Benevolence

Gathering Stubble for Bricks

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So the taskmasters and the foremen of the people went out and said to the people, "Thus says Pharaoh, 'I will not give you straw. Go and get your straw yourselves wherever you can find it, but your work will not be reduced in the least.'" So the people were scattered throughout all the land of Egypt to gather stubble for straw. The taskmasters were urgent, saying, "Complete your work, your daily task each day, as when there was straw." And the foremen of the people of Israel, whom Pharaoh's taskmasters had set over them, were beaten and were asked, "Why have you not done all your task of making bricks today and yesterday, as in the past?" Then the foremen of the people of Israel came and cried to Pharaoh, "Why do you treat your servants like this? No straw is given to your servants, yet they say to us, 'Make bricks!' And behold, your servants are beaten; but the fault is in your own people." But he said, "You are idle, you are idle; that is why you say, 'Let us go and sacrifice to the LORD.' Go now and work. No straw will be given you, but you must still deliver the same number of bricks." The foremen of the people of Israel saw that they were in trouble when they said, "You shall by no means reduce your number of bricks, your daily task each day." They met Moses and Aaron, who were waiting for them, as they came out from Pharaoh; and they said to them, "The LORD look on you and judge, because you have made us stink in the sight of Pharaoh and his servants, and have put a sword in their hand to kill us." Then Moses turned to the LORD and said, "O LORD, why have you done evil to this people? Why did you ever send me? For since I came to Pharaoh to speak in your name, he has done evil to this people, and you have not delivered your people at all."
—Exodus 5:10-23 ESV

About 1,800 people from my area work at the Ford CVT Transmission Plant in Batavia, the largest town within twenty miles of me. Ford announced this week that the plant will be closed by 2008. The repercussions of this will be felt for miles—and for decades.

I don't know what to say to the folks that work there. I don't what to say to anyone who loses a job nowadays. I do know that economists will claim that all those lost jobs will be picked up elsewhere, but I can promise them this: the majority of those folks from Batavia will be making less money no matter what job they pick up. And I'll even argue with those economists about the truth of their statement. Car wreckMy own experience is that we're not making new jobs, at least in this part of America. Instead, we seem to be creating a new class of nomadic workers who must pick up and move to follow the jobs wherever they go. I know too many people who are caught in that existence. Of course, people will quibble with my observations, but then they're not from around here.

Earlier this week I talked about living in the country, but it's getting tough to live in rural areas. As much as we admire Mayberry and its quirky rural residents, in reality hundreds of towns like Mayberry up and blew away because the jobs left. The infrastructure decayed for want of work and those that did have work still had to leave because there was no support for what they stayed behind to do.

Increasingly, we're asking people to make bricks without straw.

I've blogged about the Church and employment more than any other topic, I'm sure. But even as I'm typing, the churches around my area are reeling from this plant closure, not only from the future lost revenue, but from a lack of preparedness for this kind of loss.

I simply don't understand why the Church has kept employment on the back burner. There's nothing we do each day that consumes more time than our jobs, but from the paucity of interest the Church seems to take in our employment, you'd think there was something sinful about working. Scratch that. We talk about sin all the time. It's the everyday parts of life we don't hear about on Sunday.

Listen, if we don't know it, I'll let out the secret. We're in a boom and bust cycle in our economy and the bust cycles are probably going to grow increasingly worse and last for longer amounts of time. No rational person can look at the meltdowns at Ford and GM and pretend that won't send shockwaves through our economy. Those companies are in deep trouble and whether we like it or not, we Christians can't sit idly by and pretend it's all sunshine and rainbows.

Pastors, what are you doing in your churches to help your people prepare for the bust years? Joseph had the Egyptians save up for the seven lean years. How are churches today doing the same? Solid organizations anticipate need. So why are churches always reacting rather than being proactive?

I could write about this subject more, but I'm weary. Last week I wrote that our churches need to get everyone in them down on their faces in prayer and fasting for as long as it takes. Must it take an economic meltdown to do it?

What do you all think? Why is the issue of our jobs and the economy so inconsequential to the leaders of our churches? During the last economic bust, the number one prayer concern at my old church was for jobs, but it took the church forever to realize they needed to be more active in meeting that need. Does it have to be that way?

The comments section is open. Please talk to me about this.

Tags: Ford, Batavia, Jobs, Employment, Work, Business, Church, Faith, Christianity, Jesus, God

21 Steps to a 21st Century Church – Part 5 (Conclusion)

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No need to wait for March Madness, the Final Four are here today!

So without further cleverness, here are the final four issues that the Church in the West needs to address if she’s to be the light to the world that the Lord intends her to be.

4. Make the church for believers
Anyone who’s been watching the Church in the West, and America in particular, has seen the spectacular, meteoric flame-out of the Church Growth Movement. All sound and fury signifying nothing, the CGM gave us their new and improved Church without a Cross™. The upshot is that we now have a Church whose teaching consists of nothing more than milk 24/7/365, and mostly byproducts at that. It’s like casein —and anyone who’s ever eaten a $2 pizza knows how gross that tastes!

For 13 years I was part of a what was once a fantastic church that progressively fell on hard discipleship times because it swallowed the CGM whole. In our final grim days there, it got so bad that I alerted the church’s denomination that the church had gone so far to attract anyone they could that they’d actually stopped preaching the Gospel. Messages had become mired in Human Potential Movement garbage and a smarmy cuteness aimed at those who live for cultural relevance. After repeated unsuccessful attempts to get to the pastor to ask him what was up, my wife and I finally left.Only later did it come out that we weren’t the only ones. More than 40% of mature Christians within that church were bailing out year over year. Eventually the leadership of the church recognized the hemorrhage and repented, but we were long gone—and with a bitter taste in our mouths.The lesson here is one that all Christians should heed: the Church of Jesus Christ is for those who believe in Him. It is NOT for unbelievers. We are sent OUT to the world to bring the Gospel out to the perishing. Once the lost believe, we are to bring them IN to our churches. In their attempts to reach the unsaved, what our churches must never do is dumb-down the messages and training toward maturity that growing Christians need so that unbelievers can be accommodated. And especially if that accommodation looks no different from the world.

The Church consists of the called-apart people. Our teachings should be geared toward Christian maturity, not toward those who don’t even know Christ. The abject failure of the Church Growth Movement is that it didn’t spike the numbers in the truly converted. Sure, it attracted a few people who traditionally had skipped church, but that came at the expense of people looking for substance. Meanwhile, mature Christians have abandoned the typical church on the corner, delving into house churches, emerging churches, or skipping church altogether. They’re so fed up they don’t know what to do.

What to do is this: our churches should always hold Christ’s banner high so that those who can embrace it will, not low so that it gets trample upon. The Church has to be for believers first. Strengthening real believers into hardcore disciples is our mission. We send them out into the world equipped and ready; they bring in the harvest. No other method works.

3. Recover prayer & fasting—especially to repentance
Truthfully, I’m not sure I should add anything here. I’ve said before that we can’t expect miracles to happen, we can’t take down the Enemy, we can’t do anything at all in the Lord’s power unless we’re serious about prayer.But we’re not praying. We’re “practicing the presence” or we’re tossing up tiny “prayerlets,” but our frenzied lives have left us devoid of real down-on-our-knees prayer—though we’ve never needed that kind of prayer more than now.One of my all-time favorite Christian authors and speakers was Leonard Ravenhill. He said this about prayer: “No man is greater than his prayer life.” I don’t think a greater truth ever existed in eight simple words.Fasting. What can I say? Are we doing it? I knew a lot of guys growing up who fasted in order to find a wife. Sounds hokey, but a host of guys are nodding their heads as they read this. However, now that we have wives, we’ve let this one slip. The Bridegroom’s gone away, but if we want Him to come back to find faith on this third rock from the sun, we better be fasting along with our praying. Fasting goes with prayer like peanut butter goes with jelly (well, maybe that’s not such a great illustration—pairing food imagery with fasting—but hey, it’s late!) Both are great individually, but together they’re more than the sum of their parts.

And to what end should the Church be fasting and praying today? To repentance.

Does anyone besides me think that if every church in this country called the faithful to prayer and fasting toward repentance that God wouldn’t shake things up? People have called me idealistic before, but I still believe that if the Church in the West got down on its knees, fasting and praying until the gates of heaven shook, God would do a mighty work among us.

I believe that dire days are ahead for the Church in the West unless we repent. God has already removed some of His Glory from us and given it to the Third World because they have come to Him in their poverty, believed Him, and gone out to minister as if every day is the last. And what did the West do? The children of the world said, “Jump!” and we replied, “How high?”

I don’t ordinarily pick fights with people, but I will on this topic if people say, “No way.” We’ve lost something here in Western Christianity and if we don’t want to see our lampstand removed altogether, we better get serious about prayer and fasting, especially to repentance.

2. Live by The Golden Rule
I may have reiterated this particular case here one too many times in these twenty-one steps, but I promise this is the last time. Stay with me.Jesus wasn’t scourged for 401k accounts. He didn’t have a crown of thorns driven into His scalp so we could fight to get the latest iPod. He didn’t have three nails pounded through His hands and feet so that we could climb over the little people on our way to the brass ring. He didn’t die in agony on a hillside for the world to see so that we could pass by the homeless man on the street and feel good about our lot. Jesus Christ died for people—and not just you and me.I believe our hopelessly broken societal “norms” have led us to this grim place where our first inclination when we meet someone for the first time is to assign them a stereotype we believe they fit. We judge. We assess. We categorize. We assume.Jesus Christ annihilates that thinking. He says:

And as you wish that others would do to you, do so to them.
—Luke 6:31 ESV

I can’t help but think that if we truly believed this verse and lived it out, it would transform every single aspect of how we relate to people. We think the Golden Rule is good enough for our children, but when did it stop being good enough for us?

What would happen in the Church in the West in 2006 if every one of us who call Jesus Lord would view every relational encounter we have in a day through the lens of Luke 6:31?

I’ve got to believe that the world would be a far different place.

1. Show people Jesus
Earlier, I mentioned how a church I’d been a part of self-destructed by going completely seeker-sensitive.During a service at that church back a handful of years ago, the Lord revealed a great truth to me. I saw all those people in that huge church glued to some well-calculated, but throwaway, piece of church programming, yet the cry of their hearts was for what they were not getting. That cry was, Show us Jesus.Folks, are we showing people Jesus or are we giving them something (or even someone) else? The heartcry of every person on this planet no matter what it may seem to be on the surface is show us Jesus.Now I’m not so ignorant that I don’t realize there are people who are sworn enemies of Christ, but I still believe that even they want to see Jesus, if for no other reason than to steel their own resolve against Him, to hate His people more, to gnash their teeth at their own Christ-denying error.

But this is not about them. It’s about those people who are desperate to know Jesus, but have no idea where to turn to find Him.

What saddens me more than anything else is to see people crying out to see Jesus, yet we give them man-made garbage instead. For those of us who know Christ, why has it become so hard for us to show Him to others?

The problem starts in the household of Faith. If we’re to show people Jesus, then we have to know Him first. We must know His words, know His voice, and have spent so much time at His feet that we know Him better than we know ourselves. Only that kind of dedicated servant of Christ can show Him to other people.

That’s where the weakness is, though. We truly don’t know Him all that well. We know about Him to some extent, but we’re not spending enough time on our faces before Him to know Him as a person. So the world goes waiting while we get to know the cast of our favorite TV show, or the latest stock market trend, or whatever noise the world serves up to us to keep us from knowing the one person who can save the world.

Jesus. It always comes down to Him because He is all that matters.

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I believe that if we took these 21 steps, the Church of Jesus Christ would be radically altered. If we only took these last four steps, nothing would be the same.

I can’t live like the middling throngs. Breathing light into the darknessThe Christianity we live in the West doesn’t have to be toothless. Christ didn’t do all He did so we can be feeble in our living of the Gospel. The Church we see in Acts rocked the world! Strongholds were demolished, people were wrenched out of the hand of the Enemy, the dead were raised—and not just the spiritually dead!

Are we happy with the Church we see today? I’m not. My problem is that I’m the Church. If I expect to see change, then it starts inside me. Christ alone has the words of eternal life. Only in Him is true purpose found, true life.

Leonard Ravenhill, again, put it all in perspective when he said, “When are we going to get serious about getting serious?”

For 2006, let’s answer that question with the only answer that matters: Today.

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The Lord of Apologists and Servants

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Fallout from "The Godblogosphere's Black Hole" and "More Thoughts on 'The Godblogosphere's Black Hole'" continues to rain down. Pyromaniac's Phil Johnson waded into the fray on Tuesday. The comments for his response to me are intriguing. A few have reiterated in comments here the gist of the comments in Phil's blog. And the wheel goes 'round and 'round.

A few days ago, I wrote a mini-series called "The Church's Brave New Brain" that viewed the Church in terms of those within it favoring one side of their brains over the other. The left-hemisphere thinkers like the logical approach and bring that to the Church, while the right-hemisphere thinkers bring the relational.

In the past, I've written elsewhere on the idea of Apologists versus Servants. I believe in many ways this aligns with the left/right hemisphere issues I discussed in the aforementioned series. Now that the issue of apologetics is showing up in comments here, I thought I'd address it even if it borders on the very theological "battle" I swore I wasn't going to let myself get dragged into. For that reason, I will be brief.

Jesus Christ came to attest to the Father through His own life. He is the Revealer of Truth and the Truth Himself. He is the Lord of Apologists.

Jesus Christ came to serve, to be the Suffering Servant. He is our perfect model for service. He is the Lord of Servants.

Without apologetics, we serve in vain.

Without service, we contend for truth in vain.

In short, the two cannot be divorced.

(Since mostly Apologists are reading this, I won't even bother to pull out my ESV and quote all the verses to support this. Most of us can do it from memory.)

The folly of the Church in the West (a folly that does not seem to affect non-Western Christians, interestingly enough) is our penchant to always want to divide and conquer. We latch on to either apologetics or service and we bring that laser-like Western focus on the discipline that most ignites our hearts. We concentrate on it until we burn the rods and cones out of our eyes that correspond with that OTHER side. In effect, we can no longer see the whole picture.

I wrote what I did in those two "Black Hole" posts because in 2005 the Godblogosphere increasingly looked like an Apologists' convention. It's understandable if for no other reason than Internet-savvy folks are largely left-brained Apologists. It's also true that blogs lend themselves to information over relationship. Sure it's nice to make friends through blogging, but it's even nicer to shake that person's physical hand and down a beverage of choice with him. Nothing replaces that.

The Godblogosphere has become the haunt of Apologists. There is nothing wrong with Apologists! It's the disproportion that bothers me. But what bothers me even more is that so few are trying to find a way to use blogs as a means to service that can restore balance to the Godblogosphere.

If I can help bring the Servants out in force, I think that's my goal for 2006 in my little neck of the blogosphere. I believe that blogging can evolve to better implement physical service to others. No one said it would be easy, but I think we have to try for that ideal.

Before I end here, I have a couple more thoughts.

Right now, people are coming to Jesus Christ. Today, those people begin a walk of sanctification that they'll continue until the day they see Him face-to-face. Those new Christians are Christ's beloved. And you know what? They're going to fall on their faces when pressed hard for some piece of biblical knowledge they're not going to know. They're also going to take their newfound love for the Lord and serve themselves right into a hole because they don't know how to serve yet.

No matter whether we fancy ourselves an Apologist or a Servant, we've tanked in both those areas at some time or other. Depending on how badly we failed, we might very well have started drifting away from the apologetics or the service depending on which didn't work perfectly at that point that we most wanted it to.

And that's a shame because the Man of God is made to be both an Apologist and a Servant, not one predominantly over the other.

That's what I'm shooting for in 2006. I pray that at least part of the Godblogosphere walks alongside me.

May Christ richly bless you Apologists and you Servants as you grow more profoundly in love with Him on your way to becoming true Servant Apologists.

Tags: Servants, Apologists, Service, Apologetics, Balance, Church, Faith, Christianity, Jesus, God