Church Issues

When the Truth Strikes Out

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Once again, they’re doubling the size of the local daycare facility. They doubled it just a couple years ago. In a town of about 3,000.

The latest statistics show that the average American is rapidly approaching working a ten hour work day. Couple this with a daily commute of close to an hour, and you have a country in which people just aren’t home.

Five years ago, the majority of families we knew were single-wage-earner households. Now, almost none are.

Into these statistics wade several parachurch organizations that tell us exactly how Christian families should look:

  1. The father works outside the home.
  2. The father is the spiritual leader of the family.
  3. The mother stays home with the children and, preferably, does not work.
  4. If she must work, she works from home.
  5. The father must always be the primary breadwinner.
  6. Unless parents wish to abandon their children to the spirit of the age, they best homeschool.

Hmm.

On the surface, those are all nice ideas. The problem comes when the parachurch organization uses them to gauge the spiritual health of a family, or to tell certain families they aren’t cutting it. They’ll use Bible verses in their accusations, often in a haphazard manner, to prop up their assessments.

I’m troubled by the “you’re in, you’re out” nature of some of these diktats. When I examine these standards, I have to ask how they reflect most people’s realities. If they don’t, then I would hope that, like a good change-agent, the parachurch organization would address the problems and seek solutions.

I would hope.

Let’s look at one issue above and see how it works in the real world.

I’m all for paternal leadership in the home. I think that’s as God intends, but with an understanding that a godly wife can often hear the Lord as well or better than her husband from time to time. (I’m sort of a wishy-washy complementarian with a few select egalitarian leanings. )

But I simply must ask this: what kind of leadership can we expect of any man if he’s out of the home most of the waking day? Where's Dad?With the growing amount of time spent at work and in the car during the commute, should we be surprised that a father’s authority at home gets taxed by the very lack of his presence most of the day?

Now, you would think that an organization whose whole reason for existing is to uphold paternal leadership at home would be doing something–anything–to combat this trend that takes men out of the home all day. You would think.

But then you’d be wrong.

Last year, I wrote several e-mails to a well-known parachurch organization about this very issue. I asked them what practical means they were taking to help families keep their men at home. They wrote a reply reiterating their standard, but ignored my question concerning their plan to help Christian men meet that standard. When I followed-up with an e-mail asking if the organization was meeting with corporate leaders across the nation in order to advocate for shorter work weeks so that employees could spend more time at home helping their families, I got a rather terse response saying they weren’t doing anything like that.

In the end, they still had a standard, but no way to make it practical in the lives of men struggling against the business world’s expectation of increasing hours (and with no increasing pay to compensate, either).

I asked that same organization about the tendency for businesses today to hire women over men because they can pay women less (and because government quotas with money behind them abet this plan, especially when it concerns minority women). This puts men out of work, and subsequently, many men find themselves having to take jobs that pay less than their wives. The second fallout of this is now both spouses have to work in order to make what the man made before he got RIF’ed. What was the organization’s solution? Silence. The practical steps they were taking to combat this? Nothing.

After a while, one can go through every single standard an organization like that upholds and find that, while they love upholding it, they possess no means to help anyone else meet that standard. How tragic!

Imagine that NASA discovers a planet just beyond Pluto whose surface contains an unusual liquid that bubbles up from within that planet’s core. NASA scientists have almost conclusive proof that a few drops of this liquid, if harnessed, would forever power every energy-using device on Earth. Then NASA issues a press-release stating it has no intentions of sending any craft to that planet to retrieve this precious liquid. They’ve already told their scientists not to pursue further spectral analysis. Nor will they let any other scientists examine the data on the liquid so that it might be synthesized on Earth.

Do you think folks would be furious?

Where’s the fury then when Christian organizations demand a certain way of living, yet offer no means or help to make that living possible?

Truth is never meant to be used as a cudgel, but as a means to help others live life more abundantly. If the guardians and wielders of truth only use truth to shame others and make them live in a perpetual state of guilt with no possible escape, hasn’t the truth struck out?

Christians MUST offer truth to the world. But to do so in such a way that it becomes another set of shackles isn’t New Testament Christianity.

I believe that one of the reasons people today don’t consider Christianity a viable truth comes from our perpetual offering of that truth with no practical expression. For you or me to understand truth, it must intersect our lives. It can only transform us when it indwells us. And to indwell us, it must have a way for us to live it.

I keep wondering who the Christian leader will be who holds out a standard and then helps everyone meet it. I hope that Christian leaders interested in godly families will speak out against the economic forces threatening to destroy us.

And so I keep wondering and hoping…

It’s Never Enough Until Your Heart Stops Beating

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If you don’t already know, I play drums. Four weeks ago, I got lost in the moment during worship at church and misunderstood a gesture by one of the other worship team members as the signal end a song. Not remembering how far along we were into that song, I complied and the whole thing ground to a quick halt. This left the lead guitarist unprepared for the next song, as he was lost in the moment, too.

Oops. As someone who attempts to be professional in his playing, I don’t make an enormous number of boneheaded mistakes like that.

Later, I was told by someone that my mistake resulted in the quenching of the Spirit. I know in my heart that this isn’t true because the Holy Spirit isn’t so timid that a missed cue sends Him flying away. This isn’t an incantation, folks.

Still, a nagging doubt of my skills remained.

The next Sunday—Easter—rolled around and a packed church greeted us as I sat down on my drummer’s throne. Our set had a number of songs we’d not practiced fully, so I was on pins and needles considering the previous week.

What happened next could best be described in my view as “a disaster.” Because we sometimes extend songs if the mood hits, endings get dictated by whomever leads the song. I play along until I get a cue to end. Easter Sunday, yours truly, my cue radar on hypersensitive, proceeded to take three slight gestures by song leaders as “let’s end this”—only to end the songs prematurely. This happened on each of the last three songs we played, each ending worse than the one before.

The people in the seats didn’t know any better. The vast majority didn’t catch the mistakes. But I could barely get off the stage. I didn’t hear the message. I don’t think I heard anything anyone said. The afternoon stunk. The evening followed in kind. The Monday after resembled the dark-hued one that New Order (or Fats Domino, for all you oldsters) sang about.

New Order also sang the following:

That’s the way – shellshock.
Hold on! It’s never enough,
It’s never enough until your heart stops beating.

I talk to people and it never ceases to amaze me how many live in perpetual shellshock. No matter what they do, it’s never enough. Never enough until their hearts stop beating.

I look at what we’re doing to ourselves and wonder if the cost to keep up with the Joneses, to never let our guard down for one moment lest we stumble and the herd of stampeding elephants behind us run us over, is worth it.

I dare any married couple with children to arrange a get-together with five other similar couples. How far does the calendar spool out before a mutually open date shows up—if at all? Then the pressure mounts.

When our culture only likes a winner, everyone fights to win. But what of the losers? And if there’s only one winner, aren’t most of us losers?natlamp.jpg

When our culture praises a life set awhirling, how do we turn off the spin cycle?

The iconic magazine cover at right summarizes our dilemma. Are we the dog? Or are we the consumer? Don’t we lose in either case?

I think too many of us feel like we have a gun pointed at our heads and that at any second someone or something may squeeze the trigger. We rationalize that if we only do this better or that more quickly, the gun will magically disappear.

Or we feel the pressure to conform to the voices yelling at us through our culture. Sadly, we may feel as if our churches scream the same message as the culture. They tell us what we should be doing, but give us no tools or assistance to make that command possible. In some ways, we’re left attempting what they say for fear of worse consequences, even if we can’t make what they say work.

It’s never enough. And the heart beats on, though more anxiously.

I used to think that frenzy and performance stood as distinct traits, but now I’m beginning to see they feed off each other. They combine like nitro and glycerine to explode in our lives, leaving us shellshocked.

Yesterday afternoon, my family attended a wildflower walk hosted by the Audubon Society. Jack in the Pulpit, Spring Beauty, Blue Phlox, Trillium, Yellow Ragwort. Flowers. In the woods. For hours.

Driving home, I wondered how many people would consider that time ill-spent because the dividends don’t leap out. Or how many have so scheduled their lives they can’t possible find the time to stop and consider a fragile flower not even a quarter inch across.

I’ve got to believe that a culture that hurtles here and there loses its soul. If we’re living our lives under the mantra that it’s never enough until our hearts stop beating, then perhaps we’re already dead.

Someone has to stand up and oppose this performance-oriented frenzy of activity. And more than just one of us. We can’t do this alone or else we simply won’t generate the inertia to change our culture.

Yes, it’s a matter of prayer. But more than that, it’s Christians playing the counterculture card and doing so with their very lives.

We want to see Christ lifted up, to win the world for Him, yet we’re either stuck in the spin cycle or sidelined by shellshock.

Something’s gotta give.

{Image: One of the most recognized magazine covers of all-time, National Lampoon, January 1973, ASME‘s #7 cover of the period 1965-2005.}

How to Be a Godblogger Who Matters…

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Lately, I’ve been besieged with pleas for me to…

…review books in a sort of “reviews for links” mutually beneficial pact.
…join a network of bloggers.
…sell ad space on Cerulean Sanctum.
…list my site on the latest Christian group blogroll.

All four have been troubling, but only one of those will receive the most attention in this post. Care to guess which?

* I like books, but I can’t do book reviews. I simply don’t have the time. While the Canadian government has successfully cloned Tim Challies so he can attend conferences, review books and DVDs, write books, work as a Web designer, and post meaningfully 365 days a year for years on end, I stand for hours at a time somewhere in the middle of my house mumbling, “Now what was I doing?” Like everyone else, I blame George W. Bush for halting the American counterpart to Canada’s wildly successful human cloning program. I suspect, though, that should a clone of Dan Edelen ever be delivered to my household, the two of us would collide in the middle of the house, stare at each other vacantly for hours, and eventually get around to asking in stereo, “Now what were we doing?”

* Network of bloggers? Last time I looked, they called that The Internet. It’s some little doodad Al Gore devised out of carbon offsets.

* Long ago, I promised not to sell ad space here. While some bloggers make $10,000+ a month off ads, I spend about that much per month trying to fend off hotlinkers, sploggers, and a host of other vampiric creatures from the nether regions of cyberspace. Selling ads makes you beholden to your advertisers, and since I manage to cheese off just about everyone in Christendom at some point or other during the course of my regular blogging, I can’t see how that would ever work. Don’t want to sell my soul to the company store, if you catch my drift. I do put in a few hours a day on this blog, and that does take me away from paid work, so I’m considering a tip jar. And yes, I’ve been sweating that consideration for about eighteen months now—but that’s not what this post is about.

* No this post is about that last item of the four: listing my site on (and subsequently hosting) group blogrolls. Seems like a score of people are pushing their homegrown group blogroll or award badge. Just Add Your Link Here! and you’ll be assured of instant blogging success! Here’s the code! Just shove it into your sidebar! You’ll be at the top of the charts in no time!

Hmm.

I started blogging in the Cambrian Period of blogdom, when giant Web Trilobites roamed cyberspace, feasting on the dying flesh of Usenet. Glenn Reynolds was known mostly as a geeky law professor in a Red State, while James Lileks was actually still shopping at Kmart. Hey, everyone's got a blog, don't they?Back then, having anyone link to your blog seemed tantamount to a marriage proposal, as if you were legally indebted to the linker. To not reciprocate the link sent shockwaves through blogdom, causing grown men to faint dead away and women to spontaneously combust.

Nowadays, though, some people must spend all day signing up for (and hosting) group blogrolls and adding yet another award badge to their ever-increasing numbers of sidebars. It used to be a sort of knowing wink-wink, this game. See, these newfangled sites like Technorati and N.Z. Bear’s TTLB Ecosystem will rate your site and—clap!—PUMP YOU UP, or at least pump up your blog, so you can, well…be pumped up.

Now I admit I have a TTLB Ecosystem listing on my site. I joined the Ecosystem during the Permian Period of blogdom. Thought the darn thing kind of cute, truth be told. But what then to make of all these folks trying to get me to join their own group blogroll?

Now before I go any further in this little exposé, I want to put up a disclaimer:

I’M JUST HAPPY THAT ANYONE READS CERULEAN SANCTUM.

I mentioned recently that my failure to slavishly check my logs led to 200,000 hits in the last three months from MySpace users hotlinking my image files (all public domain images, ironically). Visitor logs? For me, it’s not about how many readers this blog gets. I was ecstatic when I got a comment early into my blogging life. I’m still ecstatic when you folks comment here. Tells me people do read what I write. But it’s not about numbers and never has been.

Unfortunately, it seems to be about numbers for some other Christian folks and that bugs me, especially when we consider why it matters to them. So I did some digging over at The Truth Laid Bear.

If you take a look at the Blogdom of God over at TTLB, you’ll notice rankings listing the real movers and shakers in Godblogdom. You can also mosey over to check out the Ecosystem rankings. The two go together in that the higher ranked Christian blogs in the Ecosystem populate the tops of the Blogdom of God, too. As it should be.

Yet all is not what it appears to be, for if you starting looking behind those top Blogdom of God blogs, you begin to see a lot of unfamiliar blog names. Now I’m not going to name any of those blogs here, but if you’ve been blogging long enough, you get an idea of which blogs are the ones most people read. The same blog names keep cropping up as references in other blogs. (There’s a reason for this, which I’ll explain later.)

I decided to do a little detective work on those unfamiliar blogs at the upper echelons of the Blogdom of God and found a curious trend. Randomly picking out a bunch I’d never seen referenced anywhere else, I checked to see if they had any stat counters on their sites. Most of them did, because most people like to know how popular their blog is. What I found surprised me.

Many of those unfamiliar blogs proved unfamiliar because their stats showed hardly anyone read them. One of those top-ranked blogs got an average of just 29 hits a day. Several of them were under 100. But if that’s the case, how’d they get to be Large Mammals or Playful Primates in the Ecosystem, or wind up so high in the Blogdom of God rankings?

Answer: They had a gazillion outsider group blogrolls in their sidebars.

The TTLB Ecosystem loves blogs that contain a bevy of blogrolls. So do Technorati and the rest. This explains the sudden surge in people asking you and me to join their group blogrolls. Those folks load up their sidebars with group blogrolls like “Association of Reformed Bloggers,” “League of Christian Women Bloggers,” “Bloggers Against Arminian Bloggers,” “Bloggers Fighting Mad About This U2 Liturgy Thingie,” “The Cabal of Bloggers Who Think We Should Kill ‘Em All and Let God Sort ‘Em Out,” and “The Holy Exalted Host of Bloggers So Exclusively Reformed As to Deny Calvin a Chair in Our Club.” (Every once in a while you get a “Hey, Pentecostals Blog Too, So Can We Have Blogroll?” blogroll, but that one only has a dozen blogs on it, so technically it doesn’t count in this discussion.)

Anyway…

Some folks think this proliferation of hosted third-party blogrolls will push the Christian blogs displaying them up the charts of those ranking sites. They consider this the chance for us Christian bloggers to show the rest of the world that we’re a force to be reckoned with. Onward Christian Bloggers and all.

But loading up our sidebars with group blogrolls to artificially pump up our blog site rankings is precisely the wrong way to get the world to sit up and take notice.

I have one sidebar on this site, and two blogrolls, my own personal roll and Joe Carter’s. Joe’s been out there for a while, and his The Evangelical Outpost tops the charts because of hard work. Joe put up his group blogroll, The Church Directory, in an effort to let other Christian bloggers out there find other Christian blogs. I link to that blogroll because that’s how I saw it, too. For being one of the first to feature a diverse set of Christian blogs that crossed denominational lines, Joe’s blogroll made it into my sidebar.

Today, however, blogrolls proliferate at a rate unheard of when Joe created The Church Directory. And considering that most of these new group blogrolls feature the same blogs ad nauseum, the point gets lost. I don’t even look at these third-party group blogrolls anymore because I don’t have the time to scroll through a thousand blogs. Nor do I have the time to scroll through the sidebar at a Christian blog that loads up with twenty group blogrolls of mostly duplicated blog titles. While the Ecosystem loves to rank a blog with a trillion outgoing links near the top of its rankings, I’ve got to believe a better means exists for us Christians to make a stand for Christ in the blogosphere.

How about writing great content? Don’t posts that get us thinking make all the difference? If we Christian bloggers merely add noise to the signal, we’ll be ignored. Better that we write the kind of profound words that will have others linking to us rather than us linking somewhere else in an effort to look more important than we are. Honestly, why should we care that we’re in the top 5,000 blogs at Technorati if we got there only on a sidebar jammed with external links? If no one reads us, isn’t that counterproductive to the plan some of these bloggers have to use blogroll bloat to show how important Christianity is in the blogosphere?

We know the Bible. We know what happens to people who make themselves out to be bigger than they are. They get exposed. Then shamed.

When a blogger puts a dozen off-site-hosted group blogrolls in his sidebars, I ignore those rolls. Let’s be honest here. If someone offered you a thousand links that came from outside the blog you were visiting, what’s your chance of picking one name out of that list and finding something worth reading? Who has the time for that kind of random excursion through the blogosphere?

Those of you who have Cerulean Sanctum on one of your personal blogrolls (as opposed to these group blogrolls I’ve been discussing), I wish to thank you. People do take those small, personal blogrolls to heart. On some of the smaller blogs with limited numbers of blogs listed in their personal rolls, they do result in people coming over. I get links from other blogs that way.

Even then, I get far more traffic from people googling. They’re googling content. They’re looking for something in particular. Yes, some want the images, but even then, many drop me a line and later stay on as readers. For those looking for the written word, what ends up in text on Cerulean Sanctum matters. Some folks need help and they’re desperate to find it. If you’re a Christian blogger, fill your blog with meaningful words that will minister to others. Don’t fill it with someone else’s blogrolls.

Truth: If you’re a Christian blogger, prove Jesus Christ lives and breathes in you by offering Spirit-filled posts that build up others and point people to Him. Don’t waste your time playing a game of pumping up your blog ranking with a bunch of outsider blogrolls so you appear important. Be important by saying something important. If you do, folks who need to hear what you’re saying will find you.

Just something to think about.