Church Issues

Fire in China, Ashes in America

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God's torch is passing to Asia, and he is performing many miracles in China.
—American missionary David Lin

Diane over a Crossroads is starting a series looking at the underground Chinese Church. I'll be quoting liberally from her blog, Chinese Girl with Her Biblebut as always, it pays great dividends to read her post.

Every Godblogger I know tries to tell it like it is, but inevitably the vast majority of us are English-speakers of American and British extraction. No matter what we might think of ourselves, most of us are not that much different in how we reflect a Western Church philosophy with roots in Reformation Europe. Acculturated as we are within Evangelicalism (mostly), we also take on the sheen of our wealthy American and U.K. culture. Especially for those of us in the United States, our models for how to live out the Christian walk are inextricably linked to American Manifest Destiny, the American Dream, Rugged Individualism, and a "What's in it for me?" attitude.

Yet not every Christian in the world thinks or acts like we do. I know it's hard to believe, but we are not the measure of all things Christian.

Yesterday, I posted that our Western roots and over-reliance on Greek thought have led us into a pit of division, where sides must be chosen, for some have even wondered which hemisphere of our brains is more godly. While we seem to be obsessed with drawing dividing lines wherever we can stick our straight-edge, the non-Western world shows us a Christianity far less at odds with itself—or with the Gospel.

Take the simple act of prayer. Ask most Americans about prayer and they'll say they wholeheartedly believe in it, even if they don't do all that much of it daily. The Chinese underground Church takes a different stance. Not only are the leaders of those churches praying several hours each day, but they have older saints who are devoting themselves to prayer all day and most of the night.

A couple years ago I posted a comment to TheOoze Web site stating that I did not believe that the Church in America would ever see any kind of revival unless people started praying a minimum of two hours a day. The response was that two hours of daily time dedicated to nothing but prayer was too much to ask. TheOoze is an Emerging Church site, so I was not surprised by that reaction from the mostly sub-35 crowd there. But what has been eye-opening to me is that Emerging Church foes in the Traditional Church largely have the same response: two hours solely devoted to prayer is unreasonable given most people's circumstances.

If one assumes that we continue to follow the societal structures we've created in our "every man for himself" society hellbent on fifty hour work weeks, two hour commutes, and family quality time, then maybe two hours is too much to ask. But persecuted Chinese Christians are pulling it off. They seem to be loaded with praying people, but where are our Western prayer warriors? If we wonder why Christianity in the U.S. is in the doldrums, I think we should look no further than the woeful prayer lives that most of us have, from the newest believer up to the most senior pastor. What kind of vital faith do we expect to see when we try to squeeze by on a handful of minutes tossed heaven's way while we rush around like headless chickens?

I don't hear American Christians talk about breakthroughs in the Spirit the way the Chinese do, either. We tend to timidly toss in the towel when confronted with a mountain-sized challenge—or else we resort to the following:

  • Traditional Church – Form a committee to examine the challenge. Form another one when the original disbands because of in-fighting.
  • Emerging Church – Walk a labyrinth to clear our heads so we can think deep, spiritual thoughts about the challenge while asking, "What would Thomas Merton do?"
  • Seeker-Sensitive Church – Commission a demographic study to examine what most people think of the challenge, then design new programming that makes talking about the challenge culturally relevant.
  • Charismatic Church – Bring in a band of traveling prophets to have them scry the meaning of the challenge in terms of battle plans for Joel's Last Days Army.

What do Chinese house churches do? They fast and pray for as long as it takes for God to resolve the challenge. As one Chinese Church leader says it:

When there is a real resistance, the teams do not try to push the Gospel. They just go on their knees and wait on the Lord to hear His voice for direction on what to do. They just keep silent and continue to fast and pray. This is a very practical part of their lives.

Is that how our churches today—no matter what kind they might be—do anything?

Our Western tendency to compartmentalize the Faith is strange to Asian believers. They have a far more holistic view of the Gospel and how it plays out in everyday life. From Diane's post:

Brother Denny (an American missionary interviewer): How do the Acts of the Apostles compare to the Chinese church? What does the Chinese church believe about the Book of Acts?

Brother Paul (Chinese): They would say, "We are there. It is our normal Christian life." They believe that Acts is a demonstration of the normal Christian life. It is a testimony of the resurrected Christ, and He is still the same today. They do not believe that miracles have passed away.

Brother Ren (Chinese): We have to understand that the Gospel that is preached in China, is a little bit different. The emphasis is not only intellectual and mental messages. It is fifty percent preaching, fifty percent showing the power of the Gospel. There is always an expectation and readiness for miracles. It is normal that anytime when the message of the Gospel is pronounced, there is going to be a demonstration of the power of God in that situation. People can see clearly that Jesus is the Son of God, and that He is the Savior of the world. The church of China is not praying for miracles, but they are living in miracles. It is like [Brother] Paul said: it is the normal Christian life.

While we continually argue the theological points of our own little factions, the Chinese Church is living the whole Gospel, not just the parts they like. The result is that God is growing the Chinese Church exponentially, while we American Christians bicker about one topic or another as fewer people care to listen to what we have to say.

Here is a Church that has none of the material available to them that we have. They have no money, no political standing, no cleverly-devised programs, no conventions, and nowhere near the dogmatic factionalism that we have. But what they do have is a faith that moves mountains and may very well topple the atheistic Communist regime in their country of 1.3 billion souls.

And what of the persecuted Chinese Church's view of evangelism? Well, they believe that the Great Commission comes first. What is unusual to Westerners is how they go about it.

In many cases, Christians are sent out to towns that have no Christian witness and the first thing they ask is, "What is the greatest problem in this village?" When they hear what it is, they immediately begin fasting and praying that Jesus Christ would prove Himself greater than the problem. Diane quotes the Chinese Christians (from the quote above) saying that two young women went into a town and were told that a demon-possessed man had the townspeople under his thumb. They confronted the man in the name of Jesus, cast out his demons, and led him to Christ. Then that same man joined the two women as they spoke to the entire village about Jesus. All three hundred in that village repented and gave their lives to the Lord.

Does that model seem familiar? We saw it in Jesus' ministry and the ministry of the apostles in Acts. In fact, the Lord Himself advocated this type of ministry when He said:

And proclaim as you go, saying, 'The kingdom of heaven is at hand.' Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers, cast out demons. You received without paying; give without pay. Acquire no gold nor silver nor copper for your belts, no bag for your journey, nor two tunics nor sandals nor a staff, for the laborer deserves his food. And whatever town or village you enter, find out who is worthy in it and stay there until you depart. As you enter the house, greet it. And if the house is worthy, let your peace come upon it, but if it is not worthy, let your peace return to you. And if anyone will not receive you or listen to your words, shake off the dust from your feet when you leave that house or town. Truly, I say to you, it will be more bearable on the day of judgment for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah than for that town. "Behold, I am sending you out as sheep in the midst of wolves, so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves. Beware of men, for they will deliver you over to courts and flog you in their synagogues, and you will be dragged before governors and kings for my sake, to bear witness before them and the Gentiles. When they deliver you over, do not be anxious how you are to speak or what you are to say, for what you are to say will be given to you in that hour. For it is not you who speak, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you. Brother will deliver brother over to death, and the father his child, and children will rise against parents and have them put to death, and you will be hated by all for my name's sake. But the one who endures to the end will be saved.
—Matthew 10:7-22 ESV

Should we be surprised at the quote that opened this post? We out-thought the Lord here in America. We told His Spirit that we can do it all in our own cleverness or we told Him that He could not work that way anymore. Either way, we seem to have lost Him here in America. He took His fire to China.

I can't read Diane's post and not get excited. Unfortunately, I'm excited for China and not for America. We can't seem to see what we've done to ourselves because of our overt anti-supernaturalism and our reliance on our own human reasoning. Meanwhile, the Chinese Church is receiving the blessing of God while they live out the whole Gospel, or as they say, "The normal Christian life."

I don't know about you, but I want that same kind of "normal Christian life" here in America. What has happened to the Church here is criminal, but we brought it on ourselves. It will take the Holy Spirit of God to bring His torch back our way, but He'll only do that if we are ready.

Lord Jesus, make us all ready.

Tags: China, America, Revival, Holy Spirit, Evangelism, Church, Faith, Christianity, Jesus, God

The Lord of Apologists and Servants

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Fallout from "The Godblogosphere's Black Hole" and "More Thoughts on 'The Godblogosphere's Black Hole'" continues to rain down. Pyromaniac's Phil Johnson waded into the fray on Tuesday. The comments for his response to me are intriguing. A few have reiterated in comments here the gist of the comments in Phil's blog. And the wheel goes 'round and 'round.

A few days ago, I wrote a mini-series called "The Church's Brave New Brain" that viewed the Church in terms of those within it favoring one side of their brains over the other. The left-hemisphere thinkers like the logical approach and bring that to the Church, while the right-hemisphere thinkers bring the relational.

In the past, I've written elsewhere on the idea of Apologists versus Servants. I believe in many ways this aligns with the left/right hemisphere issues I discussed in the aforementioned series. Now that the issue of apologetics is showing up in comments here, I thought I'd address it even if it borders on the very theological "battle" I swore I wasn't going to let myself get dragged into. For that reason, I will be brief.

Jesus Christ came to attest to the Father through His own life. He is the Revealer of Truth and the Truth Himself. He is the Lord of Apologists.

Jesus Christ came to serve, to be the Suffering Servant. He is our perfect model for service. He is the Lord of Servants.

Without apologetics, we serve in vain.

Without service, we contend for truth in vain.

In short, the two cannot be divorced.

(Since mostly Apologists are reading this, I won't even bother to pull out my ESV and quote all the verses to support this. Most of us can do it from memory.)

The folly of the Church in the West (a folly that does not seem to affect non-Western Christians, interestingly enough) is our penchant to always want to divide and conquer. We latch on to either apologetics or service and we bring that laser-like Western focus on the discipline that most ignites our hearts. We concentrate on it until we burn the rods and cones out of our eyes that correspond with that OTHER side. In effect, we can no longer see the whole picture.

I wrote what I did in those two "Black Hole" posts because in 2005 the Godblogosphere increasingly looked like an Apologists' convention. It's understandable if for no other reason than Internet-savvy folks are largely left-brained Apologists. It's also true that blogs lend themselves to information over relationship. Sure it's nice to make friends through blogging, but it's even nicer to shake that person's physical hand and down a beverage of choice with him. Nothing replaces that.

The Godblogosphere has become the haunt of Apologists. There is nothing wrong with Apologists! It's the disproportion that bothers me. But what bothers me even more is that so few are trying to find a way to use blogs as a means to service that can restore balance to the Godblogosphere.

If I can help bring the Servants out in force, I think that's my goal for 2006 in my little neck of the blogosphere. I believe that blogging can evolve to better implement physical service to others. No one said it would be easy, but I think we have to try for that ideal.

Before I end here, I have a couple more thoughts.

Right now, people are coming to Jesus Christ. Today, those people begin a walk of sanctification that they'll continue until the day they see Him face-to-face. Those new Christians are Christ's beloved. And you know what? They're going to fall on their faces when pressed hard for some piece of biblical knowledge they're not going to know. They're also going to take their newfound love for the Lord and serve themselves right into a hole because they don't know how to serve yet.

No matter whether we fancy ourselves an Apologist or a Servant, we've tanked in both those areas at some time or other. Depending on how badly we failed, we might very well have started drifting away from the apologetics or the service depending on which didn't work perfectly at that point that we most wanted it to.

And that's a shame because the Man of God is made to be both an Apologist and a Servant, not one predominantly over the other.

That's what I'm shooting for in 2006. I pray that at least part of the Godblogosphere walks alongside me.

May Christ richly bless you Apologists and you Servants as you grow more profoundly in love with Him on your way to becoming true Servant Apologists.

Tags: Servants, Apologists, Service, Apologetics, Balance, Church, Faith, Christianity, Jesus, God

More Thoughts on “The Godblogosphere’s Black Hole”

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Last Thursday’s post, “The Godblogosphere’s Black Hole” riled up a lot of people. Unfortunately, I was unable to devote time on Friday to keeping up with the comments because of a hectic day and more household illness, so I think I’ll say more here.

First, I want to thank everyone who commented. I read every comment even if I didn’t reply personally. Blogging can consume all your time if you let it, so I couldn’t comment on everything that readers said. I hope to cover a few general replies here, so read on if you were slighted and just maybe I’ll ramble into addressing your particular concern.

Second, I’m not down on blogging as a tool. Blogs make dialogue possible. While that’s perfect for heated discussions, I feel we’re thinking too small with that use. I know hundreds of people who are hurting or covering for hurts they feel the Church will never address. I want to address them. I want to find a way to meet the practical needs of hurting people all around, whether they be hurting because of physical needs or hurting because they don’t know Jesus Christ.

Before I get a number of responses saying that someone knows of a church that’s meeting everyone’s needs perfectly, DestituteI would like to add that my own experience as a Christian is that in most of my darkest times I had to tough it out alone because other Christians hit the road at the point of my deepest need. And it’s not just me. I talk to other people all the time who are left twisting in the wind by the Western Church. I would even venture a guess that the majority of people sitting in the pews on Sunday have a viable need going unmet. Say what you will, but this is the Biblical model right here:

Now the full number of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one said that any of the things that belonged to him was his own, but they had everything in common. And with great power the apostles were giving their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all. There was not a needy person among them, for as many as were owners of lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold and laid it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need.
—Acts 4:32-35 ESV

There was not a needy person among them. Can we say that about our churches today? Or the Church universal?

Now a complete lack of monetary want may very well be the case in some of our upper crust churches; you know, the ones with the chauffeur’s entrances. But while I did attend such a church at one point in my life, I don’t today. My church is packed with needy people. I suspect yours is, too.

If even one person in our churches is going ignored in an area of need, then we can’t sit back and say we’re doing the job right. Not only this, but I think the Lord would have us expand our notion of what constitutes a lack of need by going beyond money fixes. I know people who are dying for someone to call them on the phone to talk for a few minutes. I know single moms who would love to have a solid Christian man around for her sons for a couple hours each week. I know a family who faced foreclosure on their home because the breadwinner lost his job to outsourcing and can’t find a job to replace it. I know a family that would have loved to have had someone talk to them at the church service this last Sunday. But you know what? In every case that need went unmet. No one called, no one took the single mom’s sons to a sporting event, the family lost their home because no one bothered to help them, and the mom, dad, and two kids that showed up this last Sunday made it all the way back to their car in the far corner of the church parking lot without anyone caring enough to say hello.

I’m sick of those stories. I contend that one of the reasons that Christianity is not growing in the West is because of stories like those. Every year more people stop going to church in the United States, Canada, and Europe. Yeah, even if our doctrine is perfect, our living out the Gospel sure needs a major overhaul. This is the major reason why I’m not going to participate in anymore theological “discussions”—especially ones guaranteed to be contentious. I don’t need a finer point on my doctrinal stance. I need a bigger heart for the needy. I need to put the doctrine I already know into practice or else it’s utterly worthless.

The fact is that if all this truly made a difference to us, we’d go to whatever lengths it took to meet people’s needs. Unfortunately, too many of us simply don’t care because:

  • We’re too mired in our jobs.
  • We’re too addicted to entertainment.
  • We’re too geared up about buying the latest digital camera, computer, plasma TV or other piece of ephemeral electronica.
  • We’re too in love with the world system.
  • We’re too worried about what other people might think if we went 100% counterculture for Christ.
  • We stopped asking God if He wanted to use us in a way that could change the world, even if it meant that we started small by just helping our nextdoor neighbor or the family beside us in the pew.

To whom shall we go? Where is the Kingdom of God found outside of Jesus? Do we need to fill our houses with one more gadget when the money we spent on it could have been better spent funding a dozen struggling churches in Africa? And for all the good that Christian books have done us, why do most of us Christian eggheads need one more tome for our sagging bookcases when we’re not putting 0.00001% of that accumulated wisdom into practice reaching out to the lost, destitute, and broken?

I’m not sure we really believe there’s a heaven. We don’t live like the world to come matters more than this one. If we did, I suspect we wouldn’t be so hot to be on our second generation of iPod or standing in line for the latest digital camera to replace the one we bought just four years ago. We’d be asking God every day how to give it all away until it no longer mattered because it no longer held our interest—instead, heaven was ringing in our ears. We’d be known as people who lived unencumbered lives. As Leonard Ravenhill was fond of saying, it is one thing to say that Christ is all we need, and something altogether different to say that Christ is all we have.

If it really mattered, we’d find a way—even if it meant we had to pick up a cross and carry it daily. Oh wait, we’re supposed to be doing that already. It’s easy to forget isn’t it? Hey, there’s a sale at Best Buy….

I’m working on a Godblogger map that may help us field needs more effectively. I also think it would do a better job of getting bloggers together if they saw how close their proximity is to other bloggers. Still, the point of that map is to make it easier for us to help other people. If we purposefully made ourselves more available, especially those of us who get huge traffic running through our sites every day, perhaps we could become a resource for meeting people’s needs. We have so many strong Christians blogging. I’ve got to believe that we can somehow band together to use all the gifts God has given us to make a difference in the lives of the unheard people, many of whom may be too poor to even own a computer.

We know that the world’s need is great. I believe that the power of God’s word paired with a Good Samaritan’s heart might be the synergy needed to reach a world that is not so impressed with what we say as it might be with what we do. We Christians get a lot of bad press today and I think part of that is reflected in the fact that we’re not as plugged in locally as we should be. Our atheist neighbor may have all sorts of preconceptions about the greater unwashed mass of Bible Thumpers that get in his way of receiving what we have to say about Christ, but I can guarantee that those barriers will come down if we’re the one there for him when he is ill (especially if—as is so often the case—no one else bothers.)

And like I said, that kind of charity begins at home. If we can’t practice it in our churches on each other, then there’s no possible way we’re going to make it work with “scarier” kinds of people out there in the gutters of the world.

Earlier in this post I said that I believed that the majority of people in our pews have vital needs going unmet. I’ve been around long enough to know that this is absolutely the case. If you don’t think that’s true, I don’t think you’re looking hard enough. Many people may appear fine on the outside, but inside there’s devastation that we know nothing about. Some people in our churches possess minds ingrained with the idea that they can’t ask for help because American Christianity states that “God helps those who help themselves.” So they go without, sometimes for decades. I think it is a sad thing to hear from people that they’ve been in various churches over the years and no one ever bothered to lift a finger to help them when they were struggling. I heard another one of those stories just this morning. As long as their need is within the bounds of what I can do to help, I can’t call myself a Christian if I can’t be there for that person. Should their need be beyond what I can do, then I either find someone who can make it happen for them or I throw myself on the mercy of God alongside that person so they know they are not alone. And not just once, but for as long as it takes.

God created the Church to be His chosen instrument to the world. Yes, He can act on His own through miracles if need be, but more often than not, He wants us to do the work.

As for me and my house, we’re rolling up our sleeves.