Oddities

The ChristCon Con

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Each week in North America, thousands of Christians gather together in hundreds of different Christian conferences scattered across the continent. In the course of a year, millions will attend thousands of these Asleep in the Light ID Tagconferences to hear celebrity preachers preach, learn from massively credentialed Christian teachers, and enjoy fellowship with likeminded believers.

Yet we have no revival.

Pastors, worship leaders, and Sunday School teachers will attend conferences for pastors, worship leaders, and Sunday School teachers. Men, women, couples, singles, seniors, and youth all have conferences geared to their unique needs. We have countless denominations conferencing to handle policy and chart the future of their group.

Yet we have no revival.

We sponsor conferences on theology, ecclesiology, purity, pastoral care, eschatology, hermeneutics, biblical archeology, and any topic within Christendom we can imagine. We even have conferences on evangelism.

Yet we have no revival.

We drop millions of dollars on airfare, trainfare, boatfare, and gasoline to get to conferences. We line the pockets of innumerable conference speakers, teachers, facilitators, and facility owners. We have the monetary equivalent of the GDP of a small African nation to spend on lodging, dining, and even sightseeing within conference host cities.

Yet we have no revival.

On the other hand, in China, where the flames of revival burn white-hot, the Communist Chinese police hope against hope that the Chinese house churches will start arranging conferences. What better way to round up renegade Christian leaders by the conference-full, bind them in shackles, and toss them into some prison hell-hole—some never to be heard from again.

But born-again Chinese Christians know better, so they don’t hold conferences.

Consider:

Chinese Church: No Christian conferences. No one attending conferences. No money spent attending conferences. Yet revival gloriously blazes on.

North American Church: Thousands of Christian conferences yearly. Millions of people attending conferences. Untold millions of dollars spent attending conferences. Yet we have no revival.

Concerning the status of the North American Church and its love for conferences, the Bible supplies us an apt phrase: Chasing after wind.

I make no pretense toward the prophetic, but I have a word for us all:

One day, you and I will stand before the Lord at His Judgment Seat and He will ask us if we told the lost about Him, discipled others to spiritual maturity, fed the poor, clothed the naked, attended the sick, and visited the prisoner.

But He won’t be asking how many Christian conferences we attended.

Some will object to this post. I simply ask this: Are our churches so weak that we can’t disciple anyone to any reasonable level of maturity, so we have to send everyone running off to a plethora of conferences to take up the slack? If so, we should instead be staying home and fixing our churches with prayer, fasting, and faces-in-the-dust repentance. But do we do this? No. We pack people off to conferences. And as we’ve seen, we have thousands of conferences and yet we have no revival.

Do we understand how seriously we’re squandering the Lord’s resources? If we did, we’d get serious about this Faith we supposedly hold dear and stop treating it like a hobby (with fancy conferences that make us feel good about ourselves—yet accomplish next to nothing eternal).

What if each of us took the money we had allocated to yet another conference on our calendars and instead used that money to pay for medical care for the uninsured single mother with four kids who lives down the street? What if we took the weekend we would have spent with our posteriors planted in some padded theater seat soaking up a message we already know from yet another “gifted” speaker we’ve heard a bazillion times already and instead spent that time fixing up the house of one of the elderly in our congregation? What if we actually took all the things we’ve already learned about Jesus and put them to use telling others about Him and doing good works in His name so that when we have to stand before Him we look like sheep, not goats?

Perhaps if we raised the bar for those who get to attend conferences. Perhaps if we set a standard so that before we’re allowed to attend another conference we must help lead five people to Christ and disciple them to some semblance of Christian maturity.

Funny thing is, if we did that, I suspect that many of us would be asking what the point of conferences is anyway. Maybe then, our love for Christian conferences would be replaced by a love for the lost and for the brethren.

And then we would have revival.

The Other Jesus

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…but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.
—Luke 13:3b

As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Abide in my love.
—John 15:9

Who is the other Jesus? He’s the one we’re not worshiping.

Consider the two verses above. To some, they appear to reflect two different Jesuses: the Drill Sergeant Jesus and the Flower Child Jesus. The first Jesus will return to slay His enemies with the sword that comes out of His mouth. The Other JesusThe second Jesus encounters a bruised reed and will not break it, a smoldering wick and will not quench it.

We find the follower of the Drill Sergeant Jesus out on the street corner with a bullhorn, preaching hellfire and damnation. Such a follower is the hardcore evangelist depicted in the classic joke that ends with the punchline, “So, what’s the bad news?”

We find the follower of the Flower Child Jesus in a small group, hugging people and weeping, wondering aloud if it ever gets better than this. Because right now, right here, with these beautiful people, it’s heaven.

But no half-Jesus exists. Honestly, the Drill Sergeant Jesus follower and the Flower Child Jesus follower exist as caricatures of real Christians. Let’s get real, though; in many cases, American Christian theology and practice fall readily into one of those two camps.

You can explain nearly every deviant view of Christ in the American Church by how great a percentage we practice one idea of Jesus over the other. Unfortunately, if we’re not looking at the whole truth of who Jesus is, we’re missing the real Christ.

And it’s not just Jesus who suffers from our schizophrenic approach. We make God the Father out to be the Vengeful God of Law and Wrath vs. the Gentle God Who Desires We Call Him “Abba.” The Holy Spirit suffers even more. He’s the Giver of Gifts Like Administration or He’s the Giver of Gifts Like Tongues. Over there He’s the Inspirer of Scriptures set against the Inspirer of Contemporary Prophecy. And in that corner He’s…

All these divisions commit violence against the character of the Triune God, yet we witness these extremes daily within the modern American Church. We talk a great deal about worshiping the Lord in Spirit and in Truth, but it seems to me that these attempts at fracturing Him into whatever modality best serves us, rather than Him, mangles all attempts at truthful worshiping.

Remember, He is the Alpha AND Omega—and every letter in-between.

{Image: Top—Artist unknown. Bottom—Rembrandt, Christ Driving the Money Changers From the Temple, 1626}

Does God Help Those Who Help Themselves?

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I waited patiently for the LORD; he inclined to me and heard my cry.
—Psalms 40:1 ESV

Franklin said it, I believe it, that settles it!For more than a decade, I’ve been praying about an issue in my life. It’s not a sin issue, but a general guidance question troubling me. In some ways, it extends back to my youth.

The number of counselors who’ve added their advice to the problem increases over time, but the one similarity in all their counsel comes down to the old aphorism attributed to Ben Franklin, “God helps those who help themselves.”

I don’t know what it is about American Christianity that forces every Christian to abide by this rule. Our collective “doing” fervor spills over into the way we live out our faith, as if waiting isn’t just the hardest part—it’s simply stupid.

One of the most neglected verses in American Christendom states:

Unless the LORD builds the house, those who build it labor in vain. Unless the LORD watches over the city, the watchman stays awake in vain.
—Psalms 127:1 ESV

We bristle at the notion that we can’t do it ourselves. Yet look around at the expediency that passes for ministry in large swaths of the American Church and you’ll spy plenty of ministry projects in which the ministry built the house, God having little say in the construction. People will ooh and aah at the pretty thing that arose from nothing. Perhaps years later, the same folks will wonder why the pretty thing failed miserably.

Jesus said this:

“Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing. For whatever the Father does, that the Son does likewise.”
—John 5:19 ESV

An uncommon principle in American Christianity, that we should do nothing unless we see the Lord leading. I wonder what Christianity in this country would look like if we did nothing except what we saw the Father doing? Might this not transform every aspect of how we live the Faith?

I’ve talked out my own issue with some well-known ministries and their response always concerns me doing something, anything, so long as I’m doing. Doesn’t matter if the Lord’s building the house or not. Just do. Because it’s how they operate their own ministry.

Talk to leaders in Third World countries, though, and they wait until the Lord moves. This idea of “God can’t steer a parked car” doesn’t exist in their Christian playbook. They seek God until he makes a way where there is no way. They don’t go around trying to dynamite doorways out of granite just to be doing something.

Of course, my encounters with these do, do, doers of the word always leaves me wondering if I’m the one in the wrong. But then I read passages like this and I wonder:

“…apart from me you can do nothing.”
—John 15:5b ESV

Now I know that the LORD saves his anointed; he will answer him from his holy heaven with the saving might of his right hand. Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the LORD our God.
—Psalms 20:6-7 ESV

There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way to death.
—Proverbs 16:25 ESV

I also wonder if the doing zealots actually foul it up for those of us who wait—and vice versa. We’re the spanner in the works. Get us slothful waiters out of the way and maybe others could actually accomplish marvelous works for God the good, old-fashioned, American way.

I may be the nutjob here, but no way exists to avoid a verse like this:

Thus says the LORD: “Cursed is the man who trusts in man and makes flesh his strength, whose heart turns away from the LORD.
—Jeremiah 17:5 ESV

Go the arm of flesh route one too many times and the inevitable falling away occurs. And perhaps that’s the problem with the Church today. Too much dependence on singing Old Blue Eyes’ classic tune, “My Way,” got us into this jam.

Or maybe it’s just me.