Disciplemaking

Epic Fail, Epic Win

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In the lexicon of the English language, failure may no longer be an option.

Instead, we English-speakers bring you fail. Not as to fail, but simply fail. (If you aren’t tracking with this, Slate has a fine article explaining this latest twist in the mother tongue.)

Of course, being the the lovers of the extreme that we Americans are, fail is itself a fail unless we can find a way to magnify it. This becomes epic fail. And because all extreme language needs its counter, we have coined the term epic win.

The landing of US Airways Flight 1549 is an epic win.

An epic fail? Think Jan. 22, 1973.

Yes, Roe v. Wade was an epic fail for Christians in this country.

Asleep at the wheel. Knocked out. Comatose. Guard dropped. You name it, the Church of the early 1970s didn’t react to what was happening under its nose. Didn’t stick to the game plan. Didn’t get it. So we got Roe v. Wade and millions upon millions of barbarically destroyed human lives. An entire generation of people culled. Epic, epic fail.

You witness a lot of handwringing over Roe today. What wasn’t big news leading up to that day in January 1973 is now. With a new president who believes Roe was an epic win, Christians are even more alarmed about the course of our country and its attitudes toward abortion. Many frantic calls will emanate from pulpits and burn up the Christian radio and TV airwaves. We will hear a million outlines for courses of action which we have all been hearing for decades.You can almost recite them by heart.

In the language of fail, let’s look at those familiar calls to action:

Voting Republican – FAIL

The Republican Party has done next to nothing to end abortion even though the rhetoric of the party reeks of pro-life talk. But talk is cheap. As long as Christians keep devoting their time and energy to this do-nothing party of talk, we will not end abortion.

Supporting Pro-life Candidates – FAIL

See above. Candidates are often very vocal about their pro-life sentiments. Funny how we hear about this incessantly come election time, then all goes quiet immediately afterwards.

Demonstrating/Protesting – FAIL

I demonstrated with Operation Rescue. I was on the frontlines of protesting at abortion clinics. Another anti-abortion tactic fail...Yes, there were small victories when a child was saved once in a while. But the scale gained is not the scale that will save this country from judgment.

Educating – FAIL

We can show pregnant women pictures of aborted fetuses. We can fire up the 3D sonograms. We can talk and talk and talk about the horrors of abortion. Yet 36 years of pro-life education has given us one thing: the surety of more than a million babies aborted in 2009.

Praying – FAIL

Prayer a fail? How is that possible? How can God not honor our prayer to see abortion end?

Prayer fails under one critical condition. If I am outside on a bitterly cold day and I encounter a destitute man rubbing his chilled hands together while mine remain snug and warm inside my gloves, do I need to pray about what my course of action should be? Haven’t the Scriptures informed my direction? Isn’t the Spirit in me telling me what to do? What is the point of me praying, “God, I really need to know what to do about this man and his cold hands. If it be thy will, let him come over to me and strike up a conversation. Then I will know that I need to do something”? Do I need to pray this? No, I don’t. I need to do what the Spirit and the Word, both of which I claim to know, have already told me to do.

When we use prayer as a means to look spiritual while failing to do what God wills of us, prayer is a fail. Disobedience does not move the heart of God toward us. What should we expect from God when we know what to do but do not do it?

And there is one enormous thing we are refusing to do even though we know we must do it.

This brings us to the most epic fail of them all. It’s an epic fail larger than Roe v. Wade. A million Roe v. Wades combined could not be as epic as this fail. And it is this epic fail that explains entirely the epic fail of the American Church when it comes to abortion.

Making disciples – EPIC FAIL

In the early 1960s, the Church in America abandoned its primary mission to make disciples in the name of Jesus. We got sidetracked into culture wars, fighting the commies, worrying about hippies, looking at every threat in the world while ignoring the fact that lost people were remaining lost because we forgot what we were supposed to be about. I believe that’s the main reason why abortion became the law of the land.

If we have tried every other means to stop abortion in America and nothing has worked, the simple reason comes down to this: When a nation is filled with people who have not been born again, that nation will not honor righteousness.

That is the American Church’s epic fail. We simply stopped making disciples.

Want an epic win and an end to Roe? Make disciples. If every Christian in this country committed to actively sharing Christ with a half dozen lost people this year, just one every two months, I think we would begin to see change. If we stopped toying around with discipleship and got serious about raising up the next God-fearing  generation within our very own churches, we would see change. We would know that epic win that we have craved for 36 years if we dropped all the other skubalon that has distracted us and focused on our primary mission of making disciples.

Because a nation of people filled with the Spirit would have no need for abortion and would abolish it in a heartbeat.

The Long, Dark Eternity of One Soul

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I met Douglas Adams at my first MacWorld in 1997. I was manning the technology demonstration booth for Apple when he popped his head in to ask me a question. It took all of a split second to know who he was just by sight. After all, he was my favorite author. No set of books made me laugh more than The Hitchhiker’s “Trilogy,” and humor is darned hard to write.

So there I was, starstruck.

Adams and I chatted about his upcoming computer game, Starship Titanic, and how it was taking forever to debug and get perfect. Talk shifted to upcoming Apple hardware. As an Apple Master, a sort of celebrity endorser and Mac evangelista, Adams received complementary equipment from Apple. We must’ve talked for a half hour about what was coming down the pike.

I didn’t see Adams again until MacWorld 2000. At that time, I was no longer working for Apple but did high-end Mac support for NASA as a contractor. Because I gave hardware and software advice to NASA honchos, I got to go to MacWorld. Can you hear the weeping and gnashing of teeth?In the tunnel under the street that connected exhibition halls, I ran into Adams again and went up to say hello. He recognized me right away and noted my tag said that I was now at NASA. We talked about that, then I shifted the conversation to talk of a Hitchhiker’s movie. Adams told me he had just completed what he thought would be the basis of the  screenplay. I was elated, but I could tell Adams was frustrated with the progress. He told me the screenplay-writing process had really taken it out of him. He added that Starship Titanic‘s underwhelming sales had been a disappointment and that he didn’t want to see that happen with the Hitchhiker’s movie.

We talked until the surreal happened: Sinbad, the comedian, walked up and joined the conversation. The three of us, all above 6′ 3″, dominated the center of the tunnel as people streamed around us. But though I’m a raging extrovert and conversationalist, I met my match in Sinbad; I sensed that it was time for to me to bow out. I said goodbye and hustled on my way.

A little over a year later, Adams died unexpectedly of a heart attack.

As much as I thought I knew something about Adams, it somehow did not dawn on the me that the man was known as one of the world’s foremost atheists. (Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion is dedicated to Adams.) Looking back at Adams’s writings now, I wonder how I could have missed it.

In a way, my naïveté didn’t matter. Here was a man, like most men, estranged from God. Estranged at a level so deep that he had rejected the existence of all spirituality. There I am, a representative of Jesus Christ. And yet with that man mere months away from eternity, the contents of my last words to him were wood, hay, and stubble.

Today, I sit here typing and my soul grieves. It weeps because I am not serious about eternity. Next to nothing in my life  manifests my belief that an eternal hell is real. When I look around, what scares me more than anything is that I’m more serious about hell than most Christians are.  Yet my actions speak louder than words.

It seems to me that all Christians must deal with the truth that they themselves deserved hell before Jesus saved them. People may deal with it at different times in their Christian walk, but deal with it they must.

But what separates a real disciple of Christ from a DINO (Disciple in Name Only) is that the real disciple stares into the pit of hell and is so shaken by the view that all distractions in this life pale compared with working to get the Gospel out to the lost, no matter the personal costs.

I don’t think enough of us Christians are getting to that point. What else explains the feebleness of our outreach to the lost? We live as if there were no eternity at all.

Just like the atheists do.

A Nation of Fig Trees

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And seeing a fig tree by the wayside, he went to it and found nothing on it but only leaves. And he said to it, “May no fruit ever come from you again!” And the fig tree withered at once.
—Matthew 21:19

A conversation with my sister-in-law troubled me. It had to do with the old aphorism “Bloom where you’re planted.”

A couple weeks ago, I posted the following:

Overheard countless times in the last two months: “I am concerned about the poor performance of my investments and savings.

Not heard even one time in the last two decades:  “I am concerned about my poor performance in laying up treasure in heaven.

It all ties together, trust me.

I recently turned 46. To me, that’s an “other side of the mountain” age. I look at people just 10 years older and they’ve gone gray and have that “retired” look. Entropy overshoots no one.

When I take stock of my life, I’m deeply troubled. I’m simply not laying up treasure in heaven. Period. End of story.

I wish I could say that the problem is found only inside me. But it’s not. In many ways, I know that I surpass a lot of other Christians in treasure-laying-up. At least here in the States.

So my sister-in-law and I were talking about this issue and she unleashed the “Bloom where you’re planted” line. She said that God can’t fault us if we’re good employees providing for our families, Jesus cursing the fig treeraising up our kids in the knowledge of the Lord, and just being a good Christian when a good Christian is called for. Given the pressures most people face in life today, just doing those things has to count for something.

But does it?

The way I look at it, if you pull the average family man off the street and analyze his life, he’s probably doing most of those things. He may even be packing his family off to church once a week.

But I can’t see how any of that fulfills the upward call of Christ. For all I know, that man doesn’t know Jesus at all. What then distinguishes the average American Christian from his non-Christian neighbor? If “bloom where you’re planted” is the be all and end all of modern living, then isn’t Joe Pagan blooming, too?

A quick read of the ending of Matthew gives us a clue into Jesus’ standard of living:

And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
—Matthew 28:18-20

How does that jive with the list of prerequisite works found within the “bloom where you’re planted” ideal?

It doesn’t.

In the last 10 years, I’ve had one person try to witness to me. Her witness consisted of handing me and the rest of my group a tract. She did this for about 20 people, ran out of tracts, and then skedaddled, not saying a word.

I fear that encounter pretty much encapsulates what passes for making disciples today: quick, harmless, and no cost to the “discipler.”

But then again, how can we expect anything else? Everyone is too busy blooming where they are planted to give a hoot about evangelism or spending time making disciples.

The sad part, to me at least, is that I’m no better than anyone else. I’m too busy attempting to feed my family to have even two seconds for ministry.

Back when I had a little bit more time, I encouraged my church to consider a mentoring program for kids in the church who lacked dads. Today, they put out the sign-up sheet. I stood there with a tear in my eye, unable to sign my name on the sheet endorsing the very idea I suggested.

Something has got to give.

How can any of us expect to hear “Well done good and faithful servant” if the only people we serve are our families? Don’t the godless do the very same thing?

Jesus said, “Truly, I say to you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands, for my sake and for the gospel, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this time, houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions, and in the age to come eternal life. But many who are first will be last, and the last first.”
—Mark 10:29-31

The way we Christians in America live, I expect to see the vast majority of us standing at the end of the celestial line, our heavenly garb tinged with a hint of soot and sulfur after the test of fire incinerated everything we worked for in our earthly lives. Maybe a minuscule fleck of gold remained. Maybe. Emphasis on minuscule.

And what is that speck? Our treasure in heaven.

To bloom where we are planted requires we actually bloom. But not simply for ourselves. The fig tree that Jesus cursed probably did bloom. It just didn’t produce any fruit. Yet what point is a fruit tree with no fruit?

What point is a Christian who has no time for obeying the command of Christ to go make disciples no matter the cost to us? What good is a Christian whose life revolves around the same daily routine as the non-Christian, save for squeezing in church on Sunday and some prayers and Bible reading during the week? Isn’t the barrenness just as obvious between the avowed follower and the lost?

Many of us believe the end is close at hand. If so, what explains the lack of work for the Kingdom? We’re all so worried the economy will take our jobs away, but what if being forced to watch all our earthly treasure signed over to some bank is the best thing for each of us? Maybe actually losing everything would reinforce the words we speak glibly about forsaking all for Jesus.

It’s a hard word, isn’t it?