Godly Character

Update at Cerulean Sanctum – Aug. 2014

Standard

Readers have written to ask when we might be seeing new Cerulean Sanctum posts and to check if I’m doing OK.

Well…

One of the commonplace elements you will find in charismatic and Pentecostal churches is a tendency to “give a word.” Now, this is meant to refer to the charismatic gifts of word of knowledge and word of wisdom, but some people take that too literally. In other words, those word gifts become a literal word, as in singular. It’s not unusual to hear someone say, “God has this word for you: plenty.” Or “I keep hearing Sacramento. Does that word mean anything to you?”Han Solo, frozen in carbonite

Yeah, sometimes that gets a little weird.

Anyway, if there were one word that encapsulates the last few months for me, it would be frenzy.

That’s not a word I enjoy. At all. But there you go.

Life has been a nonstop frenzy. Because I tend to be a slow, considered thinker, frenzy is about as outside of my comfort zone as it gets. And the more stuff gets added to that frenzy…

I’ve been wanting to write about the state of our world, where frenzy is embraced as normal and even welcome, but I’ve been cowed by the depth of the topic and potential unintended consequences. Since unintended consequences only add to the frenzy, well…

The old aphorism says that the devil is in the details, and I think that saying says more than we understand on surface glance. Details can magnify frenzy. A frenzied life may even be the result of the devil, since nothing drowns out the voice of God like the siren of frenzy. Remember how God spoke to Elijah in a whisper? I think most Americans, Christians or not, cannot hear God for all the frenzy, no matter how many minutes we carve out of our day to devote to (or to search for) Him. I think we lie to ourselves when we look at the story of Mary and Martha and proclaim in a haughty tone that we are nothing like that clueless Martha. Hah! The finest Mary of today  would make Martha of the Bible look like Han Solo frozen in carbonite. Let’s not deceive ourselves about the level of modern frenzy and how deeply it is entrenched in each of us.

I want to get back to Cerulean Sanctum, but I also need for life to calm down substantially. For that concern, I covet your prayers.

Thank you for being a reader. There’s more than 10 years of material here on Cerulean Sanctum, and I believe the majority of it is just as good for today as it may have been 10 years ago. I’ll get back to more regular blogging when I can get a few more things wrangled and under control.

Blessings.

No Space to Avoid a Crash

Standard

PileupHave you ever noticed that your attempt to place safe distance between you and a car ahead of you while driving on the highway is viewed as an invitation by some to squeeze their vehicle into that space? Yes, nature abhors a vacuum, but so does the average motorist. Especially if that “vacuum” happens to be the space you create to avoid a crash.

We have become people who fill every precious space with something. Every moment of every day is filled. Now, instead of being alone with our thoughts, to be contemplative people, we are like meerkats staring in one unified direction toward what most draws our attention, usually a cell phone.

If we have no spaces left, we have no space left for God. And if we have no space left for Him, we have no way to avoid a crash, one that may be even worse than the kind found on a packed highway.

 

Rethinking Spiritual Growth

Standard

Measring growthI’m part of a closed group of Vineyard and ex-Vineyard folks who discuss theology on a Facebook page.  Someone there raised the age-old question:

How do we measure spiritual growth?

For too long this simple question has baffled evangelical Christians. I think there’s a reason for that, but it’s not what it appears on the surface. But then, this is Cerulean Sanctum, so when do I ever approach things from a surface perspective? 😉

Measuring anything demands we agree on what we are measuring and the tools and terms we use in the measurement. Talking measuring spiritual growth in an evangelical church immediately runs into a wall because we make poor assumptions about those bedrock criteria. Ask the wrong questions and get the wrong answers.

For me, the elusiveness of measuring spiritual growth occurs because the focus has always been on the individual Christian in the individual church. It’s a bedrock principle that what we’re measuring is how a lone Christian in a lone Church grows.

But I wonder if we’re getting this all wrong from the first step.

I go back to two posts from 2013:

No “I” in “CHURCH”–How American Evangelicalism Gets Its Pronouns Wrong

God of the Group

What if we commit a fundamental error in checking for spiritual growth by focusing on the individual rather than on the collective church?

The language of the New Testament, again and again, is the collective you, not the singular. And the New Jerusalem at the close of the age isn’t a loose collection of people, but a unified Body—or more appropriately, a complete city.

I think one reason that leaders on the local church level burn out on growth issues is because all the emphasis is on the individual Christian. But shouldn’t successful growth be centered on what that local church is accomplishing?

Even more, the tendency to focus on the individual removes the collective church from its role as Body. Paul’s metaphor depicts health not as one organ functioning alone but as the organs in the body working in harmony, which has a secondary effect of wholeness for each part. In other words, when the eye is doing what an eye does, the foot and hand don’t end up falling off a cliff along with it.

For too long the assumption has been…

IF the individual is functioning well, THEN the church will be well.

That thinking puts everything on the back of the individual, though. The onus is on him or her to perform. Legalism and moralism can be the only result.

What if we reverse that assumption?

IF the church is functioning well, THEN the individual will be well.

I think that second equation has gone unexplored for too long. And because it has not been explored, it’s not at the forefront of how we think about church, the individual, and spiritual growth. I believe that second statement, though, is closer to the heart of the Gospel.

Shifting toward measuring church growth rather than individual growth makes it far easier to gauge genuine growth overall. The Body metaphor makes more sense and lends a better basis for measuring growth.

We can chart some growth elements from the perspective of an organic Body or organism. Two obvious aspects of a living organism that we can then examine:

How well is the organism feeding itself?

How well is the organism reproducing?

Starting at the second question also answers the first. Healthy organisms reproduce, while unhealthy ones do not. If disciples are not being made and the church is not growing itself, then it is not healthy. At this point, examining reasons for ill health can take us back to the first question and to others associated with it.

Here’s the thing: Measuring the growth of individuals will always have periods of mixed analysis. If you wish to measure an individual’s activity but do so while he is sleeping, bad analysis may result. What may look like slacking off may actually be recovery from a day’s strenuous work. This analytical mistake is why charting individual growth is so hard in the church and may not be a viable source for an accurate assessment. Our results depend on something that is too variable. Stepping up to a broader measure may be a better way of charting the real growth info we need to examine, and it provides us a way to work backwards and make general statements about the growth in the individual.

The main problem is that we’re not used to thinking that way, so many of our tools, questions, and interpretations will need to be recast to look more at the collective church rather than the individual Christian. Once we start thinking differently, I think we’ll have better results for making accurate statements about spiritual growth in American churches.