us men and women of vision who are not satisfied with answers that never intersect the reality of most people’s lives. Your Church needs them now more than ever.

Tags: Vision, Disconnects, Culture, Work, Jobs, Business, Wisdom, Church, Faith, Christianity, Jesus, God

On Millstones and Disconnects, Part 1

Yesterday's post was a sad one. Today's is angry. (I'm trying to run the table on emotions here this week.) So if you're not ready to read a rant today, there are some fine blogs on the right sidebar that might be less incendiary.

Here's the key passage:

For whoever shall give you a cup of water to drink in My name, because you belong to Christ, truly I say to you, he shall not lose his reward. And whoever shall offend one of these little ones who believe in Me, it is better for him that a millstone were hanged around his neck and he were cast into the sea. —Mark 9:41-42 MKJV

We have a classic biblical parallelism here:

It's outrageously simple.

Cerulean Sanctum is a blog about the Church in America. I try to write about issues that affect us Christians (and our churches) here in this country. Because I love the Church, I want more than anything for us to be all we can be, not only as a corporate body of believers but as individuals within that body.

This is why I'm distraught over the sheer number of disconnects between what the Church preaches and how we are to live in society. If we have Ultimate Truth in the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, then we should not shrink from any challenge. The world should be able to look to the Church and have us point to the answers for problems that plague us all. Our apologetic is not contained in mere words, but in a practical outliving of Truth that applies to all realms of life: work, play, family, life, death, and so on.

But that costs something. It's not easy. It can't always be summed up in a Bible verse or a "read this Christian book and you'll be better." Here's a for instance:

A man receives a call at work that his pregnant wife and unborn child have died after a sudden onset of preeclampsia. They'd been married twelve years and had struggled to conceive. They were ecstatic to find out she was pregnant. This would have been their first child. They've been coming to your church for less than six months.

You want to minister to this man later that day, so you:

B. Drive over to his house, sit down with him and let him weep. Listen to his stories about his wife. After your initial visit, bring him food from time to time. Pray with him after Sunday services. Let him know that he can call you any time, night or day. Send him handwritten notes encouraging him. Invite him to get-togethers with other people at your home. Ask him to sit with you in church. Make sure other people in the church know who he is and what happened to him so they can be an encouragement, too. Ask him what other ways you can help him through this time.

One of those options costs something. And it's not "A". The sad thing is that "A" is what many people get. I'm not here to say the Bible has no place in this man's recovery, just that the way it was mishandled in this case was deserving of a millstone placed around the deliverer's neck—especially since nothing else was offered.

I've lost my patience with "Christian" organizations that tell people how they should live, but offer no help in achieving that goal. They think they're providing a cup of water, but they're deluding themselves. The people who say these things are only offending Christ's little ones. Unplugged/Disconnected They deserve a millstone hung around their necks and a permanent dunking in the waters above the Marianas Trench. It's a disconnect of biblical proportions.

The largest disconnects are those that call on the Gospel to intersect culture. I hear American Church leaders preaching that God's way trumps the world's, but then the Christian who hears that message goes out into the real world and runs smack into the disconnect.

A few examples:

2. The family-oriented parachurch ministry says that the only biblical household is the one where the husband is the primary breadwinner, while mom stays home with the kids. But dad just lost his twenty-year job to offshoring, his field's dried up locally, and because mom didn't keep her work skills fresh after the kids came, they're burning through all their savings while dad spends sixty hours a week job hunting.

3. Your church teaches a class on parenthood and says that the proof of God's blessing on your life is the number of children you have. But you've had three miscarriages and the last one caused so many problems you had to have a hysterectomy.

The message the Church is speaking attempts to intersect reality and the result is a complete disconnect. And a painful one at that.

The retort to all this is to say, "This is all sour grapes, Dan. You're trying to blame this on God or to say the Scriptures aren't true."

And that would be completely off-base.

What's at fault here is not God or His word. The problem is that God's given the Church a responsibility to go beyond easy answers, but we've chosen the easy answers instead.

None of the beginning statements above are wrong. Instead, the Church has failed to implement godly solutions to worldly issues, giving those statements an appearance of error. We as a Church have forgotten how to make culture fit a biblical lifestyle. We're still trying to make a biblical lifestyle fit culture—and that doesn't work. Ever.

The world looks at our Christian square pegs and says, "Oh yeah? Well, try to jam that through our round hole!" Instead, Christians should be making the world's finest square holes that will perfectly fit the square pegs. But we're not doing that anymore.

We once did. In this country, Christian ideology once drove culture; now it's the other way around. And sadly, the modern Church is abetting that disaster.

Are we satisfying the thirsty children? Or are we offending them?

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No “I” in “Church”

On Millstones and Disconnects, Part 2

On Millstones and Disconnects, Part 1