Christian Education

Equipping the Saints: Stepping on the Brake

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If you’ve been a reader of this blog for a while, you know that I have trepidations about Internet communications. I’m also concerned that the speed of our lives is out of control, as several posts here on that subject will also attest.

The Wall Street Journal ran an article combining the two issues: “A Manifesto for Slow Communication.” Absolutely read it.

Face-to-face communications between human beings is down for the count. As soon as most of the people in one of my long-time small groups were on Facebook, the group folded. Another small group Bible study my wife and I are a part of is attended mostly by those folks who have the least connection to high tech gadgetry. It should come as no shock then that even though this group is open to people of all ages, my wife and I (in our mid-40s) are the youngest people there.

As the Church, these issues pose a serious problem.

What happens to the people in the pews when the business world says “40 hours a week,” but keeping your job means actually having to work 80 hours a week?

What happens when people no longer have time to invest in the life of their church?

What happens when people stop doing ministry because they are too busy?

What happens when everyone stays  in touch by Facebook, but no one meets together face-to-face?

What happens when our dependence on online communications depletes our ability to recognize vocal and body language clues?

What happens when the primary means of teaching others, face-to-face student-teacher engagement, is lost?

A friend of mine who was hired for a 50 hour a week job was working 70-80 hours instead. When she pushed back after several years at that pace, her boss was upset, despite the deluge of accolades my friend had received over her many years of service. This is the world that has been pulled over your eyes...She’s now looking for work.  Hers is a common story.

I worried that Facebook would not be satisfied as a supplementary connection among friends, those who would otherwise meet face-to-face. Indeed, I was right. This summer has gone down as the least personal of my entire life. Facebook seems to be the only way many communicate.

I noted the small group demise above, but another Christian small group we’re a part of pretty much went on hiatus this summer. The reason? People were too busy.

Midweek church services are falling by the wayside. Hardly any church around here has a Sunday night service, either. Fewer churches have Sunday School for adults, though we somehow still manage to cobble something together for the kiddies (when our harried, frantic volunteers can find two seconds to breathe, that is).

Like a decade-old, cotton T-shirt washed too many times on hot, our social fabric is growing increasingly thin. We still recognize the T-shirt for what it is, but we can see through it now.

Questions for this generation of Christians:

How will we educate the Body of Christ if we don’t meet together regularly?

How will leaders identify spiritual gifts in their congregants and nurture them if they don’t meet together in person?

How will younger Christians see the life of Christ modeled in the mature Christian if we can never find time to get together?

How does one read the countenance of another via Facebook?

What happens to the laying on of hands in a digital age?

I don’t have an answer for those questions (and many others like them) other than to say that we Christians must be the countercultural example. If we don’t start slowing down and living differently, then Christ will come back to a world without faith. Because you can’t throw a new convert into a microwave for a minute and expect a fully baked disciple when the bell dings.

Equipping the Saints: Murder in the Church

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Talk to enough Christians and it’s apparent that whatever is wrong with the world is also wrong with believers. Not a person reading this doesn’t know a dozen Christians who struggle constantly with their Faith, staggering from one ditch into another.

For years, I used to be on a team at church who prayed for folks who came up after the service. The stories I’ve heard…more hair-curling than a beauty salon. What I’ve learned in those times makes for discernment that never fails and a word of wisdom that always applies.

What did I learn? It’s in these words of Jesus:

For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it.
—Mark 8:35

The reason many Christians suffer needlessly is because we don’t know what it means to die to self. Nearly every problem we make for ourselves we make because we’ve skirted the cross and gone on our own merry way.

Consider any issue facing the American Church today. Below the surface, the crux of that issue goes back to one thing: not enough dead-to-self Christians.

Take the phrase “not enough are dead to self ” and see how remarkably it answers the following questions:

Why aren’t Christians more interested in evangelism?

Why do so few Christians know the Bible?

Why are Christians so prayerless?

Why do so few Christians serve their neighbors?

Why do so many Christians look just like the world?

Why do so many Christians get divorces?

Why do our Christian youth apostasize in such large numbers while in college?

Why are Christians making so little impact on our society and culture?

The number of such questions that can be answered with “not enough are dead to self ” accumulates rapidly.

A chilling verse:

For many, of whom I have often told you and now tell you even with tears, walk as enemies of the cross of Christ.
—Philippians 3:18

The Cross...I’m sure each of us could draw up a list packed with names of people or groups we would deem enemies of Christ.

But notice Paul’s phraseology. He chooses his words carefully. He did NOT say “enemies of Christ” but “enemies of the CROSS of Christ.”

That hits harder because it hits closer to home. In fact, such enemies may populate our churches. Worse yet, they may be you and me.

Paul concludes:

Their end is destruction, their god is their belly, and they glory in their shame, with minds set on earthly things.
—Philippians 3:19

Sounds like America 2009, doesn’t it?

What else explains the crossless preaching from our pulpits that tickles so many ears?  What else explains Christians who can’t seem to abide even the lightest correction or systematic discipleship? What else explains Christians who look just like the world?

Simple: They haven’t been to the cross.

Perhaps one Christian in 1,000 can say the following without risk of perjury:

But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith– that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead.
—Philippians 3:7-11

Jesus makes the the dividing line even more obvious:

So therefore, any one of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple.
—Luke 14:33

And that dividing line is the cross.  The cross is death to anyone who lays hold of it with both hands:

But far be it from me to boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. For neither circumcision counts for anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creation.
—Galatians 6:14-15

Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.
—Colossians 3:2-3

But for those who die at the cross, a new hope exists:

I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.
—Galatians 2:20

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.
—2 Corinthians 5:17

The saying is trustworthy, for: If we have died with him, we will also live with him…
—2 Timothy 2:11

Here’s one of the strongest spiritual truths: People who aren’t dead to self are nigh unto useless for the Kingdom. Most of what they do for God will be of the flesh, and that junk neither lasts nor produces genuine fruit.

But a man or woman dead to self and alive to Christ is unbounded. You can’t shame such people because you can’t shame the dead. You can’t hurt the dead because they feel no pain. You don’t have to dance around the willfulness of the dead because, hey, no will of their own; they pretty much do whatever you tell them.

And that’s the kind of person God will use immensely.

If we want to talk about equipping the saints, we also have to talk about de-equipping them of themselves.

Too few Christian leaders are bold enough to tell people to their faces that the sole reason for the majority of their annoyances is that they aren’t dead to self. Too few Christian leaders have the cajones to go up to lingerers at church and say, “The reason you’re useless for God is because you have no idea what it means to be dead to self. Maybe if you stopped crawling off the altar God would use you to fix the problems in His church that you’ve been griping about for decades.” Or something to that effect.

If people get offended, too bad. It’s one of the signs they’re not dead to self. Sadly, the cemeteries are filled with the bodies of those who walked away from God because He didn’t fulfill their expectations. And each one of those people left because they couldn’t get past the cross and dying to self. Isaiah, in one of the most potent verses in Scripture, describes such people vividly:

“Woe to him who strives with him who formed him, a pot among earthen pots! Does the clay say to him who forms it, ‘What are you making?’ or ‘Your work has no handles’?
—Isaiah 45:9

You can tell when someone isn’t dead. While a dead body reeks of decay, a person not dead to self reeks of something far worse: pride.  Meanwhile, the sweet aroma of the Christian who is dead to self is that of humility, the first fruit of the image of Christ.

If we aren’t getting people to the cross, then all the equipping in the world will be worthless. If the raw material we’re hoping to see molded into the image of Jesus isn’t dead first, we might as reevaluate our fancy-dancy educational programming until it is.

Will that be hard? Heck, yeah! But it’s the only way that achieves great results for the Kingdom.

Equipping the Saints: That Catchy Tune

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I’ve long been a fan of Leonard Ravenhill, the British revivalist. Ravenhill can pack more punches in five minutes than the average megachurch pastor delivers in five years. We need more men like him.

If you listen to enough Ravenhill, the first unusual aspect of his preaching is that he continually sprinkles his messages with lines from hymns. What’s most amazing to me is that he’s probably doing this off the cuff. In other words, those hymns are deep inside him.

When we begin thinking about ways in which the Church in America can improve its education of the Body, Less drumming, more theology?most people look past music. I don’t.

“Shooting at the walls of heartache, bang, bang, I am _______________.”

If you’re over 40, I’ll bet the majority of you can fill in the blank to that lyric.  Yep, it’s “the warrior.” I have a bazillion pop/rock songs from my youth filling my head. Fact is, I wish I could get rid of most of them, but there they stick.

Likewise—and in a far more edifying way—I believe our Christian hymnody is critical to transmitting truth that sticks with people.

When I was sitting down to write this post, the first hymn that popped into my head was this one:

The Church’s one foundation is Jesus Christ her Lord;
She is His new creation,
By water and the word:
From heaven He came and sought her
To be His holy bride;
With His own blood He bought her,
And for her life He died.

Elect from every nation,
Yet one o’er all the earth,
Her charter of salvation,
One Lord, one faith, one birth;
One holy Name she blesses,
Partakes one holy food,
And to one hope she presses,
With every grace endued.

Frankly, that’s a theology lesson in two verses. If you know that hymn, you’ve got a solid base of truth in your noggin.

Compare that to what CCLI says is the number one church worship song today:

Come, now is the time to worship
Come, now is the time to give your heart
Come, just as you are to worship
Come, just as you are before your God
Come

One day ev’ry tongue will confess You are God
One day ev’ry knee will bow
Still the greatest treause remains for those
Who gladly choose you now

It’s a good song. We sing it in our church. We played it just a few weeks ago, in fact. But you can’t escape the reality that just doesn’t say as much. In addition, it swaps the meaning of the word you between the refrain and the verse. I mean, just who is you ?

We could fisk old hymns and new worship songs forever, probably, but reading through old Methodist and Lutheran hymnals shows a far more rich theology than flipping through the average Vineyard, Integrity, or Hosanna worship song collection.

I believe there is a solid place for contemporary worship songs that are God-directed and contain more “emotional” lyrics. I remember the first Vineyard worship song CD collection I picked up. I was blown away. And honestly, it made me look at the Vineyard more seriously. It’s one reason why I spent 16 years in Vineyard churches.

But as is so common with American Christians, we pushed the pendulum so far the other direction on hymnody that we lost the rich base of hymns that were theology lessons in four verses and a chorus. Too much of what we sing today is devoid of theology beyond “God loves me.” Yes, that’s an essential truth, but c’mon…

One will argue that today’s songs are more directed toward the Lord, and while some of that is true, it’s missing a greater truth. A hymn like “The Church’s One Foundation” is like the stones the Lord asked the Hebrews to pile beside the Jordan to remember their crossing into the promised land. Hymns that aren’t directed right at God have a place because they remind us of who we are and what the Lord has done. They are the stones of memory that bolster our foundation in the truths we believe.

It saddens me to no end that my son’s generation will grow up oblivious to hymns like “Spirit of God, Descend Upon My Heart,” “For All the Saints,” “Christ the Lord Has Risen Today,” “O Sacred Head Now Wounded,” “And Can It Be,” and on and on. I might sing them at home, but if my son hears them nowhere else, they will become artifacts, just like my dad singing opera arias is an artifact to me. My son may recall a nebulous, nostalgic mood, but the hymns will have otherwise lost their intended meaning.

I will go so far as to say that music’s staying power places it above nearly every other mode of communication. I may not be able to remember the content of a sermon I heard preached two months ago, but chances are high I’ll be able to recall and sing most of the new worship song that debuted that same Sunday morning.

And that’s why this issue of theology set to music matters. If the average Joe in the pew remembers a dozen hymns packed with spiritual goodness and depth, perhaps he’ll recall their truths in the time of testing in a way that he may not have responded based on other, less sticky, sources.

If we want to build a stronger Christian, then let’s write better songs that highlight the core doctrines of the Faith.