Oddities

The Perfect Church

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Sainte-Chapelle church stained glassWith passion week arriving soon, we will begin to experience the high holy days of the Christian Church. We will also experience the dividing lines along which most Christian churches fall.

You see, you can tell a great deal about a church by what aspect of those days it glorifies:  Christ’s earthly ministry, His cross, His resurrection, or Pentecost.

Churches that ally themselves most with the earthly ministry identify with Christ’s love for the weak and broken people of the world and His relentless service to them.

Churches that ally themselves most with the cross identify with a lost individual’s status as a sinner, Christ’s sufferings on our behalf, and the wondrous freedom from sin purchased by Him.

Churches that ally themselves most with the resurrection identify with redemption, the new birth, and an eternity spent with God in heaven.

Churches that ally themselves most with Pentecost identify with the empowering of the new Church by the Holy Spirit to fearlessly go forth as saints to spread the Kingdom with signs and wonders accompanying.

I’ve see a lot of churches in America, but I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen the perfect church—one that ably allies itself with all four of the above in balance. I don’t know why that is so hard, and yet it is. We seem to like our one or two identifications, and that is about all we can manage.

I keep praying, though.

How Would Jesus Blog?

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I’ve been on the Internet since the time when it was the ARPANET defense network linking universities and the military.

I was emailing people in 1981.

I was at Carnegie Mellon University when the smiley was invented there.

I owned a 300 baud modem.

I watched USENET spring into being, with its rec dots and alt whatevers.

I played in a band with one of the guys who developed the Netscape browser.

I had my own domain name in 1997.

I beta-tested Google.

I was blogging in 2001.

In other words, my cyberspace geek cred is pretty high.

I say all that to say this: Online discourse is only getting worse.

One could say that this is because the intellectual elites have ceded the Web to the great unwashed. Cyberspace is now a commodity. And as with most commodities, anything now goes.

One could argue that the Second Law of Thermodynamics applies even to human conversations, and if the Internet is any reflection, no rebuttal would be forthcoming.

Let’s play a game.

Let’s pretend to be aliens from another dimension who happen to gain access to the Internet. And let’s say that we start reading about this thing called Christianity and the people who adhere to it.

What would our general impression be of Christian people?

If the Internet is the well of information from which we draw, then would it be unfair to characterize Christianity as a religion of anger and dissension?

I’m no alien, but I’ve been around long enough online to answer that question with a reluctant yes.

And it’s not just on the Internet. The general level of anger and dissension among Christians has reached a level that resembles nothing I can recall in my younger Christian days. Jesus weptIt’s like we’ve had our skin torn off and we think anyone and everyone is ready to throw salt on us.

I don’t understand the glee with which some Christians tear into others. I don’t understand respected pastors, who should know better, making smug tweets about this person or that. I don’t get it when people use online forums to gather wood for figuratively burning other Christians alive. I don’t get it that no one seems to ask if it’s wise to post that wicked barb before they hit the Enter key.

I don’t get the massive pride among some who feel they are always the best person to administer the corrective beat down. I don’t know where people get their imprimatur to verbally assault incomplete, imperfect brothers and sisters in the faith. And I don’t know why all this must occur online for the world to see.

The bent reed is broken. The smoldering ember snuffed.

Is anyone else grieved? God knows that I am. And if I am, I wonder what the average person who hasn’t been a Christian for almost 35 years thinks. That figurative “alien.”

I’m grieved that when I see Christianity represented on the Web by the ordinary adherents of that faith, so much of the discourse is angry. Angry at politicians. Angry at cultural leaders. Angry at Christian leaders. Angry at other Christians of extreme ordinariness. Angry at every perceived foe. Anger everywhere one turns, and especially on the Web.

Honestly, why would anyone want to be a part of that?

I’ve reached the point where I think we are doing the Lord a great disservice by all this anger. American Christians are now defined by what ticks us off. Or who ticks us off. And there’s not a lot of Jesus at the core of that.

The words of Jesus:

And he opened his mouth and taught them, saying:

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

“Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.

“Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.

“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.

“Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.

“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.

“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.

“Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

“Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

“You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled under people’s feet.

“You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.”
—Matthew 5:2-16

Rethinking Evangelicalism’s Tropes #1: “Rescue Those Who Are Being Taken Away to Death”

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In the late 1980s, I was an active footsoldier in Operation Rescue, the anti-abortion organization. Not a leader. Not an organizer. But one of the grunts who did the protests and paid for doing so. I have the battle scars. You may disagree with me if you will, but you can’t challenge my experiences.

I met some of the most concerned and dedicated people in Operation Rescue. Better people than I am. I was committed to the cause. For those others, though, the cause was their life.

I think there’s a powerful spiritual delusion that accompanies the pro-“choice” side. Planned Parenthood used to hide behind the mask of “helping women,” but their rabid opposition to General Electric’s 4D sonogram technology tore away that mask several years ago. Though the 4D technology would help women immensely, especially healthwise, it has the side effect (a negative one from Planned Parenthood’s perspective) of showing the developing fetus in crystal clarity. Makes it much harder to abort one’s child when that child flashes you a winning smile from the womb.

In short, Planned Parenthood doesn’t give a damn about women’s health. They love the money that comes from killing babies.

As for Operation Rescue, while it had a large Roman Catholic contingent, the most conservative of conservative Evangelicals made up the rest. A Rescue meeting had a lot of Bible in it, at least the ones I attended. Rescue’s name and rallying cry come from this passage in the Bible:

Rescue those who are being taken away to death; hold back those who are stumbling to the slaughter. If you say, “Behold, we did not know this,” does not he who weighs the heart perceive it? Does not he who keeps watch over your soul know it, and will he not repay man according to his work?
—Proverbs 24:11-12

The first sentence was the major theme, but what followed was often used for garnering new recruits for Rescue.

Today, I’m not active in Operation Rescue or the prolife movement. I haven’t been in 20 years. That said, I didn’t leave because of grudges or snits. I left because I felt there had to be a better way.

It’s not that babies weren’t saved. They were. But it seemed a lot of effort went into Rescue that could have been more effective if channeled into the mission Jesus gave us:

Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
—Matthew 28:19-20

Jesus adds this insight:

For the one who is not against us is for us.
—Mark 9:40

We tend to interpret the Bible willy-nilly. Whatever suits our position winds up quoted.

But how can we as the Church interpret anything from the Bible without a reference back to the mission Jesus gave us? I would contend that everything we do as Christians must be viewed through the lens of Matthew 28:19-20 or else we are off our mission, the mission the Lord gave us straight from his lips.

In light of this, how then should we interpret Proverbs 24:11-12?

Are we to rescue babies alone? No, we are to rescue anyone being led away to death. And since anyone whose name is not written in the Lamb’s book of life will taste the eternal agony of the second death, working to rescue those stumbling toward it becomes our primary job. The only way to interpret Proverbs 24:11-12 is that we are tasked to ensure that no one, no matter how deserving, ends up being led off to that hellish slaughter.

Physical death is horrible. In the case of the death of the unborn, babies being ripped apart in the womb should shock and horrify anyone whose soul hasn’t been seared. But the second death is an order of magnitude more horrifying than any of that. We just choose not to think it is.

Leonard Ravenhill, a favorite of this blogger, wrote this:

Charlie Peace was a criminal. Laws of God or man curbed him not. Finally the law caught up with him, and he was condemned to death. On the fatal morning in Armley Jail, Leeds, England, he was taken on the death-walk. Before him went the prison chaplain, routinely and sleepily reading some Bible verses. The criminal touched the preacher and asked what he was reading. “The Consolations of Religion,” was the reply. Charlie Peace was shocked at the way he professionally read about hell. Could a man be so unmoved under the very shadow of the scaffold as to lead a fellow-human there and yet, dry-eyed, read of a pit that has no bottom into which this fellow must fall? Could this preacher believe the words that there is an eternal fire that never consumes its victims, and yet slide over the phrase without a tremor? Is a man human at all who can say with no tears, “You will be eternally dying and yet never know the relief that death brings”? All this was too much for Charlie Peace. So he preached. Listen to his on-the-eve-of-hell sermon:

“Sir,” addressing the preacher, “if I believed what you and the church of God say that you believe, even if England were covered with broken glass from coast to coast, I would walk over it, if need be, on hands and knees and think it worthwhile living, just to save one soul from an eternal hell like that!

For all the time and energy the prolife movement has invested in fighting for the unborn, I keep wondering how many more gains we could have made if we focused on ensuring not one soul ended up in hell forever. Converts to our faith don’t tend to abort their unborn children. And in making those converts a priority, aren’t we in fact rescuing two people?

Sometimes, the good is the enemy of the best.