Dying to Self

We Had a Choice, and We Chose…

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(Back in August 2006, I wrote a post entitled The Real American Christian “Either/Or. If you haven’t read that post, please do. Today’s post riffs on the ideas found in that post.)

I had an opportunity to drive to see my youngest brother in Illinois before he left to do linguistics field work and data collection in Alaska. My middle brother and his family joined me on the trek west. Having attended a local Bible college, that brother has volunteered as a youth minister at his church for so long that he’s into his second generation of teens.We talked about many topics on the drive to Carbondale.

 

While discussing the state of the Church today, he made the following statement:

If you take a look at the average Evangelical Christian family in this country, they may talk about choosing to follow Jesus, but they didn’t. They chose money. That explains everything.

George Barna, the pollster who routinely looks at the state of the American Church, has noted that Evangelicals are more concerned that their kids get into elite colleges than that those same children follow Jesus Christ. The reasoning for that seems obvious. Graduating from an elite college means a higher-paying job.

 

Yesterday, I made this comment about men:

I want to believe that a man can work a sixty-hour week, spend quality time with his wife and kids, be involved in his community, find time for leisure, and still be an effective disciple of Jesus Christ. The kind of man who prays big prayers and knows God intimately for those prayers. The kind of man who readily leads many others to his Savior and disciples those same people to maturity. I want to believe, but I don’t know any men like that.

 

I’m not saying that a man like I describe can’t have an earnest desire to serve the Lord. But I question the ability to follow through on that desire. It’s a case of allegiance. Two masters; which will the average 9-to-5’er (or 8-to-6’er, as the case is today) serve?

Every survey out there on the state of the Church in 2008 notes drop-offs in attendance, participation in activities, and general involvement. The Church in this country is in poor shape. We have more megachurches than ever before and less spiritual health.

Meanwhile, the lost are proceeding to hell in an endless stream.

Who is actually doing the work of the ministry today? It’s a handful of people, mostly full-time Christian workers. It’s hard not to look at the way we do ministry in America 2008 and not see that most of us have stepped out of the ministry role Jesus commended of us and handed it off to someone else accompanied by a small envelope filled with a few bucks “earnest” money. That passes for active ministry in most people’s lives.

And why not? We’re making the big bucks. Why not farm out our responsibility to someone else? It’s The American Way™!

But it’s not Jesus’ way.

As I noted yesterday, I want to believe that the average Christian man working a middle management job in some cubicle in Conglomo Corporation can make a difference for Christ. But I don’t see it. Hey, Bob, have you met the new guy in HR?I see that same man’s large suburban tract home, his boat, his trips to Disneyworld, his 401k account, but I don’t see any impact for the Kingdom. Not when all the accounts are tallied and the bill comes due. Yet this passes for acceptable Evangelical living in America 2008.

When asked if he would deny Christ, I’m sure that man would vehemently say no. And yet he appears to every day because in all the things that matter he’ll never choose Jesus. He’ll choose comfort. He’ll take the money and run. And he’ll make darned sure his kids can take the money and run, too, even if that means Jesus ends up the also-ran in his children’s lives.

I don’t want to think that it’s all about the Benjamins, yet it seems like it is. I know that I have difficult decisions to make in that regard, decisions I didn’t ever think that I—or any other man my age—would need to make. Perhaps our concessions to our Industrialized Age have forced our hands. Maybe no middle ground exists any longer. It just may be that all we can do is fall into line or else wind up scavenging for food from the neighborhood dump. Who wouldn’t want to avoid that fate?

And so we made our choice.

The Church of the Redundant

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MC knows the scoreNo one wants to think about a pastor dying unexpectedly, but what if yours did?

The church I attend had their 46-year-old pastor die of cancer a few years ago. It wasn’t completely unexpected, but he’d appeared to make a full recovery—only to succumb shortly after returning to the pulpit. People were shocked.

Now the elders in my church held the church together for a year or so while they sought a new pastor. My wife and I came on-board right as the new pastor was called. We feel blessed by this timing.

Some churches don’t recover, though, when a pastor dies or simply leaves for greener pastures. Or the children’s ministry director steps down and no one wants to step up. Or the worship pastor follows that dream to stardom in Nashville and the worship band sort of “goes to seed” in the aftermath of that departure.

It seems to me that a good many churches out there are cults. Not like Jehovah’s Witnesses, but cults of personality. They revolve around a few dynamic individuals. Should something happen to those dynamic individuals…well, you can see the handwriting forming on the wall.

It should never be that way.

Blame it on something in the drinking water in America, but we don’t do a very good job seeing ourselves as replaceable. Worse, people in leadership positions in churches take this to the extreme and find ways to keep from grooming successors. That dog-eat-dog, business world, CEO model permeates too much of our thinking, making us resistant to doing what’s best for the church, even if that best may not be the best for us personally.

The Bible has this to say,

Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life.
—John 12:24-25

The church that makes a difference is the one that understands that nothing good from anything that hasn’t died first. In this case, the truth is that I, along with you, must die to any preconceptions I have about “my ministry.” It’s not my ministry anymore than it is yours. It’s the Lord’s. And He only works wonders when the people trust Him enough to do it His way.

When we build our churches on a handful of talented individuals, we only set ourselves up for failure. Our goal instead should be to build a church where each person is replaceable, no matter how much a person might give to the ministry of the church in terms of time, effort, and money.

You see, when we’re dead, none of that worldly striving for position matters. It no longer becomes “my ministry.” The goal isn’t to play out my ministry, but to ensure that Christ plays out His, even if it means I wind up martyred for it. Because I’m replaceable.

Viewed that way, our entire perspective on how we disciple and raise up leaders must change. It forces us to see every person in the seats as a leader on some level or other. It means that anyone should be able to step up into any position within a church at a moments notice. And that’s because God often taps people for ministry on a moment’s notice.

Instead, we’ve created a model where a few of the dynamic people carry those who are all too willing to take up space. And this is what passes for church in far too many congregations out there.

Or we have the reverse where the leadership doesn’t resemble the boardroom of Procter & Gamble, so a handful of self-appointed leaders in the pews clamor to do it their way. Talk about toxic! So much for dying to self and putting the needs of others first.

When you look around the world at places where the Church is growing exponentially, it’s largely in those places where the Christians understand that everyone should be replaceable. The leaders realize they may not be around tomorrow, so redundancy is key. The Enemy can’t cut off the heads of leadership because, like a hydra, more will just grow out of the stumps.

But we’re not at that place in the U.S. Our own history of self-made men and pioneers makes that kind of selflessness impossible without a serious overhaul of our own identity as Americans. But our identity is found in Christ, not the Founding Fathers. And even they were pretty selfless when it came to founding this country.

I suspect that Darwinistic survival of the fittest concepts drive too many of us for us to see ourselves as redundant. But I also think that’s the only way we’re going to weather the storms that come our way as a Body of Believers in America.

Should it be so difficult, really? I don’t think it needs to be. It just means putting down “me” and taking up the cross. It means not thinking more highly of ourselves than we ought and esteeming others better. It means working to ensure that no one in our churches is irreplaceable. It means making disciples that conform, each and every one, to the image of Christ and not our own image.

I started out 2008 writing that this needs to be a year where we listen to the Holy Spirit like we’ve never listened before. I also think that 2008 is the year where the Church in America gets serious about laying down self. If it’s about maximizing the 401k plan, then we’re not going to work to make ourselves redundant. If it’s about maintaining a pretty Evangelical kingdom of our own making, then we’re never going  to be humble enough to say, “Lord, here I am. Use me up.” We’ll never make ourselves expendable for the only Kingdom that counts.

Aren’t we all tired of living for ourselves? Aren’t we all a little bit burned out of rushing to and fro to keep the world’s plates spinning?

So where do we go from here, army of the redundant?

I Don’t Know—And I’m Better for It

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Went out caroling last night with the youth and others from my church. A good time. I enjoy lending my voice to worthy causes.

It worries me, though, that a lot of today’s young people don’t know the traditional Christmas hymns (you know, the ones that talk about Jesus) as well as they seem to know “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer” or “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree.” When we took a request from a carolee to sing “Rudolph,” the singing gusto went up noticeably, particularly from the youngest carolers.

I noticed that same trend last year at a St. Nicholas Day sing that we do with some friends. The younger crowd stumbled through the old Christmas hymns but were in full voice for the secular songs. Worst of all, despite the fact that the vast, vast majority of Christmas songs played in our own home are sacred, our son seems to stumble through those, while somehow knowing all the lyrics to “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch.” This startles me because, as far as I know, he’s never seen The Grinch Who Stole Christmas. And to hear him singing that ubiquitous ditty about the Heat Miser and Cold Miser from A Year Without a Santa Claus, which I’m nearly positive he’s never seen, makes me wonder whether I should give him a tin-foil hat for Christmas.

Last night, I saw Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the Top 100 songs of 2007. After perusing the list, I quickly realized I’d finally reached geezerhood; I recognized less than a fifth of the artists on that list. Worse, I recognized not a single song.

A running joke in my family deals with my encyclopedic knowledge of all sorts of ridiculous facts, the kind of savanthood that would place me on Jeopardy! or Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. millionaire_or_not.jpgIn fact, my wife’s family heartily encouraged me to try out for Millionaire in its heyday. I saw one show, one early one featuring the million dollar question “How far is the earth from the sun?” a question I thought most second graders were supposed to know, then wrote off the show.

At some point in that one show, they asked an earlier question about some rap group, and I thought that would be my Waterloo if I ever tried out. I used to have an extensive knowledge of popular music, but somehow that got petrified around 1995, and after that it’s been all downhill. And don’t even get me going on these one-hit hip-hop wonders that sprout up today.

Ironically, my father-in-law convinced me to attempt the syndicated version of Millionaire. My standard reason for holding that request at bay would be that I had no clue on who these hip-hop artists are, and inevitably I would get a question asking me about what the “Z” in “Jay Z.” is supposed to stand for and I’d be clueless. Still, the insistence wore me down.

When I finally called the contestant testing number, I sat patiently awaiting my first question. That question: “Rearrange the following letters to spell the name of this popular rap group.” I spent so much time laughing hysterically that I didn’t even hear the letters. So I bombed on the first question. You know, that very fateful question I knew would be my undoing. Needless to say, I suspected I wouldn’t get a question about Marcel Proust or Carl Fabergé.

And this is what all this blabbering means so far: I don’t know—and I’m better for it.

With 2008 just around the bend, I can honestly say that the new year won’t find me worried about the latest movie releases. Couldn’t tell you the Oscar-worthy films from this year, either. I don’t know what they are—and I’m better for it.

People drop names of celebrities. Blogs talk about this star or that. I stand in line at the grocery store and must face down a rack of tabloids that trumpet which strumpet of the moment’s having an illegitimate child, who’s divorcing whom, and shocking pictures of “here today, gone tomorrow” stars without their makeup. You know, the beautiful people. I don’t know who they are—and I’m better for it.

I can’t tell you what’s happening on Lost or 24. To me, TV doesn’t matter except for the rare event like 9/11. I can’t tell you the last TV show I watched. I don’t know the latest shows—and I’m better for it.

I walked into a bookstore the other day and recognized few names on the “New and Notable” shelf. Even the book world seems to be otherwordly lately, like some alternate plane of existence that somehow intersects the plane of my life at only one or two points. Euclid would not be happy with the mangling that gives his geometric precisions, I’m sure. The point remains: I don’t know the latest books and authors—and I’m better for it.

I’m also losing touch with the blogosphere. I haven’t had the opportunity to read too many other blogs lately. I should suspect that a few people feel the same way about this one. Such is life.

All I know lately is that the Church in America has this obsession with culture that borders on the unhinged. We’re either slaves to it or we’re fighting it so hard that it distracts us from what is true, ultimately making us just a different type of slave. We seem to either love bathing in culture, especially under the guise of relevance, or as some sort of immunity potion, as if immersing ourselves in it will somehow mitigate its effects.

Here’s what the Bible says about all this:

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…
—Philippians 3:7-8

I think, as I look back over this year, that the one spiritual truth that emerges more than any other is that nothing else matters but Jesus. Peter once asked the perfect rhetorical question, “Lord, to whom shall we go?” We seem to be unsure how to answer that question. To the culture? To all the things we know? To our houses packed with things we can’t take with us and only tie us down to earth?

What does a church look like that lives only for Jesus? That desires only to know Him, forsaking all the cultural ties that bind and hamper?

I can tell you this much: that church would be a glorious thing. I pray that I live long enough to see it this side of heaven.

So I don’t know about a bunch of perishable things—and I’m better for it. Let’s pray we can all be better for it sooner than later.