Christianity in North America

Killing the Messenger

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I met with a friend the other day for lunch. He's a good man with plenty of God-given vision for the Kingdom, but he's discouraged.

My friend is discouraged for many of the same reasons I discuss in posts here at Cerulean Sanctum. He sees the problems in the American Church today, but rather than dwelling on them, he works toward solutions. He loves the Church and wants only the best for Her, yet he's had a rough time finding a place that will appreciate his talents. Instead, he's found a lot of the business world in the Church, where people in leadership positions, when confronted with problems, would rather let innocent underlings die by the sword than to be responsible men and fall on it themselves.

As I listened to my friend, it struck me how alike we are in what we see and understand. It's like we were thinking the exact same thoughts at the exact same time. I found myself nodding my head the second he opened his mouth to talk about an issue because I knew precisely what he was going to say; I would have said it that same way, too.

The difference between the two of us is that my friend is still actively pursuing a life in the ministry. I, on the other hand, tired of the gamesmanship, the unwillingness to look beyond the ordinary, and the perpetual confrontations with people lacking vision, got out.

I don't say that with any malice toward any one person or any single church. The cumulative barrage is what hurts over time, particularly for those people who by God's design are the square pegs in the round holes.

Not too long ago, I interviewed for a pastoral position at a respected church. The pastor was clearly a man who pushed the envelope and was wholly unsatisfied with the status quo. I didn't agree with every move he made, but you could tell he was on the right iconoclastic path. Sadly, during my first interview, I realized his board did not share the same vision.

When asked how I defined "spiritual growth", I made the mis-step of defining my view by opening with what it was so obviously not: keisters in seats. On this, the pastor and I wholeheartedly agreed. Someone forgot to clue the board in, though. The laser death beams that drilled about two dozen holes in me revealed the truth. To the board, it was ALL about packing 'em in.

Same planet, different worlds.

I really don't know how those folks get in positions of power in our American churches, but somehow they do. You can stamp folks like that out of a mold, put a certain regional dialect on their lips, and plop them in church leadership roles around the country—sometimes I think that's how they're made, devilishly manufactured in secret government cloning tubs in a lab outside Poughkeepsie.

For those godly people who have a better vision, the small-minded are everywhere. More often than not, they're standing in the way, doing everything they can to secure their own kingdom at the expense of the bigger Kingdom.

But what to do?

My friend and I were on the same path at one time, but broken and battered, I got off. Am I happy with that decision? Not really. It leads to the inevitable question of what might have been. But then I see my friend, a man wholly sold out to God, and I see the utter discouragement on his face and I wonder. More than anything I pray that some church that hasn't been infiltrated by small kingdom people will recognize the goldmine, will see the prophet, and turn him loose to do the thing that God so desires to do through him.

You can't peer into the holy depths of a Jeremiah and know every emotion of his every day. Who understood him except God? Who consoled him except his Creator? To not seek the approval of men is to exact a cost that too few of us are willing to pay. Certainly small-minded, small kingdom people can't understand that cost.

More than anything else, I pray that God would blow those small kingdomites off their perch, like a carpenter blows sawdust off his work. I've seen too many godly people shot down in flames, not because they were wrong, but because they were so excruciatingly right about problems and the solutions needed to fix them that no one could tolerate their correctness.

Opposition from the world is to be expected. But opposition from the Church? That's a sting no anesthetic will soothe.

Today, I'm sad for my friend. I wonder why so many good people suffer at the hands of the very people they seek to serve.

Hmm. Sounds achingly familiar, doesn't it?

{Image: The Stoning of Stephen by Pietro da Cortona}

Super Christian Homeschooling Ninja Moms of Death

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Mother's Day is this weekend. According to the restaurant industry, it's the single busiest day of the year for most sit-down restaurants as guilty husbands and children treat mom to a freakin' break for one day. And moms deserve it, too. Most Hallmark-derived holidays are bogus to the nth-degree, but I think it's hard to argue against Mother's Day.

(And yes, I know that Hallmark didn't come up with Mother's Day. I am blaming them for Sweetest Day, though.)

On the heels of the two-part "Speed Kills the Christian Soul (1 & 2)", I feel the need to address an issue that few women are willing to discuss. Being a profound extrovert, and also not a woman, maybe I can put into words what many married Christian women today are feeling, but are afraid to say:

  1. "I'm burned out, burned up, and the ember that is my personal existence is running on fumes—
  2. —yet I have to keep up appearances."
  3. "While I will say in public—public being church—that my husband is the rock of the household, I'm the one holding our home together."
  4. "I'm petrified to admit I'm barely holding on."
  5. "I'm terrified of letting anyone else know that I question whether this is the abundant life or not."

If that's you, I have a word for you: Grace. My prayer is that you receive it abundantly.

I don't understand what we're doing to women today in the Church. The pressure to conform to a lifestyle that incorporates one part Beth Moore, one part Martha Stewart, one part Jessie Wise, and one part Salome astounds me. And don't even toss in that proverbial woman from chapter 31 that every female is told she must aspire to. That's a whole 'nother post.

Is it any wonder that so many Christian homes are struggling? What woman wouldn't struggle underneath that burden? And as I noted, as she goes, so goes the home.

Frankly, I'm angered at the expectations and the pressure to conform that many women endure. We men don't have that same burden. Yes, our lives our hectic and we're overburdened, too, but we can always opt out and claim we're "just being a guy for the day." Fire up the tube and plugin to six hours of football and no other man will accuse you of being a jerk. We'll all nod and say as one, "Yep…."

But let an Evangelical Christian woman tell her compatriots that she thinks it might be easier to send her kids to public school this year and you'll witness a shunning worthy of The Scarlet Letter.

Honestly, I wonder why there are so few married women in mental institutions today, what with all the pressure to conform they must endure. It's looks, household abilities, childrearing skills, teaching ability, and a million other lines on the checklist. Fail to tick off one and you might as well drop out of church—at least some churches.

I understand it gets worse the farther south you go. Yeah, a few tongues may wag up in Lake Wobegon, MN, but by the time you hit Atlanta, they haul out the pillories that Sherman left behind. That "Well, bless her heart!" that you hear tossed at the mom who microwaves most of her dinners and sends her kids to one of "those schools" actually means, "She's sullying the good name of motherhood."

This may be extraordinarily coarse of me to say, but I wonder if for all the talk of female empowerment we prattle on about in some sectors of the Church today, that we're not subconsciously holding out The Stepford Wives as the sine qua non of feminine existence—albeit with the additional knack for rightly dividing the Scriptures.

Too harsh? I think if we could peer at the unveiled souls of women in our churches today, we'd be surprised how many are suffering silently.

If you're a man, I want you to think about a few things. If you're insisting on homeschooling your kids but you're not carrying at least a third of that load, then you're shirking your responsibility and should perhaps give up the homeschooling idol. If you think it's okay to rush off to your cave (be it the TV room, a Christian men's group, your garage, or the Internet) after dinner at night without asking your wife how you can make her life easier before you do your own thing, then consider that you might not deserve to be married. As much talk as I hear about men being the "prophets, priests, and kings" of their household, I hear far less about being the "servant."

Tammy Wynette may have sung the line, "Sometimes it's hard to be a woman…," but countless women in our churches today are living that reality, and they're barely holding on. This week, let's find ways to strengthen their grip, not only on their daily existence, but on the Lord.

And don't just quote a Bible verse at them, either.

{Image: (Update) Travis Seitler comes through and tells me this is Donna Troy (AKA Wonder Girl), an Infinite Earths variant of Wonder Woman from DC Comics, drawn by the exceptionally talented George Perez. I should have been able to recognize Perez, as he's long been a favorite of mine. Now I'll probably be sued for using the pic, since a friend of mine wrote a book on comics and the Gospel and DC wouldn't let him use any images (though Marvel had no problems). Hey, I'm giving the attribute here, DC! The full-sized version is nicely done.}

Speed Kills the Christian Soul–Part 2

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Q1: What is the chief end of man?

A1: Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy Him for ever.

— Westminster Shorter Catechism (1674)

My small group met this last Friday and the theme that came out in prayer requests and other revelations was simple: folks are struggling under a load of things to do. FranticPeople are going to bed at 4 AM and getting up at 7 AM. Homeschoolers are scheduled to the max trying to pack requirements in every day. Life has become a clumsy dance of “do this, then do that” and our days have come to resemble little more than a succession of nags.

One mom wondered what would happen when her lone hour a day to herself went away come August. Too many of us know exactly how she feels.

In the last few weeks, I spent

  • Eight hours on the phone trying to schedule a plane flight for three people
  • Three hours trying to get information on my phone service (and still no response)
  • Several hours trying to enroll my son in a state-approved homeschooling program (and I’m still not done)
  • Cramming six errands spread across the city into two-and-a-half hours
  • Mowing the grass to the tune of nine hours
  • Switching my entire Web presence to a new host, new domains, and new software—untold hours
  • Switching from Eudora (after twenty years of use!) to Thunderbird, and laboring through all the bureaucratic importation nonsense that went with that switch
  • Attending six worship band practices
  • Dealing with car maintenance issues
  • Spending a couple hours wrangling on the phone with a service company that didn’t perform the service I asked of them
  • And, sadly, finding very little time to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.

There are countless unmentioned experiences in that list, but suffice it to say, my candle’s had more than two wicks burning at the same time. While this may sound like whining, I suspect it’s a whine all too common in most people’s lives. The pace of life continues to speed up.

One commenter to Part 1 said the answer was in moving to the country. Well, I already did that and only found a new set of problems. The issue is not so much where we live, but how we live.

When I look at what consumed most of my time the last few weeks, much of it had to do with the following:

  • Bureaucracy, usually made concrete by the endless filling-out of forms or jumping through hoops
  • Technology, our new master
  • Maintaining possessions, the things we own that ultimately control us
  • Lack of personal community, wherein we must individually do what the community used to do for us collectively

Those four issues form a quadrilateral in no way like Wesley’s, yet they’re just as spiritually significant. Not only that, but they feed off each other. We have bureaucracy because we no longer live in communities of trust. Our lack of community leads us to self-sufficiency, the stepfather of technology. Our bureaucracy safeguards our possessions, of which an increasing number are technological. We ultimately replace people with items and then call our lives good.

Modern Man’s dilemma is not so much that we cannot make time for ourselves, but that the things we’ve created to make time for ourselves ultimately consume all our time and destroy relationships. Not only relationships with flesh-and-blood human beings, but with God Himself.

It’s difficult to imagine not having a car in the United States, but how hard do we have to work to buy and maintain that car? In my own case, it seems not a month goes by that I don’t have something to do related to vehicles: oil changes, tire rotations or replacements, licensing, insurance, various bits of maintenance, and working hard enough to afford the cost of $3 gas alone. With gas that high, every trip becomes a logistical nightmare. How many errands can I run in one sprint into the city? When? How? And what if something comes up that upsets that delicate balance? The dentist wants to reschedule? Ugh.

Cars are a simple one to question. There’s the bureaucracy of simply owning one, with all the titles, government regulations, and yearly paperwork. It’s technology, and it’s gotten so technological that no one can service his own anymore. I can’t get my 13-year old truck an oil change at many oil change centers because they don’t have the right wrench to remove the specific kind of plug that’s on my oil pan. Multiply that by several million cars and you’ve got a tech nightmare. And you thought computer operating system differences were a hassle!

Cars also mean insurance, because in our litigious society no insurance means no legal way to drive in most states. That’s an added—costly—hassle. And as I mentioned earlier, there’s expensive maintenance. And community? Well, there’s not much personal community in a car. Most of us don’t carpool, and it seems odd to even have a neighbor or friend in our cars. Our cars are meant to hold our nuclear families and that’s usually about it.

But unlike Europe, which developed in self-sufficient burghs, America is a vast, spread-out place that astonishes non-Americans. Almost every Japanese I’ve met in America is swift to comment on our interstates and the amount of time we spend on them. And we have to spend a lot of time on them because everything sprawls in this country. A few weeks ago I asked how many of you lived within fifty miles of extended family and I would say that 90% of you did not. So we depend on cars to get us there—if we want to see extended family, that is.

Multiply cars, phones, jets, computers, insurance policies, and the like. My eight hours on the phone trying to schedule a flight is the length of the flight there and back. Hmm. What gained then? And for a family reunion, too. Isn’t family supposed to be nearby? If 90% of us have none within fifty miles, then I guess not.

I’m getting snarky here and I apologize. Already this post has failed my usual test for quality. But still I must ask, What has all this bought us except hectic lives that go full throttle 24/7/365?

And what about God? Do we even have time for Him, much less to truly enjoy Him?

It bothers me that it’s the hardcore green liberals that are asking the question that Christians should be asking but aren’t: Is our daily existence dictated by evil, rather than by good? In our case, we understand that God is the good here, but the problem does not go away by defining good.

On this issue, I took Al Mohler to task over his non-answer when he usually has one. Perhaps that was unfair. To Mohler’s credit, he does quote Francis Schaeffer’s book title. Schaeffer asked, “How then shall we live?” in that eponymous book, and it’s a valid question.

I believe we are living in an evil construct. There is no good to be found in much of our activity. In past posts I’ve wondered aloud where the Christians are who are envisioning communities that eschew pharisaic bureaucracy, man-handling technology, devotion to things, and a lack of devotion to people. A few are cropping up, but not nearly enough to make a dent in the dialog in our churches. Mostly, those folks are seen as cranks or environmentalists or some other irritant not worth engaging. That’s too bad.

Not only are our lives being stolen by bureaucracy, technology, possession maintenance, and lack of community, but I genuinely believe that there are demonic components behind those four issues. We dismiss too easily and laugh at the notion, but could there not be a better way, a way that more fully expresses the life of God in the individual rather than the individual at the mercy of his surroundings? I believe that reality exists and is possible, but only if better people than me start working toward it.

In Song of Solomon, it says:

Catch the foxes for us, the little foxes that spoil the vineyards, for our vineyards are in blossom.
—Song of Solomon 2:15 ESV

Our vineyards today are overrun with little foxes, but we are not catching them. In fact, we take them for granted, have made our peace with them, and then no longer wonder why we aren’t fruitful. We take barrenness as the natural state of living.

If we desire to glorify God and enjoy Him forever, something has to give.