Grace

A Church That Makes a Practical Difference

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My wife comes from an Evangelical Friends background, a splinter group of the Quakers. Her experience was always with the more doctrinally solid and conservative part and less with the group known for social action and a more liberal theology.

But curiosity is a powerful lure, and early in our marriage we attended an “inner light” Quaker service just to see what it was like.

For about an hour, people sat quietly, communing with God, listening. From time to time the silence would be broken by someone who felt led of God to share  a spiritual insight. Also, people would stand and request prayer for various issues or needs, some of which were quite personal and sad. The group would then pray for them.

Say what you will about this more liberal sect of Quakerism, but I was struck by the simple truth that time was given for people to share real needs.

I know far too many Evangelical Christians whose churches are not aware of their suffering. Creating a safe place for sharing those needs and getting them addressed in prayer and with practical action would seem like a lifeblood activity of any local church. Why then is it so rare?

People with needs are often afraid to confess those needs before the church for the following reasons:

Pride, as their invincibility and bootstrapping will be shaken

Fear, as someone will certainly question their faith

Disappointment, because they anticipate that nothing will be done because nothing ever is

Resignation, because they asked once before and were rebuffed

I once told an Internet friend who had been out of work for a long time and suffering greatly that he should stand up in the middle of his church service one day and just say, “I need a job. Can any of you help?” I suggested to another that he call a well-known parachurch ministry in his area that is always talking about how men must be the breadwinner in order to be good Christians and ask them, “What jobs do you have available for me to do so I can be the man you insist I must be? I can report to work tomorrow.”

The sad thing about both those cases is that neither the church nor the parachurch ministry would encourage that kind of confession. But if not the Church, then who?

Every church should have a time on Sunday morning to allow people to share their needs. I don’t care if it takes an hour to run through all those needs, the whole church needs to hear them. Because no one knows who sitting in those pews might have the immensely practical solution that confessor needs. And church leaders need to stop thinking that they alone can handle all these problems and start turning them back to the laity.

Even more, the church needs to take a Sunday now and then to have those people who confessed a need update the church on how that need did or didn’t get met. That allows the whole church to see what God is doing. And isn’t that exactly what a lot of us need to hear? Doesn’t it seem that sometimes the only places God is working are in some distant land? That’s not at all true, but the way we bury both needs and the rejoicing in met needs, we in the seats just don’t hear enough of either to think much of this Christianity thing we do. How sad!

None of this is rocket science. It takes no great leap or huge bankroll to make happen. Every church in America could start this Sunday. We just have to do it.

God, America, Meaning & Change

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After five months of gray skies—welcome to Ohio—you can’t blame a guy for being a little morose. A few years ago, I realized I suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder, and mid-February is the nadir of my experience.

So perhaps I’m coming at Rick Ianniello‘s Facebook post with a bit of a glum philosopher’s perspective, but I don’t think I’m alone. Maybe you’re a glum philosopher now too.

Rick wrote:

How is it possible for Christians to propagate the following.

“I really want to go to church this Sunday. Could you find one that won’t try to change me?”

I don’t think that request is impossible to understand. It may not seem logical, but sometimes the illogical still makes sense.

I believe that most people are burned out on change.

We Christians think we have cornered the market in change given that we talk about repentance and sanctification all the time. But  the truth is that our secular culture has more than one-upped us. The message we Americans drown in daily consists of little more than a perpetual torrent of change requests. They go something like this:

1. “Your _____________ is not good enough, so change.”

2. “You are too_____________, so change.”

Into #1, we can fit

kid’s schooling

house

wardrobe

career

hairstyle

car

spouse

Into #2, we can fit

fat

thin

moody

introverted

uneducated

unattractive

cash-poor

When it comes down to it, most of our daily existence as Americans consists of dancing to the pied piper of change. We live in a perpetual conga line of following some leader as he/she/it takes us to the promised land guaranteed by change.

Is it any wonder that some people are desperate to stop the unending jig their life has become?

Int0 this comes the Church. We put means of salvation into #1 and sinful into #2. Our message becomes “change or go to hell.”

Sounds like more of the same, doesn’t it?

This is not to say that the Gospel is wrong, only that perhaps we have to start leading with something other than the “you better change or else” portion of the message.

See, unless our reasons for change lead to something meaningful, constant change in and of itself only leads to despair. In truth, when we distill most of the message we Americans get from our culture, it seems impossible to avoid the belief that life has no meaning.

I’ve been a Christian for a few decades now, and my constant struggle, even to this day, is the search for meaning in life. I realize that most of that struggle is because I’m bombarded by meaninglessness. And most of that comes from the constant message of change.

I am continually convinced that we Christians in the America have got to start leading with love first. Because the Bible tells us that perfect love casts out fear, especially the fear of meaninglessness.

Yes, at some point we have to get to the part of the message that includes the change of repentance, but I believe most people are so burned by change that we have to give them something else before we can get to the change part of the message. This is not to say we bury change, only that we temper it. Pulling a bait and switch on people (“Okay, we gave you love, now you won’t get more love until you change”) isn’t going to work.

I know a couple where the wife is bipolar and the husband is a church worship leader. He’s been the rock. Just recently, he was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s.

In the life of that couple, what speaks most to the meaninglessness of life? Are we going to ask them for more change? Or can we offer better?

I look around and no longer wonder why people don’t want to be a part of the Church. The Church isn’t meeting their need in the midst of the message of change, whether that’s the world’s change or the Church’s. When I hear the heart cry of someone lost in meaninglessness, I understand their lament of “I really want to go to church this Sunday. Could you find one that won’t try to change me?” I get what they mean.

Because for all our talk of godliness, repentance, and so on, it seems that we’re missing where most people are at right now. Yes, people are sinners. Yes, they need to change.

But are we giving them any meaningful reason to?

Resisting Your Own Little World for the Sake of the Kingdom

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Tim Challies linked to an interesting article that reflects a topic I’ve discussed in depth: technology’s attack on genuine community. A good article, worthy of your time and consideration.

Toward the article’s end, one educational scientist, William Kist of Kent State University, makes an intriguing statement:

[Kist] also pointed out that the “real world” that many social media critics hark back to never really existed. Before everyone travelled on the bus or train with their heads buried in an iPad or a smart phone, they usually just travelled in silence. “We did not see people spontaneously talking to strangers. They were just keeping to themselves,” Kist said.

Many Christian writers/thinkers/pastors/bloggers talk about community, but rarely have I heard any of them discussing what Kist states above.

That ability to engage a stranger is foundational to any healthy society. And it goes beyond simple transactional engagement, such as asking the butcher for pound of ground chuck.

As Kist notes, in the days before the proliferation of tech devices that wired us into our own little worlds, people were already in that world, we just couldn’t see it. Lonely in a crowdI would contend that industrialization and social Darwinism abetted that transformation long ago, as we heartily received the false gospels of self-sufficiency and survival of the fittest.

Ours has become an “I don’t need you” society where people fight over scraps. Witness how easily a simple pending snowstorm turns grocery shoppers into frightened hoarders because their self-sufficiency is briefly threatened.

I honestly believe we can counter some of that mentality if we break out of our little worlds.

I was that guy on the plane flight who was chatty with the people in my row. I’m told that makes me a nuisance, but that was before everyone was plugged into a computer, iPad, iPod, Blackberry, or whatever. And you know, I never once had a conversation with rowmates that wasn’t fascinating. Nor did I ever get the feeling that those in the conversation resented the chat.  People did open up. In fact, most people would leave the plane laughing or smiling after such a talk. Made the flight go faster too.

What got me was that just talking with a stranger opened up a level of connection that most people now avoid like the plague. Tech only makes it more obvious. (I would tend to disagree with Kist, in part, because a person with a gadget truly is less likely to engage another, lost as they are in their cyberworld. People may have been silent in the past, but that was only because they’d been acclimatized by conditioning to be so. Now, it’s supplemented.)

Those conversations I have on planes (and in checkout lines, buses, sporting events—wherever) have meaning. They tie people together and remind us that we’re not only NOT self-suffucient but that other people have worth, that their stories matter in the larger story of God’s redemptive history.

This brings me to my final point.

I’ve been wondering why Christians today are so lousy at personal evangelism, and I believe these issues play right into that. If we can’t engage people, if we aren’t the ones who break the silence, then no one will hear about Jesus.

I’m constantly amazed at the personal details I hear from strangers I engage. The young woman running my bag of carrots over the grocery store scanner has a story. And if I talk with her, I may find out her husband just left her and the kid to fend for themselves. Or that her mom just died of cancer.

For those of us who are Christians, how can we be silent? How can we be buried in an iPad when the drama of the lives of broken, shattered people plays out around us?

Do you think Jesus has anything to say through your lips to that young woman whose husband just left? Does He have anything to offer her after her mom died right when she needed her most?

Each day, our opportunities to lead lost people to Jesus are legion. How can we possibly be silent, to let others pass by trapped in a world they can’t understand, while we who claim to know the answers dwell in our own little world, oblivious?