Work

We Had a Choice, and We Chose…

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(Back in August 2006, I wrote a post entitled The Real American Christian “Either/Or. If you haven’t read that post, please do. Today’s post riffs on the ideas found in that post.)

I had an opportunity to drive to see my youngest brother in Illinois before he left to do linguistics field work and data collection in Alaska. My middle brother and his family joined me on the trek west. Having attended a local Bible college, that brother has volunteered as a youth minister at his church for so long that he’s into his second generation of teens.We talked about many topics on the drive to Carbondale.

 

While discussing the state of the Church today, he made the following statement:

If you take a look at the average Evangelical Christian family in this country, they may talk about choosing to follow Jesus, but they didn’t. They chose money. That explains everything.

George Barna, the pollster who routinely looks at the state of the American Church, has noted that Evangelicals are more concerned that their kids get into elite colleges than that those same children follow Jesus Christ. The reasoning for that seems obvious. Graduating from an elite college means a higher-paying job.

 

Yesterday, I made this comment about men:

I want to believe that a man can work a sixty-hour week, spend quality time with his wife and kids, be involved in his community, find time for leisure, and still be an effective disciple of Jesus Christ. The kind of man who prays big prayers and knows God intimately for those prayers. The kind of man who readily leads many others to his Savior and disciples those same people to maturity. I want to believe, but I don’t know any men like that.

 

I’m not saying that a man like I describe can’t have an earnest desire to serve the Lord. But I question the ability to follow through on that desire. It’s a case of allegiance. Two masters; which will the average 9-to-5’er (or 8-to-6’er, as the case is today) serve?

Every survey out there on the state of the Church in 2008 notes drop-offs in attendance, participation in activities, and general involvement. The Church in this country is in poor shape. We have more megachurches than ever before and less spiritual health.

Meanwhile, the lost are proceeding to hell in an endless stream.

Who is actually doing the work of the ministry today? It’s a handful of people, mostly full-time Christian workers. It’s hard not to look at the way we do ministry in America 2008 and not see that most of us have stepped out of the ministry role Jesus commended of us and handed it off to someone else accompanied by a small envelope filled with a few bucks “earnest” money. That passes for active ministry in most people’s lives.

And why not? We’re making the big bucks. Why not farm out our responsibility to someone else? It’s The American Way™!

But it’s not Jesus’ way.

As I noted yesterday, I want to believe that the average Christian man working a middle management job in some cubicle in Conglomo Corporation can make a difference for Christ. But I don’t see it. Hey, Bob, have you met the new guy in HR?I see that same man’s large suburban tract home, his boat, his trips to Disneyworld, his 401k account, but I don’t see any impact for the Kingdom. Not when all the accounts are tallied and the bill comes due. Yet this passes for acceptable Evangelical living in America 2008.

When asked if he would deny Christ, I’m sure that man would vehemently say no. And yet he appears to every day because in all the things that matter he’ll never choose Jesus. He’ll choose comfort. He’ll take the money and run. And he’ll make darned sure his kids can take the money and run, too, even if that means Jesus ends up the also-ran in his children’s lives.

I don’t want to think that it’s all about the Benjamins, yet it seems like it is. I know that I have difficult decisions to make in that regard, decisions I didn’t ever think that I—or any other man my age—would need to make. Perhaps our concessions to our Industrialized Age have forced our hands. Maybe no middle ground exists any longer. It just may be that all we can do is fall into line or else wind up scavenging for food from the neighborhood dump. Who wouldn’t want to avoid that fate?

And so we made our choice.

The Evils of Community?

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Tuesday, I wrote on the need for us Christians to understand that community and relationship with others is at the core of who we are as Christians, especially as it relates to the Great Commission and meeting the needs of others. You simply can’t have a ministry without people.

Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal ran a sidebar column that absolutely blew my mind. It shows exactly what we Christians are up against when it comes to fighting for depth in community. I almost never reproduce an entire article, but this one (“What’s Hurting America? Widespread Homeownership“) contains mind-boggling assertions in nearly every sentence:

Widespread homeownership has proven benefits for the nation but the Atlantic‘s Clive Crook says it brings some serious economic drawbacks with it. Citing research from Warwick University economist Andrew Oswald, Mr. Crook says the main problem with homeowners is that they are less mobile than renters. Less willing to leave their homes for greener pastures when the local economy falters, homeowners slow the nation’s economic growth and exacerbate unemployment issues by staying put. Communities of homeowners also often suppress new development by calling for new zoning rules.

On the plus side, homeowners are more invested in their communities, more likely to vote and work harder to improve their neighborhoods, but the overall societal good in homeownership isn’t clear-cut, Mr. Crook says. To that end, he questions the wisdom of the mortgage-interest tax deduction, a subsidy set up to ostensibly encourage widespread homeownership.

Mr. Crook said the deduction often promotes over-borrowing and higher spending, thus artificially increasing home values and placing borrowers in greater financial risk during downturns, such as the current housing market crunch. On a broader level, higher investments in housing †“ fueled by the tax deduction — come at the expense of investments in areas that expand the economy, such as commercial building and spending on business equipment, he says. — Troy McCullough

This is what we Christians are up against. If we fight tooth and nail to preserve our communities, we’re labeled “malcontents” for doing so. Bad! Bad house!We “exacerbate unemployment issues by staying put” and cause untold hardship fighting for zoning laws that restrict sprawl and consumerism.

Unbelievable.

Want to hurt the Church in this country even more? Increasingly force congregants to move every few years to chase jobs.

Want to bring most ministerial works within a church to a standstill? Keep changing the mix of people in the church so the wheel must constantly be reinvented.

At least nomadic tribesmen stay together as a tribe, but the kind of thinking listed in that article pretty much ensures alienation and disconnection.

Americans are already some of the most mobile people in the world. Studies show most families stay in one spot for less than seven years. Multiply that by a hundred families in a church and it’s no wonder little gets accomplished for the Kingdom. Everyone’s constantly on the move. People don’t get extended years ministering Christ to each other or to their communities.

This constant nomadic existence chasing fleeting jobs from one part of the country to another is why the Church in America MUST start speaking to issues of work and the revitalization of local and regional economies. The world is telling us that we can’t be good citizens if we want to put down roots and minister for years in the same community.

I’m not saying that we petrify in one spot. Even Jesus said that those of us who leave houses and lands for the sake of the Gospel will be blessed. Still, I suspect that most people in my town aren’t born again, so what is my obligation?

If my living situation is so transitory that I never truly get involved to any depth in the lives of those around me, then I’m less effective as a messenger of the Gospel. Just the disorientation of having to adjust to a new place means people who move are preoccupied with everything BUT ministry. The amount of bureaucracy and paperwork alone that accompanies moving within the same city is a nightmare, much less chasing jobs from city to city. That constant disequilibrium is the world’s way of distracting us from what truly matters.

We Christians have got to get serious about creating our own alternative/underground economy. We’ve got to be better networked so that people in our congregations don’t have to leave town to find work. We’ve got to start thinking of innovative ways to bring in income, even if it means exploring communal living arrangements that eliminate our need to duplicate goods to survive . If we can be freed of the need for the kind of jobs that force us to move from town to town looking for work, then let’s start working toward that goal.

I keep hoping and praying that someone on the national Christian stage will start speaking up about these issues. They play into the busyness that is crippling our effectiveness as the ambassadors of Christ in a dying world. If we’re constantly having to plan what city we’re going to move to next so we can follow the jobs willy-nilly, we’ll be distracted and ineffective our entire lives.

And that’s just what the Enemy wants.

(In similar news, it looks like we’ve been lied to for years about the lack of engineers and scientists in this country. If anything, there’s a glut. This hasn’t stopped Congress from continuing to demand H-1B visas to bring in more foreign workers to displace American engineers and scientists. I’ve been saying for years that the shortage of tech workers is a lie. Now the lie comes out. I think our government owes us former tech workers an enormous apology. If I had a Benjamin for every tech worker I’ve met who was forced into a nomadic existence to find work, or who bailed from tech altogether, I could’ve retired by now.)

The Cost of Blogging

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Last week, I received an e-mail from a reader that told a discouraging tale. The reader explained that the story might one day become a blog post. The reasoning? It might prove a cautionary tale to help others avoid a similar situation.

I cautioned against sharing it.

I caution a lot of bloggers anymore. Too many of us have an idealized view of how the world works. In addition, none of us is prescient enough to understand what the world will become. We believe an innocent activity will always stay innocent. People can be trusted with your confession and mine.

I’ve been blogging since 2001. I had a blog before Cerulean Sanctum that dealt with the tendency in our society toward lowest common denominator thinking and action. I still write in Cerulean Sanctum about that fatal flaw, but not quite as much. Bigger fish to fry, as they say.

As I enter my seventh year of blogging, I’ve accumulated some painful lessons.

Blogging is an essentially naked enterprise. You can’t blog for any length of time and not post personal information. Even on a site like Engadget or Lifehacker, blogs that look at what’s happening in the world of electronic gizmos or discuss ways to make your day-to-day living more efficient in a hectic world, the blog owners reveal personal details bit by bit. In many ways, your blog is you.

Godblogs go one step further in that the very nature of talking about faith exposes the talker on an intimate level. We’ve all heard the aphorism that polite company resists talk of religion and politics. Blogging, on the other hand, delights in discussing the raw truths and lies that occupy the core of what we are as a society and as individuals.

And there is much danger in this. Danger that we ignore at our peril.

1. Google has a long, vast memory – I can find material on Google that I posted to Usenet newsgroups 20 years ago. Little did I know that someone would one day collect all that data and store it forever. Google bought up the archives of Remarq and DejaNews and now you can find what I said on alt.rec.music.christian circa 1987.

When I typed that Usenet comment, did I ever dream that someone in Singapore 2007 would use a “Web browser” to access a “search engine” to reference something I said around the time that “Walk Like an Egyptian” was the #1 song in America?

Truth is, I should have known better.

Today, Google (and whatever search engine will replace it one day—hey, Alta Vista, anyone?) is cataloging what you blog almost as fast as you blog it. All your personal revelations are being stored on a massive conglomeration of RAID-arrayed hard drives for access by anyone who wants to know about you now and in the future.

Just the other day, a client asked me to interview a businessman. I sent a brief note asking the businessman what time he might be available. I later called him. In the course of conversation, he asked me about my organic farm. I was stunned. How did he know I had an organic farm? Simple—he’d googled my name and read what I’d written online.

While that should be obvious, it’s still startling when it occurs. What’s more startling is that people are beginning to default to that behavior. Singles google prospective dates. And businesses google prospective employees.

The Wall Street Journal recently had an article that described in great detail how employers are bypassing the old-fashioned Oh well, scratch Microsoft off my future empoyer list...means of getting info on an employee and going right to Google. So if you’d like to work for Microsoft, but a youthful indiscretion a small eternity ago led you to post on your Web site a pic of Bill Gates as a Borg clone (possibly with added devil horns to ensure your mixed-metaphorical point), it doesn’t matter how much you fawn over Microsoft products today. You may need to stick a fork in yourself.

Even personal Web sites or blogs you had years ago that are now offline or deleted are stored in sites like the Wayback Machine at Archive.org. You press that Submit or Publish button and your little comment is now one for the ages.

As Christians, we need to be highly concerned about where this is leading. Non-sectarian employers, by law, cannot ask us about our religious or other closely held beliefs. But no one can stop them from googling us and finding our less-than-positive article blog post about Zoroastrianism or homosexuality or even Fiat automobiles. When your potential boss, a closeted Zoroastrian who loves Italian cars with a passion (even the crummy ones), googles your name and finds your opinion on your blog, what chance do you have of working for that guy? Zippo. And the worst part of it is he doesn’t have to prod you for that info or give his real reason for not hiring you. It all stays very hush-hush.

If you’re a blogger, you must consider these things. We may think there is no cost, but one exists. The Church in the West has not accounted for this phenomenon, but it will need to. As anti-Christian sentiment continues to rise around the world, we must be prepared to help those who pay a price for speaking the truth. I can tell you right now that there are people reading this blog who have been discriminated against by search engine. Expect it to get worse.

2. Stalking – Stories are starting to come out about bloggers being threatened with violence because of something they wrote. Some bloggers have even acquired stalkers. That may sound far-fetched, but I’ve spoken with a few bloggers who told me stories I didn’t want to believe.

We live in a sin-sick world. People exist who derive strange feelings from their interactions with others online, and bloggers are not immune to their dysfunctions. It’s no longer just celebrities who attract deranged people.

We need to run a constant filter on the content we put out in public. While it may be true that we can’t account for every trigger for every off person out there, we must be wiser on this issue. Even now, I’m reconsidering some of the content I’ve placed online.

3. Blogging can be an addiction – While there are fewer personal journal blogs percentage-wise than a few years ago, they still exist. And even if a blogger doesn’t use his or her blog as an online diary, it can still take on a life of its own.

Some bloggers can’t walk away. The thought that their hit counters start going down if they don’t post for a few days leads to despair. Some live out their entire lives online and the thought of anything happening to what they’ve built up becomes a crushing load that keeps them writing and writing and writing. And that writing often comes to the detriment of their spiritual lives and the lives of other family members.

Here’s a hard blogging truth: readers are fickle. As much as I love my readers and have some of the best readers in the blogosphere, reality is reality. I had to reference a post from a few years back and only one commenter out of about thirty on that post still comments. C’est la vie! If you’re constantly living in fear that you can’t hold folks, then get out today. You have to have another reason for blogging than numbers and their faithfulness to you.

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I could say a lot more on this topic. I haven’t touched on the social network sites and how they are being used in nefarious ways, too. Life online is more dangerous than we think. More and more people are going to scratch their heads and wonder why they didn’t get a job they were perfect for or why supposed friends stopped calling. Information is power and the Web is pure information. Those who know how to tap its resources hold considerable sway over us.

I may be giving away my age (and it might be used against me <grin>), but I remember a line from a famous TV show that applies to this issue: Hey people, let’s be careful out there.

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