Dying to Self

The Saint Wore Negligee

Standard

I’ve long held a theory that while women are generally more sensitive to spiritual issues in their broader context, the nature of men to take bigger risks will mean that they will best women in seeking out the deeper aspects of the faith. That may not be a popular view with some, but it explains a great deal. That theory has also been the cornerstone of the advancement of Christianity since the age of the apostles.

I have to admit, though, that a brief survey of American Christianity bears a strikingly different picture. When I look at the composition of most churches, the sex on the leading edge of ministry is, more often than not, female.

Which sex predominates on Sunday mornings? Women.

Which sex predominates in small groups? Women.

Which sex predominates in non-leadership roles of ministry (which comprise the largest total numbers of participants)? Women.

Which sex reads Christian material in order to grow their spiritual lives? Women.

Which sex drives the spiritual life of the average home? Women.

This concerns me because a quick overview of the hotspots of revival around the globe always reveals the same truth: men are at the forefront.

So what’s going on here in America?

I have a few theories on this:

1. Men choose money over ministry. This has led to an abdication of the masculine role of leadership on spiritual matters. It’s not that Christian men aren’t truly Christian or fail to hold a Christian belief system. It’s just that Christianity occupies a secondary station in a man’s life. American Evangelicalism continues to hold out a standard of the male as breadwinner (and preferably sole breadwinner) that forces men to choose which role they will more ably fill with their increasingly limited time, breadwinner or spiritual leader. Men aren’t stupid; they chose what was presented to them as the best option by those held up as leaders within the Faith. Being a captain of industry who mouths Christian platitudes plays better than struggling to make ends meet while being faithful to the demands of true discipleship.

2. Women have encouraged #1, whether they realize it or not. The demands of cultural conformity coupled with the (false) sense of security that predominates in the American Dream only amplifies men’s abdication of spiritual leadership. This has led Christian women to prefer men who are captains of industry over those who are poorer in the pocketbook yet richer in treasures in heaven. Having one’s kids in an expensive private Christian school looks a whole lot better on paper than sending little Joey or Janie to the wreck they call public school, especially when that public school is vilified from the pulpit each Sunday.

3. The pursuit of #1 has enabled/forced women to pick up the spiritual slack. With men pursuing the American Dream, women have been freed in some respects to bolster their spiritual lives, even if this comes at the expense of men’s overall spiritual health. However, while some women gladly take up the mantle of leadership, a few are resentful that their men have laid it down for them to carry (though, in most cases, those wives fail to understand the hidden forces bending men toward that abdication).

4. The Church no longer preaches godly rewards for faithfulness that in the past appealed to the souls of men. While the prosperity gospel has some traction in some sectors of the American Church, men, in general, are engaging in self-examination that finds them asking where the real reward is. Work is not always its own reward, nor is the Church embodying any example of the rewards of faithfulness outside of reinforcing the American Dream. In time, this lack leads to spiritual malaise in men. They end up, more often than not, merely going through the spiritual motions, either to please the Church or to satisfy their wives.

5. Because Church leaders have not gone deeper, they are unable to lead other men to that deeper place. Shallowness breeds shallowness. While men may be capable of great depths of faith, more often than not those depths are achieved through spiritual heroes who have gone on before to mark the way. Modern Evangelicalism is a vast spiritual wasteland devoid of true spiritual adventurers. Rather than holding up as examples those men who have made it to “the third heaven,” Evangelicalism holds up for emulation those men who have made it to the corner office or the boardroom. Much of the blame here lies with today’s American Evangelical leaders, men who are a mile wide and an inch deep. The end result? Far too many men in America are tasting what is being held out as the ne plus ultra of the Christian life and are asking, “Is this it?”

The upshot of all this is that the bastions of faith in the country are the women. Satin and bows...and spiritual headship?The real saints in America 2008 wear negligee.

Some people seem perfectly fine with this. In fact, if you polled a lot of pastors in Evangelical churches, you’d find that most of them think everything’s just fine and dandy. Actually, George Barna’s already done that polling. Sure enough, he’s found that few male leaders in the Church today are alarmed that men have largely handed over the reins of spiritual leadership in church and household to the ladies.

Something has to give for the proper order to be restored.

In the last few weeks, I’ve been engaging the readers of a few other blogs that have linked to my posts on these issues of money, ministry, work, and economics. What I’m finding is a total inability to question the status quo on these issues and to ask what the true Christian response might be. We have become so fused to our way of living that even if that way of living cannot be reconciled with genuine discipleship, we’ll forgo the discipleship before we give up the lifestyle. How that’s going to play before God is beyond me.

I’m convinced that the only way the Church in America is going to catch blaze like the church in the Third World is if we radically rethink every part of how we live. This may seem like the same chronic drum I’ve been beating for years on this blog, but unless we change, we will definitely become irrelevant. Our cultural conditioning will extinguish our lampstand and God will remove that lampstand to whatever place is willing to keep it ablaze. That removal may already be in process.

Here’s 10 questions I ask you:

  • How do we break this pattern of living that reinforces the five issues I raise above?
  • What does a truly countercultural Christianity in America 2008 look like?
  • What can we do to not only break the hold our jobs have on our spiritual lives, but replace our current ideas of employment with genuinely Christian models?
  • What would those models of work look like when practically enabled?
  • What do you believe are the rewards for faithfulness that we are failing to emphasize in our churches today, rewards that appeal to men as much as to women?
  • What must we do to encourage our leadership to go deeper?
  • How does the average American Evangelical man take back his proper position as spiritual leader?
  • What tools is that man lacking that he will need to be all God intended?
  • How do we sharpen those tools?
  • What is the first step toward making these changes?

Thanks for your input. Have a blessed weekend.

4,212

Standard

Church Forward is a new blog I’ve added to my reading list. A few days ago, that site published the results of a study that showed the attitudes of the unchurched to evangelism. All the stats are important (please consider them carefully), but one stood out in particular:

78% of the unchurched agree that “if someone wanted to tell me what he or she believed about Christianity, I would be willing to listen.

That’s an astonishing figure. Part of me wonders if the survey question was understood. Honestly. Because that figure is amazingly high.

Last week I wrote about a subset of people who seem to be completely aspiritual. They may be the missing 22 percent. I suspect that they are the group that is actually growing in number.

If so, then our window of opportunity on that 78 percent is as wide open as it will ever be.

Let’s put this in perspective. In the amount of time it takes to watch an episode of Dancing with the Stars, American Idol, 24, or Lost, 6,319 people worldwide will have died {source}.

The general consensus is that about a third of the world’s population is “Christian,” a loose definition that includes not only the genuinely born again, Exit, stage left...but also cult members who ascribe to deviant forms of Christian belief and people who may mentally assent to Christian morality. In other words, that one-third is quite generous.

Yet even if we assume that loosedefinition, applying the basic truths of mankind’s eternal destiny, of those 6,319 people, 4,212 are doomed to an eternity of torment in the flames of hell. 4,212. Every hour. Every day.

This is not a pain that goes away. No narcotic exists to extinguish that agony once it’s administered.

Leonard Ravenhill, the great British revivalist, put it this way in a true story:

Charlie Peace was a criminal. Laws of God or man curbed him not. Finally the law caught up with him, and he was condemned to death. On the fatal morning in Armley Jail, Leeds, England, he was taken on the death-walk. Before him went the prison chaplain, routinely and sleepily reading some Bible verses. The criminal touched the preacher and asked what he was reading. “The Consolations of Religion,” was the replay. Charlie Peace was shocked at the way he professionally read about hell. Could a man be so unmoved under the very shadow of the scaffold as to lead a fellow-human there and yet, dry-eyed, read of a pit that has no bottom into which this fellow must fall? Could this preacher believe the words that there is an eternal fire that never consumes its victims, and yet slide over the phrase with a tremor? Is a man human at all who can say with no tears, “You will be eternally dying and yet never know the relief that death brings”? All this was too much for Charlie Peace. So he preached. Listen to his on-the-eve-of-hell sermon:

“Sir,” addressing the preacher, “if I believed what you and the church of God say that you believe, even if England were covered with broken glass from coast to coast, I would walk over it, if need be, on hands and knees and think it worthwhile living, just to save one soul from an eternal hell like that!

Hang around the Godblogosphere long enough and you’ll see plenty of fawning posts about the TV shows I mentioned above. Or about some lame movie. Or about some album by some derivative band. You’ll read plenty of talk about stuff that that will burn when the fire comes, but you’ll read next to nothing about what happens to the lost when that same fire comes for them.

If the American Church’s concern for the lost people of the world could be summed up in one phrase, I suspect that phrase would be “Let ’em burn!”

If we cared, we’d live differently. But we don’t really care, do we?

For most of us, the limit of our caring extends to the walls of our home and no further. A few of us may say we care about others beyond those walls, but our caring never gets around to asking another person, “Where do you stand with Jesus?”

I don’t like what our American culture has done to me. In fact, I despise it. Because when I look deep into my own soul, I see a nearly total lack of caring about the eternal state of other people. I may say I care, but I don’t care enough to make the changes needed to my life to ensure I’m living for Jesus. And living for Jesus means that I no longer live for myself.

The power of the American lie casts a spell over us, doesn’t it? That lie takes Christ off the throne and enthrones that pretender, self. It’s the lie of “God wants you happy!” instead of the truth that God wants you obedient to the Lordship of Jesus Christ.

Now we may say that we’re sold out to Christ, but we aren’t. We lie to ourselves and keep playing the happy card, that selfish, devil-filled mantra of self-fulfillment no matter at whose expense that happiness comes.

Because when we get right down to it, we’re so preoccupied with self-fulfillment that we’re willing to gamble the lives of two out of every three people to ensure it, 4,212 people each hour, so that we can keep on living for whatever pleases us, even if that pleasurable pursuit wracks the heart of God.

Can we imagine having to apologize to each person bound for hell who had the opportunity to hear the Gospel from our lips, but we were too busy caring about what Jack Bauer would do next?

Well, can we?

We should count ourselves lucky if we merit the tiniest cot in the broom closet of the mansion Christ is building in glory.

Living Lighter, Living Larger

Standard

Nope. No room for God here...I spent most of this week discarding.

Most of what got tossed went to the recycling center. Other items will be sold off. I don’t like to see my excess wind up in a landfill just because I couldn’t control how much I consume. Driving past the county dump this afternoon, it seemed to me to be a hundred feet higher. Though I do my best not to contribute to the altitude, I can’t escape that at least a few of those towering inches are indeed mine.

The number of bags of shredded files totaled five. I can probably shred another ten bagfuls. My parents’ lives comprised much of those confetti strips of paper. They’ve been gone nearly seven years now. Old mortgage papers, phone numbers for people who have moved on, medical receipts. Two lives in paper.

Our house resembles a bomb blast as we make room. Items that once held precious memories today prove that magic drains out in time. The present asserts itself, while the future bears down with the weight of uncertainty.

The Lord’s been speaking to my heart this week. He says I need to live lighter. With each discarded item, each memory that tumbles from my hand, each dream I let go, I know I’m one step closer to heaven.

I don’t think that word’s just for me, though.

I’ve lost nearly 30 pounds on the low-glycemic diet I’ve been following. It could have been more, but 30 was enough. I added a few off-limits items and my weight has stabilized. Of all the effects of this weight loss, none compares with the energy I’ve rediscovered.

There’s a lesson for us in that.

Whenever I consider the American Church’s state, I can’t help but think that much of our problem stems, not from the weight of glory, but from the burden of worldliness. Our inability to resist the weight of the world has rendered us fat and lazy, shackled to things, and far from the heart of God.

A simple gut check here: we don’t do the things Christ asks of us because if we did, we’d have to lose our lives. We’d have to step away from the TV, turn off the iPod, stop planning the vacation in Cancun, and get serious about the work of the Lord. We’d have to stop wondering how to insure all the debris we lay claim to and start investing in the Kingdom.

But you see, we can’t, can we? All that stuff means too much to us.

I hear so many people talking about seeking after God for a vision for their lives. To most of those people, I would say, “Give up now.”

Why? Because not a square inch exists in their souls for whatever vision God would wish to give them. All the empty places reserved for the Lord are filled with the world’s accumulated trappings. That stops 99 percent of Christians in the West dead, right there. They’ll never be effective for the Kingdom because they can’t give it all up and live lighter.

When God sent manna, He warned the people not to store it because He wants His people to live lighter.

When the days grow dim, Jesus warns us not to go back for our coat when it is time to move because He wants us to live lighter.

The desire to hold onto the world’s symbols of success destroys Christians. Destroys. The number of people who put their hands to the plow and look back must be in the millions. And each one of those millions grieves the heart of God. When I think of all those hopeful servants who never achieved God’s best for them because, like the monkey who grabbed the coconut in the trap, they couldn’t let go of their stuff and subsequently saw their ministry potential nullified…well, it breaks my heart.

At one point in my life, nearly everything I owned fit into my Honda Civic hatchback. But time, a little success, marriage, and children all contribute to this upward parabolic curve of accumulation that inevitably leads to divided loyalties. And most people fail to question that division. They’ll call their wealth “God’s blessing,” yet for most people that “blessing” only leads to a soul loaded down with perishables. Instead of storing up treasure for heaven, we’re hoarding the wealth of the flesh and watching our potential for the Kingdom wither and die.

The American Dream undoes most of us. On paper, it reads great. But the reality only leads to bloat and uselessness. And if we think God’s going to use us mightily for the Kingdom when we’re stuffed to the gills with the world’s excess, then we’re the most deceived people on the face of the planet.

If we want our lives to reflect the transformation from self-centered louts into the glorious image of Christ, then we have a choice don’t we? And the amazing thing about that choice is that even if we chose wrong a long time ago, the Lord will give us another chance to choose right. He wants us to lose the world’s flab, even if we gorged ourselves on it once.

Right now, it’s not too late. One day, it will be.

To live larger, we’ve got to live lighter.

What do you have to lose?