Leadership

A Bag Full of Wet Tribbles

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A couple weeks back SF Gate columnist Mark Morford wrote an op/ed piece called “American Kids, Dumber than Dirt” in which he quotes a longtime teacher friend as saying that kids today are stupid to the point of verging on inert:

It’s gotten so bad that, as my friend nears retirement, he says he is very seriously considering moving out of the country so as to escape what he sees will be the surefire collapse of functioning American society in the next handful of years due to the absolutely irrefutable destruction, the shocking — and nearly hopeless — dumb-ification of the American brain. It is just that bad.

I know that I’m perpetually saddened (yet oddly amused) by what people don’t know. And that’s not in some kind of snobbish way. Watching a high school graduate grossly mis-tally a simple three item receipt from a restaurant makes me wonder how such a lapse can exist.

You long-time readers know that I have a degree in Christian Education and know all the educational theorists. You know that I homeschooled up until this fall. You also know my child is in public school right now. You know that I believe that no educational system is perfect.

But as much handwringing goes on today about education, I keep returning to one inescapable truth:

Kids are only as smart as their parents are.

The apple doesn’t fall very far from the tree, and in most cases today, a lot closer to the trunk than some would like. A classroom (and a home?) full of dunces...But when it comes right down to it, smart parents have smart kids—no matter what kind of education (public, private, or homeschooled) their children receive—because the parents themselves value education and pursue it in their own lives.

If the parents of a child are about as sharp as a bag of wet tribbles, then how can we expect the child to exceed the parent? That rarely, if ever, happens.

We expect most homeschoolers to be winners of spelling and geography bees, but look at the parents in those cases. They’re engineers, scientists, academics—the national brain trust, in other words. The only way they’re going to turn out a dim bulb is if they give birth to a brain-damaged kid. And even then, that’s going to be the brightest brain-damaged child of the lot.

But even when it comes to homsechooling, the weak link in the chain is the parent. A parent with smarts that rate a 6 on a scale of 10 is probably not going to teach their kids to a level 8 or higher. Why? Because that parent will be uncomfortable exceeding his or her own knowledge. This leads to what is known as the law of diminishing returns.

Parents are never going to feel adequate to teach their kids to the limits of their parental smarts—ever. That truth wipes out most distinctions of public, private, and homeschool. As much as a we’ve castigated public schooling, smart parents who put their kids in public school are not going to turn around when that kid is eighteen and find a numbskull. This truth works in the opposite, as well. If parents can barely tally three lines on a restaurant bill, why should we expect their children to? Yet we’re perpetually astonished by the seeming ignorance of youth today.

“But Dan,” you say, “isn’t your blog about the Church in America? How does this fit with your theme?”

If we wonder why the youth of today can’t theologize their way out of a damp paper bag, we have to look at the parents.

Christian parents suffer from a few maladies that make them inadequate to the task of teaching their children about the Lord:

  1. They’ve been told that they are inadequate for the job… – This same instructor superiority afflicts parents in all types of learning environments. The educational elites turned up their noses at the bourgeois attempts of parents to teach their own children and slapped their knuckles with a mighty big ruler in the process. And just as it afflicts the public and private school systems, it afflicts Christian education.
  2. …so as a result, parents have abandoned their role in education – This is not only the parents’ fault for being weak-willed and lazy in their children’s Christian education, but also the willingness of most church people to treat the educational staff at their churches like divine oracles who can do no wrong. Worse, those so-called oracles believe the hype and even fan it into flame. That’s got to stop, on all counts.
  3. We’ve made the Faith either too complex or too rudimentary. – It seems we can’t find the balance. We either make the faith into an intellectual exercise of splitting infralapsarian and amyraldian hairs (or whatever esoteric argument floats your ark) or we make it a brain-dead exercise in being nice to people. Well, shame on us—all of us. So parents think they either have to possess a seminary degree or else they think they can skate because there’s nothing to “this Christianity thing.” Either mentality jumps the educational tracks.

So how do we get parents into the right mindset and smarts-set to do this important job?

  1. We emphasize the importance of the work—and our willingness to help. It seems to me that part of the problem of Christian education today stems from either asking for the world of parents or asking nothing at all. We need to find a solid middle ground. But more than that, churches need to understand that they must partner with parents to ensure the next generation gets some theological smarts. Not by being condescending. Not by dumping all the load on parents. Not by pointing a rifle at anyone’s head. But by walking alongside parents and helping them learn how to teach their own kids. (I’ve long contended this should be the primary role of the youth minister!) The Christian education conducted by the church should always be viewed as a gap-filler, not as the primary source of education. That’s the parents’ job.
  2. We teach the parents what they need to know. As I’ve noted, kids will only be as smart as the parents. If the parents can’t grasp the atonement or what it means to die to self, there’s not a chance their kids will. If the parents won’t talk about those topics outside church (where the greatest growth occurs), their kids won’t hear it. Churches, this is your core emphasis in Christian Ed: Instilling a solid Christian worldview and theology in your adults, particularly those adults with children.
  3. We set attainable educational goals. Every child the age of seven should know why it was necessary for Jesus to come. That should be right on their lips if asked. Littler ones should at least know who Jesus is. A solid Christian curriculum should not only repeat the basics at every age level, but also add onto the previous age level. There’s no reason our teens can’t be asked the differences between the different views on the atonement. Or to explain covenant theology. Or to be able to stand up and expound a rational pneumatology. (In my Lutheran catechism, I got a one hour grilling on theology in a private session with the pastor and youth leader.) But to get there, set appropriate, attainable goals.
  4. We work to counter culture. Our society is in the brink of disaster with our busyness. Sadly, modern Evangelicalism contributes to our harried schedules by adding more and more things we MUST do that, in the end, aren’t necessary. Educating the next generation about the Lord is about as necessary as it gets. Getting your kid into a time-intensive soccer program that will score them a spot in an Ivy League college DOES NOT MATTER ETERNALLY. Yet this is what too many Christian parents want. A recent Barna poll, one of the most disturbing I ever saw, showed that Evangelical parents thought getting their kids into elite colleges outweighed whether those same kids knew Jesus Christ or not. God help us! We have to start demolishing these strongholds that entrap us if we’re to be a vital Church.
  5. We stop the school choice derangement syndrome. Homeschooling parents must desist in their schismatic, judgmental, and outright wicked accusations against non-homeschooling parents. This is not just an issue of “secular” education. If we wish to utterly negate the truths of the Gospel in front of our children and nullify Christlikeness in them, then by all means, let all sides on the school choice issue treat each other like vermin. That’ll teach the little ones the right people to hate and for the correct reasons. We all know that’s why Jesus came, right?

So yeah, it IS all about the parents. If we want smart kids, we better make smart parents. And there’s no better time to start on that path than today.

The Loss of Imagination

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Ever drive by one of the new breed of churches and think, It’s just a big, ugly box ?

Ever wonder why what passes for Christian art in most Christian bookstores is only a step or two removed from velvet paintings of Elvis?

Ever wonder where the great contemporary Christian literature vanished to?

I think about that last one a lot. As a writer, I struggle with the dearth of avenues for Christian fiction that veers outside the mainstream. I recently wrote a story called “Killing Lilith” that deals with the crushing load of sexual guilt that many men carry. Not only does that story suffer from being brutally frank, but it’s a short story, a form of fiction that lies in a coma in secular realms, and has been dead, buried, and its grave trampled in Christian ones.

If you struggle with fasting, write short fiction for the Christian market. Just be wary of the tendency to starve to death. 😉

I hate to see loss of imagination triumph in the Church. I meet too many Christians who long ago relegated creativity to the devil. It saddens me to no end to encounter dull, lifeless children from Christian homes who have had the imagination beaten out of them, who if asked, “Tell me a story,” can’t dream up one. Somehow we’ve gone overboard in rooting out “vain imaginings” and removing any and all things that stem from our “deceitful hearts,” never questioning whether we have to throw our minds out altogether or if our imaginings and hearts can be redeemed.

So in our purges, I wonder if we’ve left Christianity a shell of what it’s supposed to be.

What should we think when God demands the finest craftsmen for His OT tabernacle and temples? That He asks that the lampstands around His altar be crafted in the likeness of almond branches and their blossoms? Or that He chooses men to write down His inspired words of Truth in a wealth of styles?

I can think of few things more appalling than ugly churches. I mean, if we’re going to spend millions on building a church building (and there’s an ethical question for you), what could be worse than spending all those millions on something that’s ugly as sin, an edifice glorifying mediocrity? Whatever happened to building that building to the glory of God and making it look like something honoring a supreme and majestic Lord?

And why so much bad art in Christian circles? It’s okay if Thelma Lou Posey makes a cross-stitch of the ubiquitous “Footprints” poem and sells it as a church auction, Fridtjof Schroder - 'The Pieta' - 1961but God forbid if some trained Christian artist creates a challenging oil painting and asks for support.

I wrote a couple weeks ago in my “100 Truths in 30 Years with Christ” post that we need to honor our artists and intellectuals as highly as we do our pastors and preachers. Are we? If we were, what then explains the stifled creativity that inhabits the Christian circle of influence? Why such lowest common denominator art and expression? Shouldn’t we be the ones who foster imagination and the creative spirit?

One of the most underappreciated aspects of us being made in the image of God is that God is a creator at heart. Therefore, so are we.

If we can’t evangelize that truth as much as some of the others we so readily support, we’ll wind up impoverished people. I can’t help but think that if the world saw that Christians led the arts again, they’d be more open to the Gospel.

Yet what would do they think when they encounter a huge multi-million dollar building of cinder block and corrugated metal passing itself off as a church? I know that I don’t immediately think, That’s where life, redemption, and joy happens.

It’s tough to be in the arts and know that few of your tribe value your work enough to pay you to do it. I’m struggling now to know what to do with the short story form, one that I enjoy writing but pays nothing. When I think of God demanding only the finest artisans for His works, I wonder how we got off base.

I wonder.

 

Update…

Additional links from previous Cerulean Sanctum posts on this issue:

Church Growth Movement Fall Down and Go Boom!

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It done blowed up real good!I’m late to the game in commenting on Pastor Bill Hybels’s recent admission that Willow Creek Community Church’s ministry model doesn’t make disciples like he thought it would. (Out of Ur has all the details in “Willow Creek Repents?” And yes, read the whole thing.)

No freakin’ duh on the certain failure of that ministry model. I could’ve told Pastor Bill that 16 years ago.

Enter now the Wayback Machine and witness a snotty-nosed, wet-behind-the-ears Wheaton College senior sitting in the third row of the massive balcony at Willow Creek circa 1991. Look at that guy. Consider the utter cluelessness, the vapid stare, the hapless scribbling of notes as Bill Hybels ladles up another patented feel-good message for Unsaved Harry and Mary. Who does this whippersnapper think he is, sitting in the crow’s nest examining the church? Examining!

That would be me.

See, as part of a senior ministry project, I did a semester-long analysis of Willow Creek’s ministry model. Back then, Willow Creek was hitting its stride as the church everyone else wanted to copy. If your church and mine were the waltz, Willow Creek was the lambada. We’re talking a sea change cultural phenomenon, especially in the Greater Chicago area.

So I spent the better part of my senior year attending Willow Creek. And when I’d scrutinized the last detail, my paper on the project came up with one conclusion: No sir, I don’t like it!

Now, I’d love to say that I—someone whose middle name is “Backup”—have a copy of that paper to post here, seeing as I saved it on not one, not two, but three separate floppy disks stored in three separate locations. But amazingly enough, over the years, a fungus destroyed all three disks and said paper is now lost to the ages. Urgh.

(Hey, and no jokes about my conclusion being rotten.)

Anyhow, the obvious problems existed in the model. Yes, just about everyone could see it was Christianity Lite. No cross, no self-sacrifice, no holiness, and a Jesus who kind of resembled that nice boy your daughter dated once. You know, Chip, or Biff, or Eugene, or something like that.

This is not to say that Willow Creek didn’t offer a lot of scientifically-derived programs styled to meet their target demographic. They could plug people into a small group Bible study faster than you could say “Hegelian dialectic,” though the Bible studies were not so much geared to babes in Christ as they were to zygotes.

But for all the trendiness, the slick production, the worship orchestra, the theater seats, the pre-sermon dramatic skits, and the general showbiz feel of Willow Creek, three glaring faults stood out:

1. Commitment – The major problem with Willow Creek and every single church based on a Church Growth Movement model is that at no point is anyone asked to make a serious commitment. Why? Because commitment exacts a cost, and Willow Creek could not expect Unchurched Harry and Mary to meet that cost. Ask them to commit to anything and they’ll pack up and leave. And under the CGM model, that’s the last thing you want them to do.

This is why the Gospel had to be made lowest common denominator to the point of no longer being the Gospel. This is why you never heard about dying at the cross. This is why the message had to be propped up with some man-inspired incentive.

All the offensiveness of a scourged Savior bloodied by Unchurched Harry and Mary and hung on a cross would be too much for them. Jesus said that no one could be found in Him unless they ate His flesh and drank His blood and He lost nearly every follower He had because that was too much to ask. No one could ask for a commitment like that.

So no one at Willow Creek did. No one bothered to stand up and say that if you want to follow Jesus you’re going to have to lay it all down. All of it. Even yourself.

Too much commitment.

You don’t create future martyrs using Church Growth Movement techniques. Snazzy businessmen with a fish on their business card, but not a martyr. Gleaming housewives in gleaming houses with gleaming children, but no one prepared to die for the Gospel.

Because nothing is asked, nothing is gained. Strangely enough, in the end, everything is lost. Including the”disciple.”

2. Communication – In a church that could not be more wired for sound, with hundreds galloping around the grounds with wireless headsets and walkie-talkies, how is it possible that such a church built around communicating like mad couldn’t communicate?

Blame it on the business world model the Church Growth Movement idolizes.

No large organization can function without communication. But as many of us who have been in the business world know, communication grinds to a halt the more levels of management exist. Monolithic corporations with a dozen layers of middle management still exist today, but their inability to get the message from the lowest rung on the heirarchy to the top means they operate in slow motion, stuck in endless meetings, never knowing what the right hand and left are doing. GM or Ford, anyone?

In the West, the more levels of church bureaucracy that exist between the average guy or gal in the seat and the senior pastor, the less effective that church will be. Try to have a one-on-one with the typical CGM-influenced megachurch pastor. Good luck! You’ll have to go through multiple layers of people with titles like “The Administrator to the Intern of the Assistant Undersecretary of Church Community Development’s Adjutant General” just to get an appoint with the Intern himself. Senior Pastor? Fuhgedduhbowdit.

I was in a church like that, where I’d known the pastor from when he was a small group leader, yet when the church started to drift off message—as all CGM-based churches will—I could not for the life of me get a personal appointment with the guy to say two words about it. I kept on getting routed through one level of bureaucracy after another. Yeah, they eventually got the message, but only after God knocked the supports out from under the creaking foundation they’d built. Then I had leaders calling me on the phone constantly to talk to me, but only after I’d left the church.

When a model exists that intentionally prevents direct communication between the lowest levels and the highest, failure results. Don’t believe me? Consider the whole point of the torn temple curtain. That’s an image CGM adherents need to understand.

3. Community – The one thing that immediately struck me about Willow Creek circa 1991 was that I could walk in and walk out without anyone caring that I had been there. No one needed to say one word to me. I could just go, sit in my seat, have a quasi-spiritual experience and then drift back into the crowd and be forgotten. And people went to that church and hundreds of other CGM churches like it just for that reason: anonymity.

But that’s not how you make disciples.

Yes, Willow Creek had a huge emphasis on small groups, but even then, the small groups felt disconnected from the Body. A white widower with one child would be herded into a group of White Widowers with Precisely One Child, but which of us wants to be stuck in a group that looks exactly like us? Even then, studies have shown that the maximum small group participation any church can expect runs at a measly 30 percent. How then does someone plug into that community?

In the end, most people have their connection through the Senior Pastor they hear give the message every Sunday, yet the layers of the ministry model never allow people to actually meet with him. Or with any other of the senior leadership. Disconnects exist at every level.

What results is that people are always looking in the wrong place for their growth. It’s better to sit back on Sunday and try to soak up the fluffy message. Forget about all the other stuff. Because of the anonymity, people can skate by unknown for years. Then because of the lack of commitment, they never come under any kind of authority on a direct level. The failures simply compound. The entire reason for the church to function as a discipleship engine shuts down.

I saw all this 16 years ago. Me, with a year of formal Christian Education training. How then did Willow Creek’s heavily-educated leadership miss this for more than two decades?

What troubles me even in the face of their acknowledgment that their discipleship model is broken is that they still don’t get it. As Hybels says:

We made a mistake. What we should have done when people crossed the line of faith and become Christians, we should have started telling people and teaching people that they have to take responsibility to become †˜self feeders.’ We should have gotten people, taught people, how to read their bible between service, how to do the spiritual practices much more aggressively on their own.

While I’m sure that confession from Hybels had a lot of Willow Creek haters hooting, it’s still only a partial truth. Worse, the haters can’t see the other half, either.

What strikes me more and more as I read the New Testament is the emphasis on the words we (plural) and you (plural). The Church is viewed as a Body, not pieces. Christianity is not a religion of individuals but of community. In light of this, Evangelicalism’s”personal Jesus” idea has damaged us as badly as the Church Growth Movement has.

So while some are happy that Willow Creek’s planning on making people into better self-feeders of the Gospel, the Gospel must be presented and worked through within community. That’s what makes it stick!

How many Christians go to churches that hammer the self-feeder message, yet aren’t making disciples because they continue to downplay community? I would suggest far too many for us to be comfortable.

We all know Paul’s Body illustration in 1 Corinthians 12. But where does the self-feeding ear or hand come into play? Cut off an ear and then try to force it to take nourishment. How long will that ear survive?

We need each other. A church with communication and community problems can have all the commitment in the world and still make deficient disciples.

Until Willow Creek gets this, their stab at making better disciples will probably not go very far. It’s sadly ironic that churches that criticize Willow Creek are making lousy disciples, too, because they completely miss how communication and community are essential to becoming all we can be in Christ.

So while it looks like the flagship of the Church Growth Movement has struck an iceberg, it’s far from clear sailing for those churches that criticized its captain and his charts. We might have superb commitment, and may even be adept at self-feeding, but unless we get our community and communication down pat, we’ll be adrift, too.