Fuzzy Church

The times we live in are growing increasingly difficult for people to navigate. It’s hard to ignore the cultural and societal breakdown. The wicked seem to flourish, and the righteous increasingly find it tougher to cope in a world where truth is called a lie and love is considered hate.

The anger in this country runs at a fever pitch, and as Christians, who claim to have citizenship in a different world, the tendency to want to fight back becomes overwhelming. Don’t we have rights? Don’t we have a mandate to right wrongs? Are we not Americans, too?

With so many conflicting voices out there, sorting through the noise takes concentration. It demands focus, a singleminded devotion to what is core—especially core to Christianity.

For that reason, I want to state the obvious, because with all the shrill voices we hear daily, what is obvious is proving harder to remember.

So here is the obvious:

Jesus Christ is Lord. Go and make disciples of all nations.

And to that I must add this one truth that we must also never forget:

Any other mission is a distraction.

Do we understand this? I don’t think we do. When I look at the American Church today, it looks fuzzy around the edges, out of focus, blurred. Our goals are nebulous. We’re pulled in a million directions, with each of us dedicated to some pet ministry project that doesn’t intersect any other ministry project. In addition, we daily add some other front to the culture war. We’re already fighting this agenda and that, yet each day another agenda from some godless group crops up and we have to open a new war front.

Countless Christians fight the cultural, political, and societal wars. It used to be that just raising awareness of some new sinful agenda was enough, but when that didn’t work, counterattacks had to be devised. People were encouraged to join the cause. Fires were stoked in the faithful. Write and email our congressman; demand he or she take action. Protest. Get on the picket lines. Let the world see our faithfulness by how hard we fight godless agendas. And when that fails to work, let’s get angry. Our foes are angry, so why not show them we can be even nastier. If they fight with a lit torch, then we counter with a flamethrower! They get their lawyers, but we get twice as many! Sue! File lawsuits! Shout, yell, scream! And when that doesn’t work, just do it longer and louder! Keep raising the stakes! If they want martyrs, then martyrs they shall have! Let the blood run in the streets if it has to, but the cause of Christ must be established in America, come hell or high water! And if it takes bashing a few heads to get there, then let the bashing commence!

Somewhere, amid all that seething Christian anger and frustration, buried by using the mechanisms of the world to fight the world, two vital truths at the core of everything we are to be about as Christians get lost:

Jesus Christ is Lord. Go and make disciples of all nations.

It seems to me that we Christians don’t seem to be learning that it’s not by might nor by power but by God’s Spirit. (I think God said that, so it must be trustworthy.)

The Church in America has gone off message. Fuzziness becomes inevitable. We’re not effective at stemming the tides of all these social, political, and cultural dysfunctions we want to see corrected because we’re trying to fix them apart from the core of what we are about:

Jesus Christ is Lord. Go and make disciples of all nations.

Many Christians talk about taking dominion, but the only way that dominion comes about is by meeting the enemy’s footsoldiers and converting them into Christians. If the opposing army is now on your side, you’ve won the war.

It’s so simple.

But instead of focusing on Jesus while we lead people to Him and disciple them into maturity, we Christians go all fuzzy. We dilute our efforts and our focus by going after agendas, many of them longtime agendas against which we have made little progress despite millions of hours devoted to fighting them.

What would happen if we took all the effort devoted to fighting all these fronts and devoted it to active evangelism instead? What would be gained by millions of hours of dedicated evangelism and training up new believers into Christian maturity?

I ask those questions because our country has never experienced less evangelism and discipling to maturity than in these times. Statistics show that fewer Americans attend church and have never been less interested in the Christian message than today. Not only have we lost the culture wars because we focused on them to the detriment of our core calling, but by jumping on so many bandwagons that are NOT core, the pews in our churches emptied faster than in any time in our country’s history.

Want to end abortion?

Want to stop the homosexual agenda?

Want to restore ethics to business?

Want to fight indecency all around us?

Want to restore the principles that made America a great nation?

Want to see the Church grow and lift Jesus up?

There is only one answer:

Jesus Christ is Lord. Go and make disciples of all nations.

Digital Versus Print Bibles?

Two questions for readers:

If you’ve been relying on digital versions of the Bible for a long time, do you find yourself resorting to keyword searches for finding verses rather than committing to recalling book, chapter, and verse?
Has using digital versions of the Bible made using printed versions more difficult?

I’m interested in your feedback.

A Ministry That Flows from Love for God and People

In response to my post “Asking the Radical Questions,” Nate Spencer of The Jesus Paradigm commented with a quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer (one of the patron saints of Cerulean Sanctum) that I wanted to expand:

If you love the vision you have for community, you will destroy community. If you love the people around you, you will create community.

I think this can be distilled into a generalization that always works:

If you love the vision you have for {desired ministry outcome}, you will destroy {desired ministry outcome}. If you love the people around you, you will create {desired ministry outcome}.

We live in a Church age where the visionaries of the Faith hold increasing sway over how we do church. These are usually people on the national stage who have successful churches and are always on the leading edge of ministry. Smaller or less successful churches often try to latch onto the vision promoted by these leaders, but the outcomes inevitably fall short, and everyone looks around and wonders what happened.

What happened is that Bonhoeffer’s warning came true: The church loved the vision more.

I don’t believe that this is ever a case of not loving God enough. I think that any movement in the Church that aims at a new vision begins from a love of God.

Where the Bonhoeffer warning comes into play is when the vision fails to love people as much as it loves God or loves the vision itself.

If you look closely, I believe you can find numerous examples in the American Church of the love for a vision overwhelming the love for people.

Take the way we worship, for example. It’s easy to fall in love with worship as an event. We may even go one further and do a good job of loving worship because to worship is to love God.

But how easy is it to have a vision for worship that actually excludes a love for people? And in contrast, what does worship that loves people look like?

I’ve been involved with worship as both a worship leader and as a supporting musician. I have planned worship, led worship, managed playlists, played and sung music, written new worship songs, and so on. I have a bit of expertise.

One thing that I see continually is that forgetting to love people leads to worship that

1. Reflects only the favorite style of music of the worship leader or musicians on the worship team

2. Contains powerful, anointed music that, unfortunately, the ordinary people in the seats find difficult, if not impossible, to sing

3. Fails to incorporate what have been past favorite songs of the people in the seats because those favorites do not match the current vision for worship

4. Mimics the worship style of whatever “famous” church the local church is trying to emulate, regardless of the past worship history of that local church

5. Fails to consider what leads nonmusicians into worship

I don’t mean to pick on worship alone here, but the worship wars are a continual topic online and worship is readily witnessed in our churches.

The reality is that any vision for doing ANYTHING in our churches that does not prominently uphold a love for people as much as it does a love for God or for the vision itself will ALWAYS produce lackluster results—or worse, heartache and burnout.

I’ve mentioned before my career in camping ministry. A surefire vision for burning out camp staff is

God first

Campers second

Staff third

Frankly, you can sink any kind of ministry with a vision that puts frontline workers third. As they are the people with whom most ministries have the deepest connection, Love thy neighbor billboard they need to be higher up on the priority list and need to be loved almost as much as God. I’ve worked in ministries that got this right and ministries that didn’t. Let me say that any ministry that puts its staff third is a terrible place to work, a place that pours out staff until the vessel is empty. And the opposite is true: A ministry that loves its staff will see ministry come from the carefully cultivated overflow of staff’s hearts, never running dry.

There’s not a person reading this who doesn’t have a horror story of how a vision for ministry steamrolled simple love for people. Isn’t that sad?

Truly, any life-changing ministry that continues to produce results comes down to loving other people more than the vision for the ministry itself. Why this is so hard to see is one of the most maddening mysteries in the modern American Church.

In the end, one of the things the Lord is teaching me goes back to what you and I learned as Little Sunbeams (or whatever your childhood church used to call preschoolers): Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

It seems so simple, yet we tend to forget it when it comes to ministry. The question remains though: Does the vision for ministry take into account the Golden Rule?

When I led worship, I tried to always ask the question of what best leads the people in the seats into worship because I genuinely desired to love those people. And that end result didn’t always lead to my favorite kind of music. Many times it was simplistic songs or hymns everyone knew word for word, the two or three classics I’d been trying to move beyond for years.

But it wasn’t about me or my vision; it was loving God and loving people. Everything else proceeded from that mentality.

This isn’t so hard, folks. Yet if we fail to heed Bonhoeffer’s warning, it always will be.