Love

Equipping the Saints: Stepping on the Brake

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If you’ve been a reader of this blog for a while, you know that I have trepidations about Internet communications. I’m also concerned that the speed of our lives is out of control, as several posts here on that subject will also attest.

The Wall Street Journal ran an article combining the two issues: “A Manifesto for Slow Communication.” Absolutely read it.

Face-to-face communications between human beings is down for the count. As soon as most of the people in one of my long-time small groups were on Facebook, the group folded. Another small group Bible study my wife and I are a part of is attended mostly by those folks who have the least connection to high tech gadgetry. It should come as no shock then that even though this group is open to people of all ages, my wife and I (in our mid-40s) are the youngest people there.

As the Church, these issues pose a serious problem.

What happens to the people in the pews when the business world says “40 hours a week,” but keeping your job means actually having to work 80 hours a week?

What happens when people no longer have time to invest in the life of their church?

What happens when people stop doing ministry because they are too busy?

What happens when everyone stays  in touch by Facebook, but no one meets together face-to-face?

What happens when our dependence on online communications depletes our ability to recognize vocal and body language clues?

What happens when the primary means of teaching others, face-to-face student-teacher engagement, is lost?

A friend of mine who was hired for a 50 hour a week job was working 70-80 hours instead. When she pushed back after several years at that pace, her boss was upset, despite the deluge of accolades my friend had received over her many years of service. This is the world that has been pulled over your eyes...She’s now looking for work.  Hers is a common story.

I worried that Facebook would not be satisfied as a supplementary connection among friends, those who would otherwise meet face-to-face. Indeed, I was right. This summer has gone down as the least personal of my entire life. Facebook seems to be the only way many communicate.

I noted the small group demise above, but another Christian small group we’re a part of pretty much went on hiatus this summer. The reason? People were too busy.

Midweek church services are falling by the wayside. Hardly any church around here has a Sunday night service, either. Fewer churches have Sunday School for adults, though we somehow still manage to cobble something together for the kiddies (when our harried, frantic volunteers can find two seconds to breathe, that is).

Like a decade-old, cotton T-shirt washed too many times on hot, our social fabric is growing increasingly thin. We still recognize the T-shirt for what it is, but we can see through it now.

Questions for this generation of Christians:

How will we educate the Body of Christ if we don’t meet together regularly?

How will leaders identify spiritual gifts in their congregants and nurture them if they don’t meet together in person?

How will younger Christians see the life of Christ modeled in the mature Christian if we can never find time to get together?

How does one read the countenance of another via Facebook?

What happens to the laying on of hands in a digital age?

I don’t have an answer for those questions (and many others like them) other than to say that we Christians must be the countercultural example. If we don’t start slowing down and living differently, then Christ will come back to a world without faith. Because you can’t throw a new convert into a microwave for a minute and expect a fully baked disciple when the bell dings.

The Error of the Unstrung

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I’ve got no strings

To hold me down

To make me fret, or make me frown

I had strings

But now I’m free

There are no strings on me

Hi-ho the me-ri-o

That’s the only way to go

I want the world to know

Nothing ever worries me

I’ve got no strings

So I have fun

I’m not tied up to anyone

They’ve got strings

But you can see

There are no strings on me

If you don’t remember that ditty from your childhood (or parenthood), it’s sung by Pinocchio in the classic Disney film.

I hear this song a lot lately. As I’ve listened to the Church in America over the years, I hear it voiced by a growing group of Christians who are ecstatic that they’ve dropped out of the institutional Church.

You know these folks. They talk about how much freer they are now that they no longer attend Sunday morning services. Now that they’re not part of a local assembly, they talk about all the things they can do for the Lord that they could not do before or were made to feel guilty for doing by the institutional Church police. Theirs is a louder and louder voice.

I was almost one of those people. Fed up with the way churches operated, I wanted to mold a loose affiliation of church-shunners who felt exactly as I did, a hand-chosen group of friends who could pal around together in Christ and buck the established institutional system that had grown so lethargic and monolithic.  Strings? I didn’t want to have any strings on me, especially institutional Church strings.

But as I have mellowed in the last few years, I have come to realize the problem of being unstrung.

An unwillingness to be herded plagues the American psyche . As the world’s iconoclasts, no one has the right to tell us what to think or how to behave. If we don’t like something, no force from heaven or hell can dissuade us. Rugged individualism defines us. We are the ultimate bootstrappers, devoted to me, myself, and I. I don’t need you and you don’t need me, and that’s the way the American religion works.

Strange as it may seem, that same mentality reigns in those people who deem the institutional Church unworthy. And just as I cannot support the errors of the American religion, I am fully convinced that abandoning the traditional church in this country is a grave mistake.

When the Lord formed His Church after Pentecost, it was a ragtag group of misfits. You had widows, orphans, Roman politicians, prostitutes, Jewish zealots—the ultimate mishmash of classes, races, and temperaments. And that’s exactly how God desired the Church to be.

Can you imagine what it must have been like for the Pharisee who had just come to Jesus to sit down with whores and Romans? How stretched, right? Do you think that man grew on the inside?

When one of us decides that we don’t want to be a part of the traditional local church, we lose something exceptionally valuable: the test of dealing with people we may not especially like.

We see a bit of this in the consumeristic action of church shopping. We hop and shop from church to church looking for one that best fits our desires, the one filled with people most like us. (Oddly enough, people who eschew the institutional Church are often the most vocal against church shopping. )

At a time in American history when it seems as if everyone considers himself or herself a victim, when we walk around as open wounds expecting some jerk to pour salt on us, when intelligent debate is no longer possible between people without the wailing and gnashing of teeth, and other people just plain suck, people who drop out of church only add fuel to that fire of misanthropy.

So while some may think they are truly spiritual by saying goodbye to what most of us recognize as church, I wonder if those dropouts are missing out on vital, God-ordained character building.

A few years ago, David Wayne of Jollyblogger interviewed a pastor from the country of Georgia. When David asked that pastor about church shopping and hopping, the pastor was shocked. In his country, church people were born into a church and were buried in its cemetery. What about discord and disagreements? David wondered. The pastor gave a simple answer: People were forced to work out their differences because they were fellow members of the Body of Christ.

When Christians drop out of church, we shun the vital truth that Christian character is built on dealing with one’s differences within a body of believers comprised of people who are not exactly like us. In fact, we may not even like many of those people.

But the Kingdom of God does not allow us to pick and choose who will be in it. God desires us to learn how to live with people who would ordinarily bug the heck out of us. That is part of our growth as Christians.

When I see people dropping out of church and proclaiming how free they now are, I can’t help but think that their supposed freedom comes at a steep cost, pinocchio.jpgthe cost of learning to find common ground with people they would not have chosen to be in their Christian clique.

Pinocchio had a cranium filled with sawdust when he sang how free he was from being tied to anyone. Is that how we wish to be?

When I hear people who have dropped out of church, they almost invariably talk about how they now get together with their handpicked friends, people just like themselves, for fellowship. I find that sad because I gain valuable lessons in my inner man when I must deal with a wide swath of diverse fellow believers I did not handpick.

God desires that I learn to love brothers and sisters in Christ who are ignorant, lazy, judgmental and stubborn—which may even be how others perceive me. He also desires that I share in the lives of people who are much smarter, more loving, and deeper in the faith than I am—people I might ordinarily avoid because they make my own walk with Christ appear so tepid.

Would I choose to hang with Christian 80-year-olds,  sports nuts, quilters, teens, auto mechanics, infants, and the like if it were not for the institutional Church? Probably not, but God asks me to anyway, forcing the issue by keeping me in the local church.

No matter where others fall on the spectrum of Christian maturity and social graces, all have something to teach me that is valuable. And I have in them people whose problems I might not ordinarily encounter, but for whom Christ desires I intercede and bear burdens. It is in those burdens found in people who are not like me at all that I learn what it means to seek all solutions in Christ alone.

The world around us is fragmenting into tribes, and God help us all when tribes clash. But the Church is not to be this way. We are called to get along, no matter what our fellow Christians may be like.

Sadly, when we drop out of church and go our own unstrung, “enlightened” way, we avoid this lesson. And we are poorer in spirit for doing so.

Blest be the tie that binds

Our hearts in Christian love;

The fellowship of kindred minds

Is like to that above.

Before our Father’s throne

We pour our ardent prayers;

Our fears, our hopes, our aims are one

Our comforts and our cares.

We share each other’s woes,

Our mutual burdens bear;

And often for each other flows

The sympathizing tear.

When we asunder part,

It gives us inward pain;

But we shall still be joined in heart,

And hope to meet again.

This glorious hope revives

Our courage by the way;

While each in expectation lives,

And longs to see the day.

From sorrow, toil and pain,

And sin, we shall be free,

And perfect love and friendship reign

Through all eternity.

— John Fawcett, “Blest Be the Ties that Bind”

How God Is

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On Thursday, my family and I drove up to Columbus, Ohio, to meet up with a friend of mine from my Carnegie Mellon University days back in the early ’80s. That’s a long time to know someone, but old friends are often the best friends of all. The last time Bob and I got together in person was at my wedding 13 years ago, so it has been awhile. Still, we have kept up by phone, email, and now Facebook.

The crux of our getting together this time was another wedding, his. Though we were not able to make the ceremony, as we do not travel well at this time, I was relieved that he and bride Christin would be only two hours away as part of their honeymoon. That WAS doable.

What I didn’t realize until the morning of the meeting was that Bob and Christian were attending the Origins Gaming Fair, the big convention for fans of role-playing games, boardgames, military strategy games, and…well, most any kind of game out there. I’ve never seen so many gaming fans together in one place. Our son was with us, and I knew he would eat up all the fun stuff going in within the many rooms of the convention center, and indeed, we had a blast.

But it wasn’t on the convention floor that I was most blessed.

As it was a meeting to celebrate a wedding, we brought a gift. I thought about that gift a long time and was able to find exactly what I was looking for to give to Bob and Christin. When we met, they were waiting there with a gift in their hands, too, something I did not expect.

Bob asked me to open the bag—inside was something very special.

When I was still in my youth, my brothers and I had a copy of an aerial combat game called Ace of Aces. By using an innovative game mechanic, two people with the small, paired, illustrated books of maneuvers could participate in a real-time dogfight. The game was brilliantly simple, and I loved playing it. And if I loved it, I knew my son would, too.

Sadly, though it was highly regarded, the many Ace of Aces variants are all out of print. Copies sold online command very high prices. I know; I checked. It seemed to me that my son and I would have to pass up playing this game together.

When I opened up the gift bag from Bob and Christin, I found a copy of Ace of Aces. It had been the copy that Bob and his son (now an adult) had played. I couldn’t believe it.

Walking back to my car to safely stow this wonderful gift, I got a tear in my eye. I kept thinking that this is how God is with us. We seek to bless Him, but what He blesses us with in response is much more than we can imagine. Just as my friend had been paying attention to a comment I made on Facebook about searching for this game, God hears us and plans great things for our pleasure, because He loves us so very much.

God cares about our needs, but He also cares about our joy. A little game I can play with my son may not seem like an earthshattering thing, but its an example of God’s goodness in even the smallest things.

After we left Bob and Christin, we met up with a Cerulean Sanctum supporter, Travis, one of the longest-running readers of this blog, A gift from God, one of millions...and someone I had not had the pleasure of meeting face to face. We ate together in a nearly deserted Bob Evans, and we talked about his new daughter. Just some regular folks hanging out and talking about life. Driving home, my family and I saw a rainbow. Last night, we watched two baby finches, whose nest was in our hanging fern outside, take their first flights and disappear into our woods. On a sweltering evening, we felt the first cool breezes of an oncoming nightfall before the stars came out thick and bright, the Milky Way lighting up the sky.

God cares about us and shows it in a million little ways each day. My prayer is that you can find the time to exult in those blessings and realize how much you are loved.

Be blessed and cultivate joy. It’s all around you.