Boldness

Fuzzy Church

Standard

The times we live in are growing increasingly difficult for people to navigate. It’s hard to  ignore the cultural and societal breakdown. The wicked seem to flourish, and the righteous increasingly find it tougher to cope in a world where truth is called a lie and love is considered hate.

The anger in this country runs at a fever pitch, and as Christians, who claim to have citizenship in a different world, the tendency to want to fight back becomes overwhelming. Don’t we have rights? Don’t we have a mandate to right wrongs? Are we not Americans, too?

With so many conflicting voices out there, sorting through the noise takes concentration. It demands focus, a singleminded devotion to what is core—especially core to Christianity.

For that reason, I want to state the obvious, because with all the shrill voices we hear daily, what is obvious is proving harder to remember.

So here is the obvious:

Jesus Christ is Lord. Go and make disciples of all nations.

And to that I must add this one truth that we must also never forget:

Any other mission is a distraction.

Do we understand this? I don’t think we do. When I look at the American Church today, it looks fuzzy around the edges, out of focus, blurred. Our goals are nebulous. We’re pulled in a million directions, with each of us dedicated to some pet ministry project that doesn’t intersect any other ministry project. In addition, we daily add some other front to the culture war. We’re already fighting this agenda and that, yet each day another agenda from some godless group crops up and we have to open a new war front.

Countless Christians fight the cultural, political, and societal wars. It used to be that just raising awareness of some new sinful agenda was enough, but when that didn’t work, counterattacks had to be devised. People were encouraged to join the cause. Church gone fuzzyFires were stoked in the faithful. Write and email our congressman; demand he or she take action. Protest. Get on the picket lines. Let the world see our faithfulness by how hard we fight godless agendas. And when that fails to work, let’s get angry. Our foes are angry, so why not show them we can be even nastier. If they fight with a lit torch, then we counter with a flamethrower! They get their lawyers, but we get twice as many! Sue! File lawsuits!  Shout, yell, scream! And when that doesn’t work, just do it longer and louder! Keep raising the stakes! If they want martyrs, then martyrs they shall have! Let the blood run in the streets if it has to, but the cause of Christ must be established in America, come hell or high water! And if it takes bashing a few heads to get there, then let the bashing commence!

Somewhere, amid all that seething Christian anger and frustration, buried by using the mechanisms of the world to fight the world, two vital truths at the core of everything we are to be about as Christians get lost:

Jesus Christ is Lord. Go and make disciples of all nations.

It seems to me that we Christians don’t seem to be learning that it’s not by might nor by power but by God’s Spirit. (I think God said that, so it must be trustworthy.)

The Church in America has gone off message. Fuzziness becomes inevitable. We’re not effective at stemming the tides of all these social, political, and cultural dysfunctions we want to see corrected because we’re trying to fix them apart from the core of what we are about:

Jesus Christ is Lord. Go and make disciples of all nations.

Many Christians talk about taking dominion, but the only way that dominion comes about is by meeting the enemy’s footsoldiers and converting them into Christians. If the opposing army is now on your side, you’ve won the war.

It’s so simple.

But instead of focusing on Jesus while we lead people to Him and disciple them into maturity, we Christians go all fuzzy. We dilute our efforts and our focus by going after agendas, many of them longtime agendas against which we have made little progress despite millions of hours devoted to fighting them.

What would happen if we took all the effort devoted to fighting all these fronts and devoted it to active evangelism instead? What would be gained by millions of hours of dedicated evangelism and training up new believers into Christian maturity?

I ask those questions because our country has never experienced less evangelism and discipling to maturity than in these times. Statistics show that fewer Americans attend church and have never been less interested in the Christian message than today. Not only have we lost the culture wars because we focused on them to the detriment of our core calling, but by jumping on so many bandwagons that are NOT core, the pews in our churches emptied faster than in any time in our country’s history.

Want to end abortion?

Want to stop the homosexual agenda?

Want to restore ethics to business?

Want to fight indecency all around us?

Want to restore the principles that made America a great nation?

Want to see the Church grow and lift Jesus up?

There is only one answer:

Jesus Christ is Lord. Go and make disciples of all nations.

Business, America, and the Courage to Do What Is Right

Standard

One major lesson learned from the economic meltdown is that far too many people in American business today are morally bankrupt. And it seems the higher up you go in the corporate org chart, the more malfeasance one finds. The post-Enron push made by companies to hire more ethical workers has been shown for the farce it is. We continue to hire and promote foxes for hen-house guard duty.

With allegations of fraud dogging Goldman Sachs, and with further indictments and allegations (thankfully) coming to others behind this debacle, the question is: Are we going to learn anything about the bankruptcy of the American soul from this?

I want to pass along a story on CNN written by Bob Greene. It details a transaction that goes on many thousands of times in this country each day, though this transaction has a slight, but important, twist. Greene tells of his encounter with Mark Dalton, the owner of a mom-and-pop bookstore, after purchasing a used book online:

In 2008, I found a book I was looking for on that Amazon marketplace, and submitted an order. The price was more than reasonable: $6.95 for the used hardcover. Used books are not shipped by Amazon itself, but by the local booksellers.

A week or so after I placed the order, the package arrived, from High View Books in Smithfield, Rhode Island. The book seemed to be in good shape. I was pleased.

But with it was a personal letter to me. It said:

“Thank your for your recent book order. I have enclosed a check to you for $2.95. The reason for this is that this book is only in ‘Very Good’ condition, while I mistakenly described it as being in ‘Near Fine’ condition in my listing. Please accept my apologies for the error. (Also, please note, the soiling that you see on the dust jacket is actually on the Mylar and not the dust jacket itself.)”

[Dalton] wrote that he hoped his apology and the refund were satisfactory. Sure enough, tucked into the book was a check made out to me, for $2.95.

Greene goes on to mention that the condition issue was beyond his ability to discern. Instead, he was surprised that anyone would go to the lengths Dalton did to ensure that the sale was completely up and up, especially for an item with such a small price tag.

As they say, read the whole thing (“A $2.95 Lesson for Wall Street“).

One of these days the business world is going to wake up to the reality of genuine customer service. But beyond that, I hope they finally discover whatever moral compass the owner of High View Books possesses.

The allure of money in our society, that “get rich quick by any means necessary” mentality that permeates our culture, may be only one of our many vices, but it certainly is the root of great evil. My brother had a CAT scan done recently and got a $4,000 bill for the procedure. That’s insanity for what amounts to a glorified x-ray, but I’m sure it reflects a “gotta get my cut” reality from a dozen different sources who stand to profit from that scan.

I don’t know about you, but I find that kind of pile-on mentality wicked. Yet it’s the norm anymore in America. It’s why an airplane ticket is more fees and taxes than payment for time spent in the plane traveling. It’s why gas prices are so high, why it costs so much to educate our kids in public schools, and why the answer to everything governmental seems to be a tax hike. It’s the Great Gouge. We’ve reached an era when sick people avoid the doctor not because of the fear of a cancer diagnosis but of bankruptcy!

But in a bookstore in Rhode Island, a man realized a $6.95 used book may not have been in the condition he described, so he refunded the purchaser $2.95.

In contrast, on Wall Street we have morally bereft con men who knowingly sold worthless securities because they could get rich, even if their jackpot ruined other people.

I say all this because The Wall Street Journal once featured an article that exposed the religious backgrounds of all the major players in the Enron,  WorldCom, and other business scandals of the early 2000s. They found that almost all the people with the dirtiest hands were pillars of their churches.

I don’t know anything about the religious beliefs of the owner of the bookstore in Greene’s story. But I know that he had far more Christian character than church elder Ken Lay of Enron infamy.

The little things matter folks. There’s courage in sending back $2.95. God not only looks at our weights and measures, but He knows what we do in secret.

As Christians, do we conduct our daily business with God in mind? When there’s money to be made, do we join the pile-on, even if it ends up hurting people? Would we have sent back $2.95 because the book we sold was a fraction less perfect than we had described?

Honestly, if America wants to get back to greatness, a good first step would be for American businesses to fire the morally bankrupt (no matter how high up the org chart) and hire godly men and women who realize that the God they serve is always watching.

In ending, I want to help reward the courage to send a $2.95 refund. While I could not find an online link to them directly, I did find contact info and a means to order books directly from High View Books through Biblio. So the next time you want to buy a book, consider supporting High View Books. And let’s send a message that character still counts.

Asking the Radical Questions

Standard

Please watch these video excerpts from a Francis Chan message:

I love Chan’s heart. He’s one of the few contemporary preachers with national reach who is asking the hard, radical questions that contemporary Christians must ask. He seems to have a better understanding of what it means to be human, to feel out of place in the institutional church, to read the Bible and then wonder why our expression of it fails so poorly to truly reflect it.

For people who have been Christians for more than a few years, shaking off the “system” of Christianity that we have erected is mind-bogglingly hard. Gaining that fresh perspective on the Scriptures and looking at them “sideways” doesn’t come easily—if it ever comes at all. We are more likely to simply kowtow to whatever our denominational flavor says and never truly ask the radical questions.

We throw around the word countercultural when it comes to the Church and the world, but the older I get, the more I find that the real counterculture is swimming against the tide of Church systems erected by well-intentioned believers who saw through a glass darkly and missed the real heart of the Gospel.

But that truly Christian counterculture is awakening. It makes my heart glad to see that some people get it, even if most of us still don’t.

My hope for all Christians, especially the ossified ones that predominate in the West, is that we will ask the kind of tough questions people like Francis Chan are asking. And more than anything else, I pray that we are prepared to do what it takes to provide answers, even if those answers painfully tear down idols in our churches, our culture, and our own lives.