A Ministry That Flows from Love for God and People

In response to my post “Asking the Radical Questions,” Nate Spencer of The Jesus Paradigm commented with a quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer (one of the patron saints of Cerulean Sanctum) that I wanted to expand:

If you love the vision you have for community, you will destroy community. If you love the people around you, you will create community.

I think this can be distilled into a generalization that always works:

If you love the vision you have for {desired ministry outcome}, you will destroy {desired ministry outcome}. If you love the people around you, you will create {desired ministry outcome}.

We live in a Church age where the visionaries of the Faith hold increasing sway over how we do church. These are usually people on the national stage who have successful churches and are always on the leading edge of ministry. Smaller or less successful churches often try to latch onto the vision promoted by these leaders, but the outcomes inevitably fall short, and everyone looks around and wonders what happened.

What happened is that Bonhoeffer’s warning came true: The church loved the vision more.

I don’t believe that this is ever a case of not loving God enough. I think that any movement in the Church that aims at a new vision begins from a love of God.

Where the Bonhoeffer warning comes into play is when the vision fails to love people as much as it loves God or loves the vision itself.

If you look closely, I believe you can find numerous examples in the American Church of the love for a vision overwhelming the love for people.

Take the way we worship, for example. It’s easy to fall in love with worship as an event. We may even go one further and do a good job of loving worship because to worship is to love God.

But how easy is it to have a vision for worship that actually excludes a love for people? And in contrast, what does worship that loves people look like?

I’ve been involved with worship as both a worship leader and as a supporting musician. I have planned worship, led worship, managed playlists, played and sung music, written new worship songs, and so on. I have a bit of expertise.

One thing that I see continually is that forgetting to love people leads to worship that

1. Reflects only the favorite style of music of the worship leader or musicians on the worship team

2. Contains powerful, anointed music that, unfortunately, the ordinary people in the seats find difficult, if not impossible, to sing

3. Fails to incorporate what have been past favorite songs of the people in the seats because those favorites do not match the current vision for worship

4. Mimics the worship style of whatever “famous” church the local church is trying to emulate, regardless of the past worship history of that local church

5. Fails to consider what leads nonmusicians into worship

I don’t mean to pick on worship alone here, but the worship wars are a continual topic online and worship is readily witnessed in our churches.

The reality is that any vision for doing ANYTHING in our churches that does not prominently uphold a love for people as much as it does a love for God or for the vision itself will ALWAYS produce lackluster results—or worse, heartache and burnout.

I’ve mentioned before my career in camping ministry. A surefire vision for burning out camp staff is

God first

Campers second

Staff third

Frankly, you can sink any kind of ministry with a vision that puts frontline workers third. As they are the people with whom most ministries have the deepest connection, Love thy neighbor billboard they need to be higher up on the priority list and need to be loved almost as much as God. I’ve worked in ministries that got this right and ministries that didn’t. Let me say that any ministry that puts its staff third is a terrible place to work, a place that pours out staff until the vessel is empty. And the opposite is true: A ministry that loves its staff will see ministry come from the carefully cultivated overflow of staff’s hearts, never running dry.

There’s not a person reading this who doesn’t have a horror story of how a vision for ministry steamrolled simple love for people. Isn’t that sad?

Truly, any life-changing ministry that continues to produce results comes down to loving other people more than the vision for the ministry itself. Why this is so hard to see is one of the most maddening mysteries in the modern American Church.

In the end, one of the things the Lord is teaching me goes back to what you and I learned as Little Sunbeams (or whatever your childhood church used to call preschoolers): Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

It seems so simple, yet we tend to forget it when it comes to ministry. The question remains though: Does the vision for ministry take into account the Golden Rule?

When I led worship, I tried to always ask the question of what best leads the people in the seats into worship because I genuinely desired to love those people. And that end result didn’t always lead to my favorite kind of music. Many times it was simplistic songs or hymns everyone knew word for word, the two or three classics I’d been trying to move beyond for years.

But it wasn’t about me or my vision; it was loving God and loving people. Everything else proceeded from that mentality.

This isn’t so hard, folks. Yet if we fail to heed Bonhoeffer’s warning, it always will be.

Christianity and a New America?

I read the following article at Front Porch Republic and it resonated with me:

Beyond Capitalism and Socialism: Rebuilding an American Economy Focused on Family and Community

What the article lacks, though it mentions G.K. Chesterton extensively, is a keen understanding how these ideas mesh with biblical Christianity.

I’ve written before how the 19th-century Church failed to understand the consequences of industrialism, social Darwinism, and postmillennial eschatology. Recovering what the Church gave away may be the only hope we have in keeping America from sliding into yet more high-handed governance.

But how does the Church accomplish such a task while staying on the Gospel point? And given the unrest in our nation, are we more open to the ideas in the article or even less so?

The comments are open. What do you think?

My Island, No Trespassing

I like to watch people. The backstage of an event is often more interesting to me than the event itself. What happens when no one is looking (except for me) I find fascinating.

Recently, I’ve been watching what may be an interesting cultural trend.

My son is part of a weekend program that offers many challenging classes for gifted students. We love it. The two classes he takes have about 30 kids in one class and 15 in the other. Because some families have more than one kids in a class at a time, parents are not always fully represented, so some kids are in class by themselves, while others are there with one or both parents.

Both classes involve a lot of construction. The kids may build complex items, such as a soldered circuit board. Pretty ambitious stuff. Again, challenging for the kids.

I’ve been there for both classes. What has struck me is the dynamic of helping others.

When presented with a task, the majority of parents focus solely on helping their own child, despite the fact that other children have no parent present to help. Also, while plenty of opportunities to assist the teacher of class exist, not many people jump at the chance.

A few parents assist those children who have no parents present. A few generally help the teacher with whatever needs to be done to make the class work. A few. But most parents turn all their attention to their own child.

I’ve written many times about the island mentality in America 2010. I see a country where people increasingly focus on their own family unit to the exclusion of others. Some believe this is the aftermath of cocooning wrought by 9/11. I contend that cocooning has transformed into islanding.

Some scientists say that the continents began as one land mass called Pangaea. Time and tectonics eventually tore Pangaea into smaller chunks that became the recognizable individual continents and islands.

In many ways, our communities and sense of common national identity are being torn asunder by the tectonic shifts of societal change. The entire idea of community increasingly suffers when people turn their community into a sea filled with tiny islands with a common sea between them, but no real contact between the islands. The sea, rather than being a means of travel and connection, becomes a moat that keeps others out.

What is particularly sad is that these human islands “evolve” their own ecoculture that, in time, cannot abide the ecocultures of the other islands. Anyone who follows the travails of Australia in that country/island’s fight against cane toads and rabbits knows that being too different in one’s ecoculture wreaks havoc when an outsider comes in.

So, some islands work very hard to keep the outsiders out. And the fracture lines keep widening.

This should not surprise us, though. Darwinism, one of the core philosophies of contemporary society, wormed its way into the minds of too many people. We made peace with the “selfish gene” and incorporated “survival of the fittest” into our worldview. We see others as competition. “Only the strong survive.” We must protect our own, even if it comes at the expense of others individually and our communities as a whole. Or so it is said.

A couple months ago, I mentioned that the youth pastor at my church lamented his inability to get youth groups from other churches together to do combined community projects. Too many other churches feared their youth would be poached by a “competing” church. Island thinking exist in Christianity, too.

God didn’t make us to live as islands, though. Our families are not intended to be so sacrosanct that no one else is allowed in, or that others exist only to get in the family’s way.

This is especially true of the Church. Jesus repeatedly said that the family of God is not an island, that ANY who do the will of God are invited in. There are no strangers, only those who have not yet come into the fold. And on the cross, Jesus shattered the idea of boundaries of biological family by entrusting His mother to the care of His youngest follower, and vice versa.

If we are to be a true reflection of the Church that God intends, we have to get rid of the moat. We can’t be an island, other than to be a place of refuge amongst cultural and societal insanity. Because the model we have from the Bible is not an island. Nor does the Bible preach the nuclear family to the detriment of those whose biological family does not look like our own. The Church should NEVER be afraid of the outsider, because such was each one of us before Christ restored us.

Is it that hard to put down “our thing”—whatever it may be—to help another?

Do we not have some sense that we are diminished ourselves when others go wanting?

Why must we work so hard to protect our own that we have nothing else left over to give to those not our own?

Must we live by the survival of the fittest?

And lastly, why are we so proud of our personal island when God has no place for islands in His Kingdom?