Failure

Three Little Words We Christians Need to Say

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The worst teaching we get here in America is to always stick up for ourselves. From the time we take our first steps, the mantra we hear over and over is to stand up for our rights and stand against “the bad guy.”

But in the rush to always reinforce the American collective mentality, found in our forefathers as they battled British “oppression,” humility has taken a devastating hit. Somehow, we lost the way to fight for what is good while simultaneously being humble people. Worse, our lack of humility causes us to gloss over atrocities, both individual and collective.

And no entity in America has suffered more for this than the Christian Church.

Here are three little words you almost never hear in the average church:

We were wrong.

Or the individual version:

I was wrong.

Our inability to confess to failures continues to compromise the effectiveness of the Church in our country. Swept along by the spirit of the age, the Church here has forgotten what it means to be humble. Haughty, arrogant, prideful, judgmentalAs a result, like other failed institutions wracked by hubris, the Church has been lumped with all the pride-filled transgressors and relegated to meaninglessness in the lives of most Americans. And for those people who have not thrown the Church on the dung heap, usually Christians, they continue to be slaves of their own pride, unable to say those three little words.

We live in a cynical age. I would argue that our cynicism is borne out of witnessing far too many instances of pride run amok. When that pride is only reinforced in the wake of obvious failure, when confession and remorse should be the response—and yet are not—we throw another log on the fires of “wisdom” and harden ourselves further, like Damascus steel, over the flames.

When was the last time a church confessed publicly that…

…all the money dumped into the new youth program hasn’t made the teens better disciples?

…for all the talk of community, people in the church were getting no help finding work or were unable to pay their bills?

…the enormous building campaign was fueled more from a need to outdo neighboring churches than to lift up Jesus?

…the beloved special speaker brought in for a yearly teaching series is doctrinally wonky?

…it personally failed the young person who wound up pregnant/in jail/homeless/drug-addled?

…the latest spiritual bandwagon it jumped on went off a cliff?

…the nationally known Christian, whose ministry it supported unquestionably, needed to be questioned more throughly, long before the scandal broke?

Why is it we are so afraid to say we blew it?

Why is so much swept under the proverbial rug?

I know so many charismatics who have come to me over the years glowing with some exciting “word of knowledge” they received from some “Spirit-filled” leader or traveling prophecy show and yet that “amazing word” never came to pass. And still those same people are the first ones in line to grab another “word.”

Some bizarre denial mechanism exists in Evangelicalism that takes all that failure and walls it off in our psyches as if it never happened. This hardens some to the point they become unable to discern anything. Others wind up wrecked on the rocks of those failures, and in the midst of everyone around them denying the problem, end up walking away from the Church—and often from God.

How is it that we cannot weep with those who have been burned by the inability of the Church to say We were wrong? Are we THAT filled with pride?

People keep wondering how we can fix the horrible mess we find ourselves in as Christians in America. Confessing our pride and our failures would be a great start. They used to call that repentance, though I know that word is not popular when applied to us. Usually we reserve it for the other guys. You know, the sinners.

A nation of people who are not humble will be humbled. A Church that asserts pride-driven power will be brought low. God is not mocked, and placing ourselves on a platform on His level, demanding rights only He can possess, is a sure recipe for a butt kickin’—ours.

You and I are dust. Remembering that would go a long way toward fixing a world of problems.

And maybe, just maybe, if we were a lot more humble, people who are dying for real answers to real problems would again look to America and the American Church for solutions.

Every revival starts in the ashes of humility.

When Christian Celebrities Crash and Burn

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Tim TebowWith a recent long losing streak and a new coaching philosophy in New York, Linsanity is dead.

As of yesterday, Tim Tebow is riding the bench again and likely will be traded.

Two evangelical sports stars are now no longer lighting up the heavens. And that’s OK.

Well, it’s OK with me. Some other people may be taking Tebow’s and Lin’s descents hard. Seems we have a way of doing that when it comes to Christian celebrities. Christian sports stars are particularly ripe sources of adoration, but as the old axiom goes, the bigger they are, the harder they fall.

There is something desperate in evangelical Christian circles to be both taken seriously and liked enormously. Whenever a Christian “comes out” in Hollywood, it gets trumpeted in every Christian media outlet that follows popular culture. Somehow, it becomes news by the sheer force of will of people who are struggling to hold onto the idea that Christians are just as cool as everyone else—and possibly cooler. Like moths to a flame, Christian media outlets stampede to dub some Christian sports, music, political, or film sensation the next Great Christian Hope and the model for us all to emulate. That many of these celebs have a Q Score in single digits and often show up in a higher number of direct-to-DVD film productions seems not to trouble the true believers.

And then there are the celebrity pastors/preachers and their all-too-visible ministries.

Aside from the B-list nature of most Christian celebrities in the entertainment industry, once in a while we get some notable Christians in sports, with Jeremy Lin of the NBA Knicks and Tim Tebow of the NFL Broncos being the latest headline grabbers. Tebow has endured a level of scrutiny I wouldn’t wish on a presidential candidate, while Lin suddenly had all of Asian sports hopes dropped on his Ivy League shoulders. We Christians only made the hype worse, finding ourselves compelled to comment and to wish the very best for these golden representatives of Our Side®.

Then comes the inevitable fall. In the case of Christian celebs, that fall comes in the form of either some sin that becomes public or a rapid descent into averageness or irrelevancy.

This troubles the true believers to their cores because, honestly, their true believerdom is much shallower than they care to admit. It is as if the success of a Christian celebrity somehow is essential to proving true our Christian beliefs. Sadly, the triumph of a Christian in the public eye is too often seen as validation not only of the existence of God, but also that He favors us Christians above all other people.

I’ve been around a while, and I can say with all assurance that more often than not, our dependence on Christian celebrities to confirm our beliefs fails. And often fails spectacularly. We may no longer trust in chariots (Psalm 20:7), but we still trust in humans to meet our need for validation. Yet there is no more fragile receptacle for faith than fame. That it gets in the way of the Gospel far more often than it boosts it should be obvious to most Christians. Yet when the latest celeb comes around, we’re hopping on the bandwagon in droves. If experience should have taught us anything, it is that such bandwagons have an affinity for cliffs.

We won’t know who the real superstars in the Faith are until we get to other other side. Curiously, the overwhelming majority will be folks we never heard of. I suspect that’s the way the Kingdom works best. God doesn’t need celebs to advance the Gospel. He needs dedicated, mostly average, anonymous people who aren’t impressed by worldly accolades. In America 2012, those folks are rare indeed.

So please, can we stop with the hero worship? Clay feet are part and parcel of this world, and too many of the modern Christian heroes of our own creation come equipped with deluxe models. No one should be surprised, yet we always are, which only makes us look silly when a Christian celebrity we hyped to the max crashes and burns.

We don’t need celebrities to prove our beliefs true. Jesus more than validated Himself. Of course, God added the “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased. Listen to Him!” If we can’t trust God, then what’s the point?

Jesus had no need for a Q Score, and neither should we.

Elusive Wisdom

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Before we get to the second part of my posting on being a Church family, I want to add some thoughts on wisdom in a modern age. I couldn’t stop thinking about the issue this weekend, and as I was out on my tractor for several hours Sunday, I had plenty of time to think.

I was interviewed for a radio show called “Wise People” this last Saturday and will be again this Saturday. But the fact is, despite the title of the show, I find wisdom elusive.

I’m 47 years old, and if I were asked to comment on the pat answer about getting older and gaining wisdom, I’d have to say that the conventional wisdom on wisdom and age just doesn’t work. Or at least it doesn’t work in the conventional sense.

At the age of 21, I didn’t have a lot of room for “wisdom” that didn’t meet my preconceptions. I was pretty much the standard angry, young know-it-all. Sadly, that was a state that persisted for far too long.

But as I’ve gotten older, I seem to have fewer prepackaged answers and a whole lot more questions. The list of “Stuff I Don’t Get” gets added to daily.

When you get down to it, all practical wisdom concerns making sense of people and God. In 47 years, what I have come to understand of people is that I don’t understand them at all. And while I can definitely see God  moving in certain situations, it’s those situations in which I don’t see Him that I come to realize that my understanding of God could fill a thimble—one made for Barbie.

The supposedly wise person makes sense of people in light of sin. Understand the nature of sin and you understand why people do what they do.

But honestly, the older I get, the less satisfying that response becomes. And it is less satisfying because no one can know the future, and it’s our relationship to the past, present, and future that makes understanding humanity so difficult. How sin informs the past and present is hard enough to comprehend, but add the future and I don’t see how any nonprognosticator can make predictions.

Now put God into that mix. The result, at least to me, is too big to get one’s head around.

Which is why Romans 8:28 is so hard for me to understand:

And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.
—Romans 8:28

The first part is hard enough to grasp, but it’s the phrase after the comma that makes my head spin.

If you’re couple who spent years trying to conceive, and finally that blessed bundle comes, what is to be said when the little baby dies unexpectedly? Did that babe get in the way of your purpose in life? Is it a good thing then that the baby died? And what can be said when no more children come?

Or you’re a missionary couple with kids, and after 25 years of marriage the whole couple thing crumbles. One day you were sharing the Lord with lost tribes of people in the backwaters of India, and the next day you’re in divorce court. PotholeHow did it all go so wrong? If the calling to marriage and mission were there, why did it end up like this?

Or you’re part of a leadership team at your church, and one by one every person on that team gets hit with calamity: cancer, divorce, depression, suicide, and so on. Do all those calamities really work together for good? Is it enough to say, “I survived,” and call that outcome good?

I talked about Christian maturity in the radio interview, but defining maturity is hard. We tend to think of it as some kind of Ph.D. in theology, but if my own experiences are any indicator, perhaps it’s something else entirely. And perhaps there’s some other meaning behind Romans  8:28 that eludes us.

Karl Barth, when asked to summarize the contents of his massive book Church Dogmatics, responded, “Jesus loves me/This I know/For the Bible tells me so.”

A children’s song.

In response to Barth’s answer, I’m sure some “wise” people snickered. Yet when faced with all the craziness, the nonsensical happens, the head-shaking personal calamities in the lives of ordinary people, the godly decisions that went south, the hopes that fell to pieces, and the general nastiness of human existence 2010, perhaps Barth’s answer is the wisest of all.

God knows that I don’t understand life—or Him—any better than that.

{Update: I had originally thought J.I. Packer was behind the “Jesus Loves Me” quote, but it was Swiss Reformed theologian Karl Barth.}