Benevolence

The Blog-out for the Kingdom

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My announcement yesterday of The Blog-out for the Kingdom (Nov. 20-26) has generated some interesting responses. I hope even more come along as I post further on this idea in the coming weeks before the Blog-out.

The Blog-out is intended to give us an opportunity to use the ideas and truth we have discussed in each other's blogs to

  • Serve others in the name of Christ
  • Encourage the brethren in a more personal way
  • Forge relationships with others face-to-face
  • Think outside the box when it comes to practical expressions of the Gospel
  • Break out of our ministry comfort zones
  • Grow our own spiritual lives
  • Lift up the name of Jesus
  • Redeem the time, for days are coming when no one can work
  • Reflect our thankfulness for all that the Lord has done for us

The Blog-out is not intended to

  • Condemn bloggers for "wasting time" blogging
  • Burden others with one more thing to do
  • Impose legalistic servitude
  • Replace daily service to others in the name of Christ

I know that blogging can be a ministry—it is for me. Calling for a week without blogging will in no way compromise anyone's online ministry. Henrik Stefan's The Good SamaritanWhat I hope for the Blog-out for the Kingdom to do is to get us all thinking about practical expressions of what we know and have learned, putting those things into practice to change ourselves, our neighborhoods, and ultimately, the world.

It is my prayer that everyone who comes to Cerulean Sanctum catch this vision, not just for that one week in November, but in all we do. The Gospel was never intended to be locked up inside our craniums, but to be lived out in the presence of real people starving to hear it and see it truly in action.

Yesterday, I mentioned some ideas for ministry during the Blog-out. Please comment and leave more ideas for others today! I know that one thing I want to do is to take that time away from blogging and use it to handwrite letters to those Christians who have been influential in my spiritual development over the course of my life, thanking them for what they poured into me that has led me to become the person I am today. Encouragement of our fellow members of the Body doesn't happen enough today. And when was the last time someone sat down and handwrote you a letter saying how much you had blessed his/her life?

Don't we all want to see the world changed for Christ? The Blog-out for the Kingdom is just one way to make that a reality.

Let's not just talk the talk.

The Blog-out for the Kingdom—November 20 through 26, 2005.

{Image: Henrik Stefan's The Good Samaritan, 1920}

Changing the Christian Blogosphere (and the World) Forever

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I've been blogging for more than four years now. What has changed in the last year is that I'm spending more time reading what others are writing rather than solely concentrating on my own words.

There are incredibly bright men and women, people of intense faith and devotion, blogging. We are His handsAt one time I considered myself intelligent, but some of the folks blogging today are on some plane of intellect that makes me feel like I'm five and back on the Uncle Al show.

I don't think a time in history has ever existed when so many people have so much opportunity to influence others via the written word. Just seeing the names of other familiar bloggers in the comment section of yet another blogger's site is enough to tell me that collected wisdom is getting around.

But I'm also seeing another trend, one that others are just now acknowledging. Our brains are routinely getting filled with knowledge, but if other bloggers are like me, putting all that we know into practice is suffering. We're accumulating facts, but are we increasingly unable to take what we know and translate that into being the Body of Christ to the world?

My head is full, but my hand is too often empty.

This is what it says in 2nd Peter 1:5-8 (ESV):

For this very reason, make every effort to add to your faith goodness; and to goodness, knowledge; and to knowledge, self-control; and to self-control, perseverance; and to perseverance, godliness; and to godliness, brotherly kindness; and to brotherly kindness, love. For if you possess these qualities in increasing measure, they will keep you from being ineffective and unproductive in your knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Knowledge comes at the beginning of the process, but love is the final goal. How are we expressing that love to a broken world?

We may know the differences between Moltmann and Barth, Knox and Zwingli, but do we know the names of our neighbors? Have they ever been in our homes? Have we broken bread with them? Have we asked them what we can pray for? Have we been the first ones at their doorstep with food when there is a sickness—or for no other reason than that we care about them?

I understand that it's hard in the fractured society we live in to reach out to strangers. Loving those we do not know well is exceedingly difficult. But do we even love our brethren in Christ? When was the last time we visited the shut-ins from our own churches? Do we invite new members to our homes for a meal? Are we actively seeking out visitors? Do we keep in touch with the people who were essential to our coming to faith and our growth afterwards? Are we showing the brotherly kindness that leads to love?

Years ago, I believed that knowing was everything. Yet now that my head is filled with more Christian knowledge than it seems I can ever fully comprehend, I'm no longer satisfied with adding more. Unless I'm putting all that knowledge into practical service to the lost and to my brothers and sisters in Christ, have I not become that useless resounding gong that Paul warned of?

Words matter, but actions matter just as much.

That is why I'm proposing something so radical that it may not only change the Christian blogosphere, it may very well change the world: Let's stop the words for a week and instead substitute action. Let's put all that we know into practice.

I'm calling all Christian bloggers to step away from their computers from November 20-26. Rather than add one more word of theology, one more complaint about the way things are versus how they should be, let's take all that we have learned in our blog travels and use it to further the Kingdom by putting it all into action. Let's take our blogging time and dedicate it instead to making a personal difference in our neighborhoods, churches, and the world.

In the midst of that week, what can we do that we've never done before? Work at a soup kitchen on Thanksgiving Day? Visit an elderly mentor whom we've lost contact with? Talk to someone in our neighborhood we've never spoken to?

And if you're the kind of person who's mastered all that, what else can you do that you've never attempted before for the Lord? Perhaps you can call a missions organization and have them send you a list of missionaries from your local area. You could begin praying for those folks or even send them money, books, or a card saying you're lifting them up before the throne. Maybe you could offer to watch the pastor's kids so that he and his wife could have a night alone. Or you could rake the leaves of the neighbor you've been trying to witness to for years with words, but never with actions.

Blogging can become our comfort zone if we let it. But that isn't the Lord's desire of us. Can we do this, folks? Can we turn off the computers and take a week to reach out with the truth and love of Christ in a way that changes others and changes us along the way? In a week when we Americans celebrate Thanksgiving, can we give thanks back to the Lord for all He's done for us by making this happen?

November 20-26: Blog-out for the Kingdom.

Folks, what can we do that week to change the world for Jesus?

The Practice of the Practical Gospel

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Weeping angel sculptureTim Challies had a convicting analysis earlier this week concerning the shallowness of Evangelicalism. I think that more and more of us are fed up with the state of the American Church in general, and Tim puts a fine point on our flailing around:

The shallowness of evangelicalism leaves it largely inequipped to deal with the difficult issues. If we are to be a people that brings hope to the hopeless, purpose to the purposeless and joy to those who know only sorrow, we must be prepared to give answers that are biblically-based and Scripturally-satisfying. To do this we must wrestle with the difficult doctrines of sin, love, sorrow and suffering. We must be prepared not only to give an answer for the hope that lives within us, but for the suffering that causes us to draw upon that hope and to take our refuge in Christ Jesus, the One whose death gives us hope for now and for eternity.

Amen to that.

Yet I think that for the Church in America to really live out the Gospel it has to go one step further. While I agree that the Church must do a better job with our answers, I believe even more strongly that we must radically improve our praxis, the very practical living out of the faith that lies behind those answers.

While I may get dinged by some for suggesting this, if it were merely an issue of biblical answers, I could type up an appropriate set of Bible verses, add in a dash of exposition by a famous Christian of yesteryear, and simply hand out the right pages that would address the specific problem of this person or that. In this way, no one could ever claim that they didn't get answers to their pain.

However, if you'd just had your world ripped apart, is a package of answers wrapped neatly in a bow going to assuage your anguish or make you feel loved? Not likely.

If Christianity were just about answers, then it's reached its pinnacle because you can Google for answers and get a gazillion and a half Web sites—including this one—ready to dispense Christian truth at a moment's notice.

But we're not the Blog of Christ. We're the Body. That Body wasn't created to go into the hellholes of Earth and hand out a tract, but to be the very arms of Jesus around a broken person who needs a shoulder to cry on more than she needs someone armed with a relentless set of answers.

This isn't to say that Tim's wrong. No, he's absolutely right. The problem arises in that answers must be accompanied by someone who cares enough to go the second mile. Postmodern people expect that everyone will claim to have answers, but they're more willing to listen to those bearers of truth who demonstrate compassion first and answers second—and for good reason: the rightness of what we believe was never intended by God to exist in a vacuum barren of human interaction. We're the Body of Christ (and not merely the Answers of Christ) by His wisdom, and we gut the Gospel if we think we can casually drop an answer bomb on hurting people and walk away. Yet how many thousands of times a day, especially on Sunday, does that happen in our churches, workplaces, and homes?

No one supports apologetics more than I do. The Bible clearly states that each one of us should know that of which we speak. Still, the fact remains: one of the primary reasons the Western world doesn't take the Church seriously (and even the Western Church doesn't take itself seriously) is we thought we could trade godly, compassionate relationships for easily dispensed solutions.

Any regular reader of Cerulean Sanctum must get tired of me preaching this, but the whole truth is that the Gospel transforms fully only in vital community. Ignore community long enough and the power of the Gospel to change lives is diminished. Not because the Gospel failed, but because our practical expression of it in community failed. This is wholly our problem and not anything that's wrong with the Gospel.

How so? If we're not willing to sit for hours on end with the grieving congregant who just buried his fiancée days before their wedding, what then should we expect of him when it is our turn to mourn? Our lesson to him is that it is easier to quote a few appropriate passages of Scripture than it is to give the one thing we value more than anything else today: ourselves. Over time, people learn that only short, well-rehearsed scripts can be expected and not a knock on a door that reveals an empathetic face ready to listen rather than dispense answers. Pass enough of this anti-Christian interpersonal neglect around within a worshiping community and I can guarantee we can make Sunday (and the rest of the week for that matter) as empty of God's compassion as the darkest portions of hell.

Answers matter. But in the end those answers have a proscribed destination: people. Why then are we so willing to ignore people or give them only a minute of our time on our way to whatever we deem in the moment to be more important than they are?

We will never have a greater mission than to be Christ to the people we encounter daily. If we can't make room for them, then no matter how much of the Bible we memorize, nor how many answers we're equipped to provide, our ministry will bear no fruit.