Dying to Self

Bizarro Church, and What We Can Do to Save American Christianity

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Bizarro SupermanI grew up in an age of comic book superheroes. Spider-Man debuted just months before I was born, and as a child, I endlessly watched the old George Reeves Superman TV show.

About four years before my own debut, at a point that can only be considered a creative nadir, the writers of the Superman comic came up with an anti-Superman called Bizarro. His powers were the opposites of most of Superman’s, and though he was none too bright,  he gave the Man of Steel fits.

Bizarro hailed from a square planet, Bizarro World. Later, as is wont in comic books, publisher DC kept enhancing Bizarro World, adding Bizarro copies of favorite DC denizens Batman and Wonder Woman.

To me, there’s nothing more idiotic in comics than the whole Bizarro idea (well, if you ignore all the desperate comic book universe reboots and their inane explanations).

Sometimes, I feel like I’m trapped in Bizarro Church.

At the beginning of 2012, I wrote about the organic/house church movement and my frustrations with even finding an existing church in that mode in my area, much less one that seemed vibrant and growing (“Is the Organic House Church a Myth?“). That post eventually generated 100+ comments, as many shared my frustration or felt they needed to comment on my rightness or wrongness.

Unlike some bloggers, I don’t close my comments after a period of time. You can comment on a post I wrote a decade ago, if you wish. Over this past weekend, a reader commented on that older post that he shared my frustrations with the oddities and rarity of the organic/house church.

Now let’s discuss the brouhaha that erupted by bringing in the “Gentlemen.”

When the post first came out in January 2012, Gentleman A commented on it and seemed to be an organic church leader. I’m not sure how, but the sudden, recent activity on that post’s comments by that reader commenting sucked in Gentleman B, who, out of nowhere, wrote a screed against Gentleman A, claiming A was some hellraiser bent on destroying the real organic church and its leaders. This was followed by Gentleman C, who often decloaks from nowhere and comments. In this case, Gentleman C wrote to the reader and repeated the annoyingly frustrating organic church habit of sharing how organic church is thriving like crazy in every place where the reader (blog owner included) does not live. Later, Gentleman D, also out of nowhere, wrote me a personal email, noting how Gentleman A is slandering him all over the Web. Evidently, Gentleman D was tipped off to the presence of the seemingly innocuous comments of Gentleman A because of what Gentleman B wrote. And, with a little research, it seems Gentleman D and Gentleman B are connected through the same organic church organization.

In short, a few organic church “leaders” swarmed in and started accusing each other or making the usual unhelpful comments.

Adding to this, my post on Christian singles from a few years ago (“The Christian Singles Mess“) saw a reader comment turn into a diatribe against younger Christian men and their inability to grow up, make good money, and become a proper husband for the commenter.

I’ve been a Christian going on four decades, and I’ll tell you honestly that sometimes I just want to chuck the whole enterprise. And I’m not talking about my blog.

How did the Church in this country get to be such a mess? From the Bizarro behavior associated with this organic/house church fiasco to the Bizarro “everyone else is a loser but me” kind of commentary, it all seems so idiotic as to strain credulity. You begin despairing that whatever it is that Jesus started, we’re not anywhere close to that organization in any way, shape, or form. We instead seem to be practicing a Bizarro form of church that exemplifies everything that is wrong in the world.

Worse, when Bizarro Church grabs the spotlight, immediately we get its apologists, who claim that it’s impossible for sinners to run a decent, sensical church—an idea I reject in toto.

How is it that so few people can see through all this obfuscating garbage? Why is it that no one seems to take basic, commonsense Christianity to heart?

How do we fix this Bizarro Church behavior and get back to the main and the plain?

1. Folks, we are dust. So is everyone else. And dust shouldn’t have such a high opinion of itself.

Here is what Jesus said:

“Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee, standing by himself, prayed thus: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I get.’ But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’ I tell you, this man went down to his house justified, rather than the other. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.”
—Luke 18:10-14 ESV

I am sick to death of the lack of humility everywhere I look in the Church. If we don’t repent of our pride, we are wasting our time being the Church, because we won’t be, no matter how much we tell ourselves we are.

2. We think we have a handle on life. We don’t. Time to grow up and experience a reality check.

Here is what Jesus observed:

And Jesus went throughout all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom and healing every disease and every affliction. When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.
—Matthew 9:35-36 ESV

I will repeat what I have said often elsewhere on this blog: Most people are just trying to get by. Do we have compassion on them? They may get by in a sinful, stupid way, but they are trying to get from Point A to Point B in any way they think is possible. What stupid things are you and I doing to get by? Because I can promise you that we are sheep too.

3. We say the harshest things to and about each other. We should stop. Now.

Here is what Jesus said:

“You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not murder; and whoever murders will be liable to judgment.’ But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment; whoever insults his brother will be liable to the council; and whoever says, ‘You fool!’ will be liable to the hell of fire. So if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go. First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift. Come to terms quickly with your accuser while you are going with him to court, lest your accuser hand you over to the judge, and the judge to the guard, and you be put in prison. Truly, I say to you, you will never get out until you have paid the last penny.
—Matthew 5:21-26 ESV

Later in the Scriptures we are told that Christians are ambassadors who have been blessed with the ministry of reconciliation. Are we acting that way? Is reconciliation at the heart of what we do as believers? If not, why not?

4. What we learned about Christian practice as children seems to be forgotten in our “maturity.” That’s an enormous loss.

Here is what Jesus said:

“Truly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it.”
—Mark 10:15 ESV

Also:

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

Really, how hard is it to ask oneself before any interaction with others, Is this how I would want to be treated? I mean, didn’t all of us learn The Golden Rule when we were 3 or 4 years old, even if we never stepped foot into a church? If so, how is it that we treat others so atrociously?

5. Whatever it is that is wrong with someone else, what is wrong with you and me is probably bigger. How can this not sober us?

Here is how Jesus said it:

“Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Brother, let me take out the speck that is in your eye,’ when you yourself do not see the log that is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take out the speck that is in your brother’s eye.”
—Luke 6:41-42 ESV

Nothing amazes me more—or frustrates more—than people who read their Bible every single day without a miss and yet they’ve never incorporated into their lives the most well-known and obvious passages. If that’s the case, stop with dutiful Bible study, because it’s not penetrating that cold, dead heart, and we’re just wasting our time unless the Holy Spirit gets ahold of us and we repent.

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I’m sickened by all this immaturity. Really. None of us is listening to what the Spirit is saying to the American Church. We are all self-righteous prigs, and we seem satisfied with our state.

Stop it.

Bizarro Church sucks. Period. And yet it seems to be what we’re perpetrating on the world.

Some are searching the skies for Superman to appear and fix everything. Here’s a clue: You and I are Superman. But only if we stop living in this Bizarro World of our own making and start living the way Jesus can empower us to.

The Cardiovocal Atheist

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Vocal atheist returns less than 11,000 results, says Google, but I ran across it at least three times in items I read last week. In contrast, vocal Christian returns 127,000 Google results.

Funny thing is, atheism doesn’t start with what is voiced with the mouth. I guess Google, fount of all theological wisdom it might be, got this right.

Psalm 14:1 begins like a punch to the solar plexus:

The fool says in his heart, There is no God.

I did a bad thing there in that quote. I left out the ESV’s quotation marks around what the fool said. Instead, I went more for the formatting style of an internal thought. You see inner monologue formatted that way in novels. Sometimes, it’s even written like this:

The fool says in his heart, There is no God.

That second style seems even more ominous than the first. Almost like a shout. Or the whispered thoughts of the heroine in the horror flick who is walking the “empty” house, and we hear her inner trepidations–and all the while we know the deranged killer is right behind her.Inner wasteland

Regardless, what is said in Psalm 14:1 is internal only. It reverberates inside the heart. Call it cardiovocal. A resonate dissonance that ends up shattering the whole man, like some cheap crystal facing Ella Fitzgerald on Memorex.

One gets the sense that it’s a ruminated internal saying, too, a cardiovocalization people repeat over and over as if looped, a repeating sample people dance to.

I think if you could hear the cardiovocalizations of the average person, you would hear There is no God loud and clear. A person doesn’t have to say it with his or her lips because it never stops echoing in the chambers of the heart.

Which is why I think that Alister McGrath, the noted theologian, is wrong in his The Twilight of Atheism. There is no God is the mantra of atheism, and it is being cardiovocalized by millions, if not billions. It is not a saying fading into twilight but a reality expressed nonstop in the world today. Even if we do not hear people saying it with their lips, we see it practiced ad nauseam. People living as if there were no God. Some mantra must be driving that reality.

While the silent cardiovocalizations of some people do come out in practice or in veiled writings, the nature of such inner monologue is to be hidden. You won’t get a judge who claims to be a moral person yet who makes immoral judgments admit that There is no God drives his decisions. Or the pastor who can’t stop checking out the ladies. Or the soccer mom who lives solely to buy more stuff.

Funny, though I’ve learned a lot in 50 years, one of the most important lessons goes back to my childhood and a children’s story. In that story, it says, What is essential is invisible to the eye.

Might I substitute ear for eye, in this case? Because that interior cry of atheism is rampant. It is essential to understand its prevalence, what it means, and what its ramifications are.

Christians are not immune to cardiovocalized atheism, which should sober us. Every day, I read material written by supposedly devout Christians who deny the gifts of the Spirit, mock the supernatural, make peace with the things Christ gave His very life to destroy, and craft endless mitigations of truth, which masquerade as “enlightened” spiritual treatises and “doctrinally pure” systematic theologies. In short, there is no difference between such people and atheists. The cardiovocalizations are the same. There is no God is at the core.

Sounds like a conflict, right? How can believers in Jesus have a heart that says There is no God?

Simple. They decide that they don’t like what the real God is saying and substitute a god of their own creation. If that’s not a denial of God, then what is? There might be a god, but there is no God.

No person is immune. What is your heart silently saying?

If Christians don’t understand this broken message of the heart, then we will not understand why people appear OK on the outside, yet the world keeps moving forward in the wrong direction. We will not understand motivations that seem to clash with spoken intentions. We will assume everything is fine with the people we encounter, yet inside they are screaming something that should appall us.

Irrelevant Relevance

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Over at World Magazine, Anthony Bradley has generated some brouhaha over his piece “The ‘New Legalism.’” Up-to-date Cerulean Sanctum readers will note Bradley’s article reads like a rehash of my recent “Kids, Systems, and Success (A Response to Brant Hansen’s ‘Your Kids Don’t Need Your Stupid Success Track’)” and its follow-up, “Radical for Jesus: What Does That Look Like in America?”

Church ruinsThe Bradley article is good and got trackbacked extensively. As always, read the whole thing. I do think, though, that he puts too fine a point on it by centering the angst he notes in the lives of young people alone. As I’ve noted elsewhere, my peers are laboring under that burden of relevance as much as anyone, and perhaps more. We’re the ones who are trying to be faithful to the mission of God…while we try to get back into the workforce after being pink slipped for being “old,” caring for increasingly decrepit parents kept alive by modern medicine, dealing with our own health failings, and still raising children.

Bradley mentions the self-pummeling meted out by our adoption of the words missional and radical. I want to add a third: relevant.

Google relevant church sometime. The pages stretch on forever.

As for the guts of the three links above, all of it comes down to relevance. In light of this, I don’t believe that Bradley’s diagnosis is right. Young people are not leaving the Church because they are being challenged too strongly to live a radical life. They’re leaving because the challenge is posed by a Church willing to challenge but unable to help achieve the goal. And in those cases where a local church is NOT challenging people, it’s also NOT providing answers to the most pressing challenges of life.

For all our talk of relevance, the fact remains: Our churches are not helping us meet the relevant challenges of the times.

And people are NOT going to hang around to hear messages about a watered-down salvation that can save mostly from a problem that doesn’t seem to be the most pressing problem they face. Or the third most-pressing problem. Or even the tenth.

Yes, Jesus Christ came to save sinners from their sin. Sin still matters. It’s the problem that must be dealt with before any other problem gets addressed.

But for all our talk of relevance, what is the solution from most churches for dealing with life once one has dealt with the problem of sin?

Hmm.

Your spouse lost a job in a corporate downsizing and has been out of work for eight months. Your bank account has taken a major hit, and you’re starting to eat into your kids’ college funds. Your teenage daughter was diagnosed with full-blown depression, and the meds she’s on do weird things to her personality, which make you wonder which is worse, the cure or the disease. Your mother is in an extended care home and has maxed out her benefits. You don’t know how you’ll pay for her care, and you sit there on Sunday morning wondering what will happen when you have to bring her to live with you in the midst of all the rest of this.

Meanwhile, they found a heart murmur in you that may require a valve replacement and you don’t have the insurance coverage because it was on your now-unemployed spouse’s policy. The prices at the grocery store keep going up. The cost of repairing the car you depend on keeps going up. The cost of repairing you keeps going up. You may have to change your own job just to keep up and also look into a master’s program because everyone wants a master’s degree, and that costs so much in dollars and time and…

And the preacher is telling you you must be radical or else you’ll be the lukewarm person spat out of the Lord’s mouth.

In the midst of all that, what does relevant mean?  I don’t think the contemporary Church in the West has any idea.

If we want to know why people are looking elsewhere, the answer is simple. For all their talk of relevance, our churches are not addressing the struggles of most people today. And if people can’t find answers to life’s issues in Church, they will find someplace else that will give them answers, even if those “answers” are lies.

In the wake of the death of Pastor Rick Warren’s son due to suicide brought on by mental illness, Christians talked about mental illness for a  few weeks. While that’s better than nothing, I’d like to see what the lasting fruit of that discussion will be on a practical level within our churches.

Because THAT is relevant.

But I’m not holding my breath.

You see, I’ve been waiting for a decade for someone in the Church with some level of clout to speak out on the employment issues facing us in America. Because if you want relevance there is nothing more relevant than talking like adults about the one issue that makes or breaks more people in this country on a day to day basis. And yet for how dominating the issue of work is in the lives of average Americans, I have yet to see or hear anything from a national-level Christian leader talking about our work lives and the sheer amount of time we devote to that one aspect of daily living.

My great fear for the Church in America is an increasing drift into total and complete disconnection from daily reality. Yet that is what I’m seeing.

Most of the relevance I hear about is irrelevant. It has little to do with real people and real lives.

Hey, massively relevant hipster church, you want to help couples with their sex lives? Great. Help dad find a better job. That’ll do more for mom and dad’s sex life than anything else. Far more then sexy readings of Song of Solomon.

You want to keep teenagers? Get them deep with Jesus and stop trying to outduel the world on trendiness. And start addressing the mental illness rampant in young people today.

You want dad to come to your men’s event? Find a practical way for him to deal with the longterm care of his aging parents.

And no. No one said any of this will be easy.

There will be people who say all this is outside the bounds of what the Church is supposed to be about. I contend that unless the Church stops being an ostrich with its head in the sand on issues like these, all the talk of relevance will stay talk and functionally remain irrelevant.