Judgmentalism

Why We Need Each Other…

Standard

And though a man might prevail against one who is alone, two will withstand him—a threefold cord is not quickly broken.
—Ecclesiastes 4:12

And behold, a lawyer stood up to put him to the test, saying, “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” [Jesus] said to him, “What is written in the Law? How do you read it?” And he answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.” And he said to him, “You have answered correctly; do this, and you will live.”
—Luke 10:25-28

I’ve not been actively reading other blogs the last two weeks, so I came to Jared Wilson’s Gospel-Driven Church blog a week after his post “The Hard Stuff of Real Lives.” It’s a tough read because he asks whose fault it is (and why) when people fall away.

Go ahead, read the whole thing. It’s deep enough that it drew me out of my temporary hiatus to post this.

One of my great concerns about the Christian blogosphere is that it’s heavy on the vertical. By that I mean it emphasizes faith and doctrine almost exclusively. Hang around the Godblogosphere long enough and watch Christianity become a mental exercise. If only you think the right things you’ll have faith and be successful in Christ.

But that’s not true. Or should I say it’s only partly true.

Yes, we need to have the right kind of vertical relationship with God. And what you hear mentioned as the cure on most Christian blogs—and in most churches, BTW—is that learning, receiving solidly-biblical preaching, praying, and so on will build your faith. And it will.

But it simply is not enough.

You can’t read the Bible and not catch the horizontal element of Christianity. When the lawyer puts Jesus to the test, the Lord comes back with the well-known “love God and love your neighbor” answer as the fulfillment of what it means to be a Christian.

What bothers me, though, is that we have emphasized the “love God” part to the detriment of the “love your neighbor” part. Yet Christianity can’t exist if we fracture Faith and what I call Family. The Faith portion we understand, but Family is just as important. That Family exists as the community of believers and those not yet believers. In other words, the people we see around us every day are Family.

Now the Bible makes it very clear that we Christians owe it to our fellow Christians to look after their needs first. Outside the Family of God, believers have a responsibility to the unbeliever in sharing Christ’s compassion and His Gospel. Unified handsBut for us already in the Church, we are a first line of defense for each other because that’s how God operates in His Church.

The Lord set up His Church so that I have a responsibility to watch your back just as you have a responsibility to watch mine. That may sound like some gung-ho military mantra, but we ARE in a war, a spiritual one, and God has made it clear that we are a Body, not an Army of One. We are to maintain a deep, horizontal relationship with each other that mirrors our vertical relationship with God. In fact, the Scriptures say that a person who claims to love God but does not love his brother actually cannot love God at all. Sad to say, this awful pronouncement afflicts a large portion of the Church in this country because of the hyper-individualism we’ve embraced as self-sufficient Christians.

I recently read the book Deep Economy by Bill McKibben, and he emphasized that industrialism, as it is based on machines that eliminate human labor, had the side-effect of destroying our reliance on each other. Community is built when we labor side-by-side. Today though, many of us work in environments designed to eliminate community (cubicles, anyone?) I’ve said this for years at this blog: we have underestimated the cost to our communities (Family) by living the way we do. We must change, especially in the Church, if we’re to satisfy the horizontal requirement of loving our neighbor.

Now to the meat…

Wilson touches on community at the very end of his post, but I wish to take it a few steps further. When we see people in the Church go down for the count, who lose their faith, who fail in discipleship, our natural inclination is to comment on the depth of their faith. And I think that’s an evil response.

Why? Because the Bible tells us that faith can’t exist in a relational vacuum. It has to exist in a community. When Jesus tells us to do two things that give life, those two are to love God (Faith) and love our neighbor (Family). When I see people get trampled on the road of discipleship, almost every time, they’ve been abandoned. They may claim that God abandoned them, but I would contend that it wasn’t God. It was the Church who walked away and left them to die.

I’ll go so far as to say that not a person reading this would last more than a year or two in his or her faith if left totally alone. That’s for a reason, folks! God wired the Body to be a Body. I shouldn’t have to quote the relevant Scriptures here, but we act like we don’t know them, do we?

What then happens to the abandoned person when the time of testing comes? What happens when the Church looks the other way rather than get involved in the messiness of someone else’s life?

My own Mom was there at people’s doorsteps in the wake of tragedy. People found comfort in her ministrations. She got it. She understood the Gospel.

But when she was terminally ill, did anyone from her church come by? Hardly. What a sad, sad lesson I learned during that time. And when my Dad died unexpectedly in the middle of Mom’s protracted demise, all sorts of people at his funeral shook my Mom’s and our hands and told us that they would do anything we asked of them. But when we actually had “the nerve” to take them up on their offers, they fled faster than roaches when the light goes on.

And therein lies the problem.

Who’s willing to walk with a soul-sick, hurting person to the extent necessary for healing to come in God’s timing? Who? We’re too busy adjusting our 401k investments, aren’t we? We’re too busy slaving so we can buy more junk we don’t need, stuff that blinds us to the reality of the Kingdom of God! And then, when that abandoned person goes down for the count, we say, “Well, I guess he didn’t have enough faith!” Or, “Well, he was deceived!” Or “He must not have been a Christian in the first place because he didn’t last.”

Why don’t we ever turn around and ask, “Just how were we there for him in his dark days?” Why don’t we ever ask ourselves where our faith was to lay down our selfish lives so a person who needed us to walk alongside could have the full benefit of our time?

See, we don’t want to ask that question. It demands too much. It may mean we reconsider the entire way we live. In the end, it’s easier to question someone else’s faith than to confront our own indifference toward others.

One last confession and then I’ll end this.

Since I’ve been blogging, I’ve made it a practice to write an e-mail now and then to check on some of the bloggers whose blogs I regularly read. I ask how they’re doing and if I can pray for needs.

I’ve not been prepared for the results of that tiny effort. Without exception, I hear back that the blogger is in the midst of a dire need and their church just looks the other way. Without exception. Not one exception to my asking in all the time I’ve been doing this. I hear stories that would kill you of bloggers in desperate need who are left to twist in the wind because their church didn’t lift one finger to help them. In many cases, their church actually worked to make their situation more difficult! Yet those churches will preach and preach and preach “the Gospel” but never at any point actually show it in practice.

How damnable is that? Pretty damn damnable, if you ask me. Who wants to have Romans 8:28 quoted to them while their brothers and sisters in Christ sit around with the God-given resources to help make all things work together for good, yet do nothing?

Vertical and horizontal—that’s how God made us to function. Faith and Family work together in synergy. Love of God only works if we love our neighbor. If we’re not prepared to stand by the person struggling with her faith, then we need to acknowledge that we failed to be Christians when that person needed us the most.

We may preach and prophesy. We may cast out demons. We may think great theological thoughts and expound mightily on the nature of Christian belief. But if we don’t love our neighbor as ourself, all our religiosity is so much dung. We may point fingers at the person who couldn’t finish the race, but in the end, what good is our own faith if we wind up as goats to whom the Lord says, “Truly, I say to you, as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.”

What is it going to take to get us to understand this foundational truth?

Throwing Stones in Glass Houses of Worship

Standard

People who worship in glass houses...Some arguments that crop up in the Godblogosphere just kill me. If I were a non-Christian, I’d have all the ammo I’d need from blogs alone to make a compelling argument to look somewhere other than Jesus for my salvation.

Can I reiterate the old aphorism that the biggest argument against Christianity are Christians? Hackneyed, yes, but sadly true.

Last week, the old divisive question of cessationism vs. charismata raised its perpetually ugly head for the umpteenth time over at Pyromaniacs. It seems that we simply can’t let this issue die, as if one more post on it’s going to force one side or the other to capitulate.

Whenever the supporters of a cessationist view want to make their point that all charismatics are “shambalahonda”-babbling, heretical nutjobs, they go to the same well again and again: TBN. The same tired arguments are trotted out. “Look at Benny Hinn! Will you get a load of that screwloose?” Or “What’s with Paul and Jan Crouch? I mean, seriously!”

And thus all charismatics—myself included—are painted with the same exceedingly broad brush. The blanket of condemnation falls on anyone who spoke in tongues after the Apostle John died, and we’re all Benny Hinns, W.V. Grants, and purveyors of error worthy of an extra bucket of red-hot embers when we finally croak and wind up in hell.

But is that the truth?

I’d like readers to bear with me through the next few paragraphs. Don’t even read them unless you’re willing to read to the end. Just stop reading now if you aren’t going to finish this post. I’ll even highlight the questionable words in blue so you know which ones I mean.

Pyromaniacs is a Reformed site. They support 5-point TULIP Calvinism. In truth, we agree on most things, though I understand that my Lutheran theology (though Reformation-inspired) coupled with a belief that the charismata are still working today would not endear me to my brothers there. Certainly, I would not be branded Reformed by their definition.

So while Phil Johnson of Pyromaniacs talks of bad experiences with charismaniacs, I’d like to share my experiences in the Reformed church, since I was a part of a few Reformed churches over the years and have friends who have attended Reformed Calvinist churches.

One Bible study I attended consisted solely of men from a respected, wealthy Reformed church. Before the Bible studies started, these men would sit around and belittle the poor, talking about “those people” and how they were lazy and ignorant. (That they laughed while they tore down “the least of these” made it all the more excruciating for me to even be in the same room with those “Christians.”)

Or let’s consider the Calvinist church that split because some people in that church wanted to evangelize the nearby Hispanic community. Objections swirled that the church would be ruined should “those people” (there it is again!) come in and disrupt things by bringing their culture and customs with them.

Or how about greeters at a Reformed church “greeting” visitors by immediately asking if they were Calvinists, then walking away when the visitors said they did not know?

What can be said of the Reformed church that belittles congregants who can’t afford to send their kids to an exclusive, private Christian school (founded in part by the church)?

Or how about the couple who wanted to start an evangelistic outreach in their Reformed church, but encountered constant apathy on the part of the congregation because “those who were predestined were already in the church”?

In short, which is worse—the babbling, emotional, theology-challenged, snake-handling charismaniac OR the self-righteous, xenophobic, status-seeking, materialistic Reformed/Calvinist?

It’s a pointless question, isn’t it?

If we Christians want to speak words of death in the Church, then by all means let’s resort to naming the worst possible examples of living the Christian life that we might possibly find in some other denomination or sect. Then let’s write as if those worst possible examples were the norm.

I didn’t want to write this post. That this post even needs to be written saddens me. Writing those examples of how some perverse subset of Reformed/Calvinist brothers and sisters ignored the very heart of the Gospel gave me no pleasure at all. Why? Because I know that thousands more Reformed Calvinist brothers and sisters in Christ are NOT like that. In the same way, thoughtful, theologically-sound charismatics who don’t like TBN or the excesses displayed within some charismatic churches exist in large numbers.

Because some Reformed and Calvinist believers are jerks doesn’t negate the Reformed/Calvinist message anymore than wacky charismatics negate theirs. The truth here is that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. Before we disparage others from some other flavor of Christianity, we should ask if our own flavor has its house in order. Railing on “those other guys” comes easy to us because few of us wish to acknowledge the problems in our own house. (If Team Pyro wants to correct those Reformed churches I mentioned above, I’ve got the phone numbers for a couple of them. They can drop me an e-mail. I’ve already corrected charismania many times here.)

If Reformed/Calvinists with a keen eye for discernment would work to clean up their house, and Baptists worked to clean up their house, and Nazarenes worked to clean up their house, and charismatics worked to clean up their house, I have an idea that God would bless each house in a profound way. Perhaps then, even our differences wouldn’t seem so large.

But if the Nazarenes decide to point fingers at the mess in the Baptist’s house, and the Reformed/Calvinists decide to ridicule the excesses in the charismatic house, then the world they all live in will go on spinning and the Church of Jesus Christ will smother itself with a blanket of words that kill.

Because I can always find a problem with my neighbor. It’s my own problems I’m not so keen to fix.

Frauds

Standard

By the time I’d counted my tenth radar-wielding cop in only twenty miles, I could only shake my head. I’m no speed demon, don’t get me wrong. Still, I knew our ride back home from visiting the in-laws over Memorial Day would be more snail-like than usual. People get cowed by all the law enforcement and they take on a herd mentality that makes good driving impossible.

When a mobile cop car pulled onto the highway, I knew we were done for. Every lead-footed, Top-Gear-watching, Michael Schumacher wannabe suddenly spazzed and downshifted into second. Think “trailing the pace car” kind of gridlock here as about forty vehicles all jammed together behind the cop car, each driver petrified of passing him. Three lanes of gear jockeys cursing their dumb luck scrunched onto I-71 heading south through Amish country. Oh, joy.

What did I think? What a bunch of frauds.

And they were frauds twice over, too. If they truly were crazed speed enthusiasts, you’d think one would have the guts to pass the cop (who was doing about 55 in a 65 zone). On the other hand, they all acted like law-abiding little old ladies out for a Sunday drive in their pristine K-cars—another lie.

Frauds.

I think most of us are frauds, each in his or her own way. Our society doesn’t reward honesty. Doesn’t give out medals to people who keep it real. We may think Jeff Bridges’ iconic character from The Big Lebowski, The Dude, epitomizes a guy just being, but he’s a fictional character in a movie mouthing fictional statements written by someone else. The whole thing smacks of fraud when you distill it down to its essence.

I think most people in this country would die a thousand times over if other people knew what they were truly like, could know their thoughts, could feel their insecurities. I think most spouses have never scratched the surface of what the other looks like deep in his or her heart of hearts.

I’m convinced that far too many Christians in churches around this country live a fraudulent life filled with keeping up an aura of spiritual perfection. They go through life as someone they’re not. FraudsA few live in such self-deception they don’t even know they’re doing it. Still, most do know—and they hate themselves for it.

In the very early days of this blog, I’d get e-mails from folks castigating me for being holier than thou simply because I pointed out a few things I thought we all could do better. Me, holy? No, I’m just as fraudulent as the next guy. I think as time went by, people saw through whatever mask they thought I was holding up. But what they didn’t see was the more subtle one I wear all the time. It looks like me, only better, stronger, sharper, and swifter—but most of all, more spiritual.

When we age, the first thing that goes is pretense. Suddenly, the young punk down the street we used to dust in pickup basketball is creaming us every Saturday. We reek of wintergreen the day after, too. In the silence of our homes, we hear the knees creaking.

It happens the same way in the soul of the Christian attuned to the Lord. (At least it should.) We wake up and see that same masked face in the mirror. And when we pray, the Holy Spirit shows us that same lingering shadow of the Old Nature. He tries to get us to admit we’re frauds, but it doesn’t come easy. People talk. People have opinions. People, people, people—that same old fear of men. A snare, the Bible says.

The Bible also says this:

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
—2 Corinthians 5:17-21

We are ambassadors of Christ, and as such we represent the government of a new Kingdom with reconciliation as its message. And ambassadors don’t get to be ambassadors by clinging to fraudulent identities. No, they endure a character trial that proves their mettle. In other words, No Frauds Allowed.

All of creation awaits our coming into our ambassadorship. It’s groaning, in fact, that we come into our own, that “own” Christ established before the foundation of the world.

If only we’d put down the fraudulent lives, the fears, the secrets, and step into the Light.