Compassion

The Question Ignored By Christian Authorities, Leaders, Pundits, and Bloggers

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The Internet is filled with words. The Christian section of it too.

To waltz into the Christian ghetto online will get you beaten about the head and neck with every sort of opinion, doctrinal refinement, and thought balloon. Yet it seems to me that for all the punditry and supposed solutions to all of life’s problems that the online Church says it answers, almost every source of solutions ignores the foundational question that most people in the world today ask:

Does anyone care that I exist?

Sadly, that’s not a question we are answering well in the contemporary Church. We can say “God loves you,” but we don’t offer most people much flesh and blood proof of that truth.Lonely in a crowd I suspect it’s all too common for a person to walk into a typical church on Sunday with that question burning in the heart and leave an hour later with it unresolved—and perhaps even unadressed entirely. That a person can be utterly alone in a church packed with people…well, it happens, doesn’t it?

So what difference does all the talk on the Internet make if all these authoritative voices have so little impact on that most pressing of all inquiries?

The tangential issue that bothers me most about that unresolved question is that I wonder if any of the Christians behind the voices on the Internet (and outside it) even bother to wonder what it is like to be someone else. Do we ever put ourselves into the lives of other people? Do we consider how they live, struggle, cope, and adjust?

It doesn’t seem as if we do. What else explains the hamfisted way in which we deal with others? What else answers how agendas, programs, and initiatives steamroll real people? Or how people can encounter us and not be changed by the Jesus we say lives in our hearts?

Other people simply are not on our radar.

I am convinced that the only thing that will snap us out of our cocoons of self is personal tragedy. We have to suffer greatly before we begin to wonder how other people live, especially if we find ourselves alone in the midst of that suffering.

I would think that it wouldn’t have to go that far, that the Holy Spirit would be enough to enlighten us to the need for dealing with humanity’s brutal question, but it doesn’t seem as if He is getting through to us. Not that He is somehow insufficient, only that we stuff our ears with “our lives” so as to block His shouts.

Someday in the American Church, a group of people will wake up and help others answer the question of whether or not anyone genuinely cares if they exist. Those pioneers will demonstrate that care too.

It can’t happen soon enough. More power to ’em.

Your Church’s Budget–And Why It May Grieve the Lord

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Jesus or Money?I was thinking about how churches spend their money. Given all the verses in the Bible on finances and the sheer number of Christians who ascribe to Dave Ramsay’s philosophies, one would think we Christians in America would have this money thing down pat.

One would think.

But what would happen if we were to scrap the way we think about church budgets and adopt something more aligned to what the Bible says?

I could list a thousand verses on money in this post, but you already know them, right? We all know them. We just don’t adhere to them very well.

Here is what I’m thinking:

First, let’s take church staff salaries off the table for now. This is a baby-step process I’m advocating, and it’s no use angering anyone by suggesting we reevaluate staff costs now. Maybe when we’re more mature in the Lord. 😉

Take the church budget and set salaries aside. Now take all the money leftover and split it into two equal piles: Inreach and Outreach.

The Bible states that we must take care of the needs of the brethren. That’s our Inreach. In truth, staff salaries should be part of Inreach, but we’ve got them excluded for now. Inreach covers the church physical plant, programs, and benevolences given to church members who need financial assistance.

The Bible states that we then take care of those outside the church. That’s our Outreach. Missions, connecting with lost people, and benevolences for the needy outside the church community comprise Outreach.

And that’s your basic church budget. I think that’s a Kingdom-minded approach, don’t you?

Now how many churches out there work that way?

I would suggest that Inreach and staff salaries dominate most church budgets. But there is a HUGE “however”: Inreach as allocated in too many churches leaves almost no money for benevolences given to church members. In fact, benevolences monies, whether for Inreach or Outreach, are often the smallest pool of cash in the church budget.

So much for “Give and it shall be given to you.”

As much as we talk about being others-centric in the American Church, our church budgets don’t reflect this. We really are too self-centered. For many churches, the Great Commission is thwarted by building and physical plant maintenance costs. When a church allocates little money for outsiders, it grows into itself and withers.

If you are a church leader, consider a different way of budgeting that better reflects the Kingdom of God. If it means not erecting a $10 million building so you can use those funds to finance the education of single moms in your community instead, then cancel the groundbreaking ceremony. If it means a Sunday School teacher who has been out of work gets to keep his house because you set aside monies for this kind of help, then go for it.

We live in disconcerting times. If we don’t adjust the way the Church spends money, we won’t be the first choice when lost people come looking for answers. The Church will look like any other worldly, tightfisted corporate entity, and no one is running to Megabiz Inc. for salvation.

Resisting Your Own Little World for the Sake of the Kingdom

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Tim Challies linked to an interesting article that reflects a topic I’ve discussed in depth: technology’s attack on genuine community. A good article, worthy of your time and consideration.

Toward the article’s end, one educational scientist, William Kist of Kent State University, makes an intriguing statement:

[Kist] also pointed out that the “real world” that many social media critics hark back to never really existed. Before everyone travelled on the bus or train with their heads buried in an iPad or a smart phone, they usually just travelled in silence. “We did not see people spontaneously talking to strangers. They were just keeping to themselves,” Kist said.

Many Christian writers/thinkers/pastors/bloggers talk about community, but rarely have I heard any of them discussing what Kist states above.

That ability to engage a stranger is foundational to any healthy society. And it goes beyond simple transactional engagement, such as asking the butcher for pound of ground chuck.

As Kist notes, in the days before the proliferation of tech devices that wired us into our own little worlds, people were already in that world, we just couldn’t see it. Lonely in a crowdI would contend that industrialization and social Darwinism abetted that transformation long ago, as we heartily received the false gospels of self-sufficiency and survival of the fittest.

Ours has become an “I don’t need you” society where people fight over scraps. Witness how easily a simple pending snowstorm turns grocery shoppers into frightened hoarders because their self-sufficiency is briefly threatened.

I honestly believe we can counter some of that mentality if we break out of our little worlds.

I was that guy on the plane flight who was chatty with the people in my row. I’m told that makes me a nuisance, but that was before everyone was plugged into a computer, iPad, iPod, Blackberry, or whatever. And you know, I never once had a conversation with rowmates that wasn’t fascinating. Nor did I ever get the feeling that those in the conversation resented the chat.  People did open up. In fact, most people would leave the plane laughing or smiling after such a talk. Made the flight go faster too.

What got me was that just talking with a stranger opened up a level of connection that most people now avoid like the plague. Tech only makes it more obvious. (I would tend to disagree with Kist, in part, because a person with a gadget truly is less likely to engage another, lost as they are in their cyberworld. People may have been silent in the past, but that was only because they’d been acclimatized by conditioning to be so. Now, it’s supplemented.)

Those conversations I have on planes (and in checkout lines, buses, sporting events—wherever) have meaning. They tie people together and remind us that we’re not only NOT self-suffucient but that other people have worth, that their stories matter in the larger story of God’s redemptive history.

This brings me to my final point.

I’ve been wondering why Christians today are so lousy at personal evangelism, and I believe these issues play right into that. If we can’t engage people, if we aren’t the ones who break the silence, then no one will hear about Jesus.

I’m constantly amazed at the personal details I hear from strangers I engage. The young woman running my bag of carrots over the grocery store scanner has a story. And if I talk with her, I may find out her husband just left her and the kid to fend for themselves. Or that her mom just died of cancer.

For those of us who are Christians, how can we be silent? How can we be buried in an iPad when the drama of the lives of broken, shattered people plays out around us?

Do you think Jesus has anything to say through your lips to that young woman whose husband just left? Does He have anything to offer her after her mom died right when she needed her most?

Each day, our opportunities to lead lost people to Jesus are legion. How can we possibly be silent, to let others pass by trapped in a world they can’t understand, while we who claim to know the answers dwell in our own little world, oblivious?