Christianity in North America

Choosing Your Canaan

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We’re thinking about putting our son in public school this August.

We homeschooled him via a public e-school this year and personally experienced the Achilles heel of homeschooling: lack of socialization. As an only child in an area where almost all the children go to public school, our son suffered from piecemeal contact with other kids and it showed. Yes, we have him in activities with other kids. It simply hasn’t been enough.

In addition, because he’s an only child, he needs to be in an environment where he’s not the center of attention all the time. Homeschooling works totally against that idea. Nearly every growth area he needs to improve in can best be met by hanging out with a large group of kids for long periods of time.

But when I mentioned this reality to a friend the other day, I received a rather pointed response:

“You’re handing him over to the Canaanites.”

Hmm.

What followed was the usual explanation of how anything but education in an exclusive private Christian school will permanently warp our son. We’ll be totally unable to counteract the brainwashing he’ll receive in public school. Welcome to Canaan!For our decision, we’ll end up with a child who grows up to be one part Bertrand Russell, one part Aleister Crowley, and one part Ted Bundy.

Thank you, NEA.

Or actually, thank you Baptists.

You see, two Baptist megachurches in our rural town control much of the public school district. Folks from their congregations make up a big chunk of the superintendents, principals, and teachers. Considering that these two churches try to outdo each in moral rectitude, I highly doubt first graders will be forced to read Heather Has Two Mommies.

But all this is beside the point.

No, some think the private Christian school education must be superior because it has better people in it. Along the road I live on, many families live in trailers, sectionals, and double-wides. They tend not to send their kids to private Christian schools for no other reason than they can’t pay the tuition.

Truth is, most people making a household income less than $100,000 a year can’t pay to send their children to private Christian schools.

Which leads to the heart of this post:

And the LORD spoke to Moses, saying, “Speak to the people of Israel and say to them, I am the LORD your God. You shall not do as they do in the land of Egypt, where you lived, and you shall not do as they do in the land of Canaan, to which I am bringing you. You shall not walk in their statutes. You shall follow my rules and keep my statutes and walk in them. I am the LORD your God.
—Leviticus 18:1-4

No matter what we do in the United States of America, we’re forced to choose our Canaan because we aren’t a theocracy like Israel was. As much as the Lord wants us to follow Him exclusively, we Christians aren’t called to bunker ourselves against the rest of the world. We’re called to shine our light amid the darkness. And where is the darkness? Everywhere we look.

And sometimes, it’s oh so disarmingly subtle.

Whatever my child may face in public school, I can assure you that none of it is subtle. On the other hand, the pernicious nature of the subconscious message of the exclusive private Christian school is the the message of upper-middle-class suburban Evangelicalism: materialism.

Fourth-graders putting condoms on bananas OR materialism. Which one damages the soul more? Which is harder to root out? When the Lexus SUVs pull up to drop the kids off at the private Christian school, are the kids aware of their privilege? When they’re all equipped with the latest iPod, the swankest TI graphing calculator, and the non-stop message that it’s all about them, how can they NOT be?

Worse still, how can they possibly see through that gray fog when their own parents can’t?

I’m no master of discernment, but I think I’m fairly capable of dealing with whatever the public school Canaanites can throw at me. The kids I truly worry about are those in the private Christian school who may very well be materialists at the core, yet surrounded by a highly polished veneer of Christianity or—in keeping with an age when truth is now truthiness— what I like to call Christ-iness.

We can’t drop out of Canaan because it’s all around us. We have to choose which Canaan we’ll dwell in. Some do so consciously, while other get sucked in by osmosis.

One of the reasons we moved to the country was to get away from the overt materialism we saw pummeling the suburbs. We want our son to see that not everyone garners merit by what they own. We want him to escape the dependence on others to provide for his every need. We don’t want him in the Canaan that’s so intractable that hardly anyone sees it.

The private Christian school parents forced to send their kid to public school may sit down with him or her and say, “Now be on your guard if they try to tell you that homosexuality and abortion are okay.” Meanwhile, the public school parents sending their child to the private Christian school may say, “Now be on your guard because many people there will define themselves by what they own or what they can buy.”

Choose your Canaan. We all must. No one gets a free pass. Every day each of us must fight evil.

But evil itself is not uniform. It bends the rules. Sometimes it comes as an angel of light and sometimes as a blackened beast from the pit of hell.

It’s the angel of light that troubles me.

Blind, Deaf, and Dumb

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I don’t normally change my plans for posts for the week, but my brother e-mailed me a story yesterday I just couldn’t believe. And I couldn’t believe it on so many levels that I could probably blog about it for the next month and not limn its depths.

As a musician, I enjoy a wide range of music. I think I can appreciate just about any genre of music. Punjabi sitar to punk rock to Pavarotti singing “Nessun Dorma”—hey, I like it all.

Which is how I know of Joshua Bell.

Sort of the classical music version of Bono, Bell’s the pre-eminent violinist of our times, under-forty, charismatic, and a lady-killer, too. He plays the noted “Gibson ex Huberman” Stradivarius worth $3.5 million. He commands $1,000 a minute performances all over the world.

But the Washington Post wondered what might happen if Bell were asked to dress down and play as a street musician near one of the busy subway connections in DC. An experiment in sociology, so to speak. Famed musicians were asked to weigh in on what might be the outcome. Most predicted problems. The biggest worry? Crowd control.

So Bell, dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt, took his multi-million dollar Strad down to the Metro to play incognito for morning rush hour. Hidden video camera still of Bell playing in DC subwayHe chose superb violin works unperformable by the less skilled. He played masterfully for the commuters.

And…

The Washington Post has the whole tale (plus hidden camera video) in a fascinating story called “Pearls Before Breakfast.” Please read the whole thing.

Leonard Slatkin, the noted conductor, when asked what he thought might be the outcome, suspected that Bell would draw a large crowd and garner about $150 for his effort. The result proved far less stellar.

In truth, less than a dozen of the 1,097 people who passed by seemed to notice Bell’s presence. Fewer yet paused even momentarily to listen to the finest music in the world played by a virtuoso. Of those who did stop, a couple possessed past experience with the violin, enough to know the guy with his case left open for tips played on a level far beyond what could be expected from a street musician. One woman recognized Bell and stayed around simply because she couldn’t understand what she witnessed. She tossed in a bemused $20, making Bell’s total take for 43 minutes of stellar playing $32.17. And yes, a few folks threw in pennies.

I find it impossible to read that story and not consider that something’s profoundly wrong with us. In our hurtling from one place to another, our lives on perpetual fast -forward (at least until we hit the numbing reality of the cubicle), we’ve allowed the system we live in to rob us of time, relationship, culture, beauty, and every other mark of true humanity that simmers in our God-breathed souls. We act as if wonder itself might be purchased at Target for $9.99 on sale. We get our cheap, adulterated fix, then it’s head down and don’t get in our way.

One vignette within this cautionary tale tells of a mother whose three-year-old kept tugging her away from her objective so he could pause to listen to the guy playing the fiddle. I couldn’t help but think, and a child shall lead them.

Jesus Christ didn’t die simply to secure us a ticket to heaven. He died and rose again that we might have life and have it more abundantly.

In her book The Companions, science fiction author Sheri Tepper imagines a future in which people wear veil-like clothing in public in order to preserve their own cocoon of privacy. In many ways, I fear that Tepper’s world is already our own. What else can explain the silent shrouds we wear that cut us off from others, that speak to a child and tell him not to want to listen to the beautiful music, or to interact with the man playing it. That shroud descends over all of life, smothering it.

When I hear people telling me they prefer attending their local megachurch because it affords them some anonymity, I wonder when Jesus gave His divine imprimatur to our privacy. Yet we guard ourselves to the point of losing our souls. We numb our hearts to life going on around us. Wrapped in our cocoons, we literally fail to stop and smell the roses—or listen to Joshua Bell playing a Bach piece that once summoned tears to even the driest eyes.

Are we that beaten-down? That blind, deaf, and dumb?

It comes as no shock to me that much of Jesus’ ministry dealt with healing the blind, deaf, and dumb. We understand the physical component, but do we understand the spiritual and emotional portion of our marred humanity that compels us to walk by the world’s greatest violinist and not even pause for one moment to revel in his skill? To drop out of the ever-rushing torrent to soar on music crafted by the greats? Bach wrote “To the glory of God” on every work he penned, yet that glory wafts past us and we perceive it not.

How can it be that we have fallen so far, even those of us who claim to be Christians?

Why Men Don’t Pray

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Let’s listen in on the end of a Christian men’s group meeting:

Guy 1: Great Bible study! Now who has prayer requests?

Guy 2, raising a hand: I inherited a couple thousand dollars from an aunt who died, and I need prayer to know how to best handle the money.

Guy 3: Put it in a stock index fund. Tracks the stock market and since it’s always going up over time, you win.

Guy 4: Have you looked into a 529 account? Little Joey will be going to college some day. Gotta remember that.

Guy 5: There’s the upcoming mission trip for the youth. I hear a lot of the kids don’t have enough money to go. You could write it off. Advance the Kingdom and all that.

Guy 3 to Guy 5: But if he invests it, he could make money and still turn some over in the future. Let his interest fund the mission trip five years from now.

Guy 6: This is a blessing from God. He means it to meet your needs. Your car’s not lookin’ all that hot right now. Didn’t you say the transmission needed work?

Guy 2 to Guy 6: True, but…

{Twenty minutes later…}

Guy 4: College, man. I’m telling you. It’ll cost a quarter million for four years the way things are going. Save now.

Guy 1: It’s almost 9:30, guys. Looks like we’ve pretty much shot our time, so anyone want to close in prayer?

{Guy 2 raises his hand}

Guy 1: Go for it.

Guy 2: Thank you, Lord, for this time. We pray you’d bless us and all our families. Help us to know you more. Amen.

All the Guys: Amen.

Sound familiar? I’d say that’s an eerily close script for just about every group of Christian men I’ve ever been a part of. Mention praying for each other’s needs and for the needs of the Body and you’ll hear 99 percent advice and 1 percent prayer.

I don’t remember it being that bad in my ancient past, though. And as much as it’s easy to blame men for this (to say they just aren’t spiritual enough today), I have another theory.

Consider all the changes wrought in our society in the last fifty years.

  • Companies fire men at the drop of a hat, even if they do good work.
  • Women now fight them for their jobs—and win.
  • The feminist movement questioned men’s very raison d’être, and that questioning trickled down into society as a whole.
  • TV went from Father Knows Best to showing dad routinely outsmarted by everyone, including the family dog.
  • Men aren’t reading the lay of the society’s land well. Too many changes happening too fast. Even in church on Sunday, they hear the message they’re not doing it right.

In short, I believe many men—many Christian men—struggle with feelings of incompetence. They wonder if they do anything well. GaggedThey fear that the future will somehow reveal their inadequacies, and they’ll be made a laughingstock.

I’m no psychiatrist. I’m down on psychology. But when I talk to other men, I see them struggling with these issues. It’s like watching Death of a Salesman or Glengarry Glen Ross looping in the lives of many men.

I believe this comes out in the way men approach prayer today.

A problem arises as expressed through a prayer concern. Suddenly, a chance to show competence—to let someone else know that I’ve heard what he said and I might be able to resolve it then and there, as if God had miraculously touched my mind with the answer! I can be helpful! I can make a difference!

I can be competent!

A more disturbing side exists to this, too. Intellectual competence in providing the winning solution to someone’s problem isn’t the only competence issue at stake here. Prayer becomes a comptetence issue, as well.

To many men, providing a common sense answer to a prayer need means not running the risk that prayer may not work. We prayed about Steve’s inheritance and he wound up getting taken by some shyster financial advisor. Then who’s wrong? Maybe our prayers failed the competency test. Maybe our faith failed that test, too. Maybe we’re not godly enough for God to take our prayers seriously. We’ve botched everything else, so why not this, too?

That fear of being shown incompetent doesn’t afflict women as much as men. I think the main competence issue women struggle with concerns raising their kids. Yes, that’s a leaden weight, too, but I think men tend to struggle with competence in every aspect of their lives. It’s why shows of bravado empower men. To be king of the hill carries some meaning.

Now we can inject all sorts of spiritual advice into this. We can talk about dying to self. We can talk about grace. But men simply aren’t experiencing those in their lives because what they get from the church on Sunday doesn’t have enough steam to get them past the gauntlet of potential incompetence they must run through the rest of the week. The car breaks down, and it’s so complex they can’t fix it. When their kids ask for help on algebra, they can’t do it. They can’t work enough hours in the week to avoid the offshoring due to hit their company. They can’t meet all the requirements the parachurch ministry says they must meet to be a Christian husband. They don’t even know where to start in prayer to address all these lacks. So they don’t even try.

And that’s my take on why men today don’t pray.