Counterculture

Thoughts on Halloween and Reformation Day

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We interrupt this Cerulean Sanctum “Being the Body” series to bring you the ubiquitous Godblogger posturing on Halloween and Reformation Day. I’ve seen scads of previous analyses of the former over the last few years, but now there’s a push to bring the latter out from under the covers. Better discuss both.

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As to Halloween, last year I wrote a piece detailing why I now opt out even though I was raised in a Christian household that had no problems with the “holiday.”

The Obligatory “Halloween Is Bad” Post

Rob Wilkerson over at Miscellanies on the Gospel is one of my favorite bloggers. His recent post on Halloween is outstanding:

A Gospel Perspective on Halloween Horror

I don’t know what it is about folks from charismatic and Pentecostal backgrounds, but they seem most leery of Halloween, almost without exception. Meanwhile, Christian folks on the far, far side away from that perspective seem to be more tolerant of trick or treating.

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Celebrating Reformation Day, for me, is a little like remembering someone you loved dearly who has passed away. As a dyed-in-the-wool, anti-RCC Protestant, I would love to rousingly celebrate the anniversary of Luther’s pounding his 95 Theses into the cathedral door at Wittenberg. But I think we’ve squandered a lot of what the Reformation bought us.

I don’t think we practice most of the backbone concepts of the Reformation, even in the most ardent Reformed churches. I grew up Lutheran, and even so I ran into disconnects all over the place.

Take the idea of the priesthood of all believers. Nothing in our practice of our church life proves that we believe this foundational truth of the Reformation one iota. Too many of our churches have pastors who lord it over their congregations, disempowered congregants who are routinely told that only the specially trained (read “seminarians”) are equipped to minister, Martin Luther sticks it to the RCCand vicious church factions debating the same “who is greater?” nonsense that got the disciples in hot water with Jesus. Truthfully, our practice of the priesthood of all believers better resembles that classic line from George Orwell’s Animal Farm.

I know in my own life I’ve encountered that hypocrisy more times than I can count, none more glaring than my experience in the church Martin Luther founded. I worked at a Lutheran camp a couple summers and got in serious trouble with the leadership of the camp for baptizing kids who converted to Christ. Seems like a perfectly ordinary action to take with new believers, baptizing them and all. From the reaction of the leadership, though, you would’ve thought I’d killed those kids à la Jason of Friday the 13th movie fame.

At sole issue was the fact that I wasn’t a pastor. When I countered that the Philip who baptized the Ethiopian eunuch wasn’t an apostle but a guy who waited on the tables, I was lucky not to be stuffed into a canvas sack and thrown into the lake right then and there. So much for the priesthood of all believers. I guess some priests are more equal than others.

I could walk through the Reformation’s five solas and ask how we practice them in reality. Just the other day, I experimented by Googling the phrase “What must I do to be saved?” and perused the answers provided by leading Protestant Web sites. If that cursory survey is any indication, we’ve got to do a whole lot more to be saved than have faith in Christ, trust His Scriptures, and receive His grace. (Though I think soli Deo gloria still holds up in all cases.) Sadly, at the site of one prominent Reformed blogger, the list of requirements for salvation (according to the sermon by Cotton Mather posted there) included a whole lot more than what we got out of the entirety of the Reformation. Somehow, we Protestants have found a way to obscure the simple answer to that most necessary question. In many ways, we’re back where we were just prior to the Reformation.

But I guess the main reason that I’m not quite as pumped about Reformation Day as some others is my speculation about Martin Luther. I fear that some of the loudest celebrants of Reformation Day might be the very same people who would call for a good old burning at the stake for Martin Luther if he showed up today and pounded a new set of 95 Theses on the doors of our modern Evangelical churches. Love to see them Catholics squirm, but don’t tell us to give up our modern indulgences.

Too many of us Protestants have capped Christianity at the Reformation. We believe that nothing more can come out of Christ’s Church than what we got out of the Reformation nearly five hundred years ago. In some ways, we’re like the fifty-year-old shoe salesman at K-Mart who once quarterbacked his high-school team to a state championship. Our entire lives revolve around that day when we threw the winning touchdown. We relive it, revel in it, and on and on. But we let that one event in time become the be all and end all of our existence. It can never get better than that time, nor can we ever let it possibly come close.

But oh what we may be missing because we can’t see the opportunities that lie before us today!

Don’t get me wrong. I supremely value the Reformation. I also supremely value practicing what we preach and asking if we need a new reformation even better than the old one.

Now what church will let me nail that to their door today?

Being the Body: How to Forge Real Community, Part 3

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In this fourth installment of the series “Being the Body,” we’ll look at the major conceit of most of us in the Western Church. I believe this fallacy prevents us from becoming the real community of Jesus Christ on Earth. If we can get over this lie we’ve believed, great things will happen in our midst.

The Scriptures say this:

The earth is the LORD’s and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein….
—Psalms 24:1 ESV

[King David praising God before the assembly of Israel:] “But who am I, and what is my people, that we should be able thus to offer willingly? For all things come from you, and of your own have we given you….”
—1 Chronicles 29:14 ESV

“The silver is mine, and the gold is mine,” declares the LORD of hosts.
—Haggai 2:8 ESV

“Behold, all souls are mine; the soul of the father as well as the soul of the son is mine….”
—Ezekiel 18:4a ESV

“For none of us lives to himself, and none of us dies to himself. If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord. So then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s.
—Romans 14:7-8 ESV

“You are not your own, for you were bought with a price…..”
—1 Corinthians 6:19b-20a ESV

Here’s the short summation: you and I own nothing. We don’t even own ourselves. It’s all the Lord’s.

But do we Evangelicals, so enamored of our supposed political and economic power, truly believe that? The way we live would suggest otherwise. Yet for us to embody the fullness of Christ as His Body, we need to realize an important truth:

#6 – Real community can only come about when we understand that everything God has given us must be in play for others at all times, especially for those within the community of faith.

If we truly believe the Scriptures above are true, then we have no right to ever withhold needful things from others. Sort of explodes our fallacious notion of “mine,” doesn’t it?

If our current church culture is any indication, no lie from hell can outdo our allegiance to “mine.” We may talk about original sin and point to the lies children tell as proof, but a sixteen-month-old child whose first words consist of “mine” is just as convincing a proof of original sin as lying. Unfortunately, though we discourage the lying, we smirk at the grab for what’s mine. “Isn’t that cute, hon? He’s destined to be a corporate raider some day!”

As we know, “mine” knows no boundaries. It doesn’t stop at the expensive items like cars or houses. Our love for what we convince ourselves is ours extends down to the most insignificant things.

The Bible says this:

He who loves money will not be satisfied with money, nor he who loves wealth with his income; this also is vanity. When goods increase, they increase who eat them, and what advantage has their owner but to see them with his eyes? Sweet is the sleep of a laborer, whether he eats little or much, but the full stomach of the rich will not let him sleep.
—Ecclesiastes 5:10-12 ESV

We can’t stop accumulating wealth can we? Fifteen years ago, everything I owned in the world could fit into the back of a Honda Civic Hatchback. If it all got stolen, I wouldn’t miss it.

A self-examination: If you’re reading this and are married, isn’t it amazing how much more stuff you’ve picked up since saying, “I do”? It costs money to insure all that accumulation, too, because we all worry what might happen to it. Not so much that we would lose it, but that once it was all gone, people would treat us differently. We wouldn’t be as affluent. People might actually think we were—God forbid—poor!

How many of us reading this sleep a little less comfortably at night than we did when we owned nothing? That sleep largely suffers for one enormous reason. Few of us, deep down inside, can rest assured that our church communities would draw alongside us should we suffer financial ruin. We fear that our churches are not convinced of the following:

“If your brother becomes poor and cannot maintain himself with you, you shall support him as though he were a stranger and a sojourner, and he shall live with you. Take no interest from him or profit, but fear your God, that your brother may live beside you. You shall not lend him your money at interest, nor give him your food for profit.”
—Leviticus 25:35-37 ESV

God did NOT say that He Himself would rain down food, shelter, or clothing, but that this help should come from the community of faith! The act of true fear of God within a believing community is that we cover the needs of our brothers and sisters.

Just this weekend I heard from yet another brother in dire financial straits. (We’ve never met face-to-face, but I know him from his online writings.) Helping handThe broken-record response from his church? “Sorry, we won’t help you.” They have the financial resources, so they could help; they just won’t. They love money more than they love this brother or their own community.

I have one word for that: sickening. Are there any churches left that fear the Lord?

We watch faithful brothers and sisters in Christ go through bankruptcies and other financial disasters without lifting a finger to help, then we excoriate them for it. There’s not a person reading this right now who doesn’t have a decent, hard-working family in his or her church enduring financial hell. What are we doing for them? Anything? Or are we blaming them instead, trying to find a reason for their ruin much the same way the Pharisees sought to find a reason for the original blindness of the man Jesus healed?

Do we know that it’s for the glory of God that we help our brothers and sisters in their time of need?

Folks, if the rest of the world around us still wants to cling to “mine,” it means that those of us who understand that it’s all the Lord’s are even harder pressed to pick up their slack. We have to decide that we value Christ more—and subsequently the ones He died to save—than we value material wealth. We must desire to live like this:

And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. And awe came upon every soul, and many wonders and signs were being done through the apostles. And all who believed were together and had all things in common. And they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all, as any had need. And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved.
—Acts 2:42-47 ESV

If it means we do without a 60″ plasma TV so we have funds to help a family who can’t pay their electric bill, then we do without.

If it means we don’t go out of town on a vacation this year so we can pay the rent of a family hit by unemployment, then we don’t go. (And our children learn a valuable lesson about what is important in God’s eyes.)

If it means that we eat canned soup the rest of the week so we can make a weekly feast for all those in our church who can’t even afford canned soup, then we eat canned soup the rest of the week.

If it means that we have to sell something of “ours” so that a family in our church can keep a roof over their heads, then we sell it.

Because we believe that Jesus Christ is Lord.

Because we believe that He died and rose again to forge a community of saints who will live forever in Paradise.

Because our reward is in Heaven, not in this life.

Because we know that unless we start living that way, we will never see revival in our churches or the kind of Christian community that brings healing, peace, unity, love, and the presence of the Holy Spirit. The kind of community that has the lost taking notice.

Putting what God has given us into play means more than handouts, too. It means we open our homes to others because those houses are God’s. It means we give our time and effort to help others, because we don’t own time and effort, either. It means we don’t hold exclusive rights to our family members, making other families our family, too. When we finally realize that we own nothing, what we can give to others is magnified a thousandfold. And community is built.

We’ve believed the lie of “mine.” But there is no “mine.” It’s all God’s. And His command to us is that we give what He’s given us to those in need, especially those in the community of faith. Because that’s what the Body does, it looks after itself. If the heart is sick, the whole body is sick. All suffer together.

And when we look after each other, all rejoice together, too.

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Being the Body: How to Forge Real Community, Part 2

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As we’ve seen, the Lord views real community among us believers as critical to our spiritual health and of those yet to enter our community. Despite wanting vital interaction with others, we stumble when it comes to execution. How do our churches forge real community?

Today, I want to discuss a simple way we can build a better community of faith. I’ll focus on one common item already found in most churches.

#5 – Leverage your church directory.

    Even now I can hear the faint mouse clicks as hundreds flee this site for greener Web pastures. Stick with me, though.

I believe our church directories are one of the most underutilized resources we have for building community.  While nothing beats face to face interaction, Searching the listings...our church directories are a database for community growth and blessing if done correctly. I acknowledge up front that it would be better for us to learn about other people in our church through sharing meals with them in our homes, but we need a babystep back toward that reality. Expanding our vision for what a church directory affords us can get us to that better place. Then when we’re doing our community life better we can use the directory as a fallback in the future, not a primary means of accomplishing community.

Before we begin exploring this more, I’d like to share a few verses. Much of what follows depends on our understanding a painful truth about dying to self and being raised into a community of faith:

You are not your own, for you were bought with a price.
—1 Corinthians 6:19b-20a ESV

For he who was called in the Lord as a slave is a freedman of the Lord. Likewise he who was free when called is a slave of Christ.
—1 Corinthians 7:22 ESV

If I am not my own, if I am a slave of Christ, then what rights do I have as a Christian? None that have anything to do with personal privacy.

A dead man doesn’t have any privacy. We saw our right to privacy die at the foot of the cross. If we were free before, we’re slaves to Christ now. We don’t get to call the shots, Jesus does. And as part of being born into Him and the Church He died to create, we don’t get a say about our own privacy. Just as the clay can’t talk back to the potter, we can’t tell God we don’t want to be a part of community. Nor can we tell Him we’re not happy about losing our so-called right to privacy.

The Christian isn’t a private creature. The Christian lives and dies to a Lord who lived and died for others. Again, our focus is outside ourselves. For that reason, a true Christian gives up any pretenses to privacy.

Now this doesn’t mean a Christian can’t rent a cabin in the deep woods for a week and get away for an occasional  break. What it does mean is that our lives are now lived openly, with a servant heart toward others, even if those others infringe on our privacy from time to time.

You won’t hear that message from too many pulpits because if we truly believed that (as opposed to believing the American civil religion we tend to bow to), our lives would be drastically altered by living it out. Radically counterculture, eh?

A church directory is not a private thing. I’ve heard anecdotal reports that more and more Christians are opting out of having their personal info included in their church directories because of privacy issues. I know for a fact that fewer churches are attempting church directories in the first place, either because they’re megachurch-sized (I’ll speak to this issue in a future post in this series) or they’re getting a big ho-hum from their congregation.

Tough. A church directory is essential. Trust me on this one. My first explanation says it all:

a. We’re praying through our church directories, right?

    If we want one reason why our churches are ineffective, it starts here. The people who make up our churches are not praying for each other. If we truly believe that prayer matters, how can we not being praying over every person in our church? Good grief, whenever I hear someone like John Eldredge spouting off about how men in our churches are bored, I’ve got to ask if those men are praying over every person who walks through the doors of their church! Who has time to be bored when we’ve got such an enormous task ahead of us covering each other in prayer? I’d go so far as to say that we should have praying over the church directory inserted into the everyday service we perform when we become members of a church. A-1 priority. Church leaders, I implore you to consider this if you’re not already doing it at your church.

Here’s a way to start. Break up the alphabet into sections, A-E, F-J, K-N, O-S, T-Z. If a family’s last name is Edelen, the Edelen family would pray for other families in the section that corresponds to their last name, in this case A-E. Do that for a set period of time, then have the families move onto the next section. Edelens would then pray for those in F-J. Every day, pray for three families in that section, praying for each individual within each family.

That kind of covering prayer can be tweaked, so a million options exist. But church leaders should let their congregants know that praying through the church directory is one of the ways the church functions, and therefore it’s expected of everyone.

Praying through the church directory opens up myriad possibilities for community growth and bonding. I know that I would want to know more about the people I’m praying for, wouldn’t you? I might even pick up the phone and call those families to find our how I can pray more specifically. I’d also like to know how those prayers I’m praying with others are coming out. What a blessing it is to hear of prayers answered. But if you’re like me, you hear about answered prayer far too infrequently for it to have any impact on your own faith for big requests. Think how blessed we would be if our entire church were soliciting prayer requests, praying for those requests, then actually hearing those prayers answered!

It can start with praying through the church directory.

b. Faces matter. So do names.

    We humans are visual. Any anxiety we have about interacting with others is dramatically reduced when we can routinely match a name in a church directory with a face. For that reason, spend whatever it costs to get pictures in your church directory. Pictures make praying through the church directory even more effective.

When you go for a visual directory, make certain that the names of individuals within families are correctly noted in captions below the pictures. If a family has five teenage sons (God have mercy on them!), we should know which teen face matches which teen name. While Dale Carnegie isn’t a spiritual mentor in the slightest, he was right about one thing: a person loves to hear his own name. Our names matter in community. We need to get them right as practical proof that we care about the people in our church.

c. Tell us everything.

    Here’s where the privacy pushback comes in.

In order to have a community that seeks the best for every person within that community, we need to be open. We can’t hold back information that can be helpful to other members of the community.

Long ago, we used to know what others did for a living. Chances were that Millers operated the town mill, Smiths manned the blacksmithing duties, while the Taylors made the clothes.

Today, our work lives are far more complex than they once were, nor do they align with the rest of our life experiences, even our college majors. But as believers in community, our work matters not only to our employers, but to each other. Community necessitates that I know what your job is at your company. That helps me to give you business; your financial health matters to me because you’re part of our community.

It extends beyond work, too. Knowing your hobbies and talents can better allow me to join in those hobbies with you or leverage those talents to the betterment of not only myself, but the entire community.

We need to go beyond a name, address, and phone number. Knowing what teens have completed childcare courses can better help me choose a babysitter. Knowing who in the church speaks Spanish can help my child when he or she’s learning the language. Knowing who lived in Silicon Valley for ten years can help me should I need to move there.

Options abound. Put the directory on the Web and give church members a special login to access the info. Given that most people have computer access, a church can keep the info up to date with an online list of the talented people within the church.

Only your church community can decide how much info is too much. Personally, I think a church directory should move beyond a name, address, and telephone number to encompass full biographies of the people who attend our churches. If we want to better unite our people in community, that kind of information is priceless.

Communities of long ago knew this kind of detailed information, but today we barely know the names of people in our churches. We need to attempt this kind of transparency. God intended us to network with each other and those outside the church proper, yet when I look around, too many of us know hardly anything about the person sitting next to us in the pew. A more robust church directory would go a long way to fixing that problem.

Can we consider doing more with our church directories? If the world is hard to navigate as a community, how much harder is it to handle as individuals cut off from each other? Yet that kind of disconnection typifies our lives in America 2006. We don’t know anyone beyond a handful of people, and what we know is so shallow as to not help us or others when times are tough.

More community-building ideas to come…

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