Maturity

Hell’s Road and Good Intentions

The Struggle of Good and Evil Spirits (1875) by Ivan Tvorozhnikov
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“When an unclean spirit comes out of a person, it roams through waterless places looking for rest, and not finding rest, it then says, ‘I’ll go back to my house that I came from.’ Returning, it finds the house swept and put in order. Then it goes and brings seven other spirits more evil than itself, and they enter and settle down there. As a result, that person’s last condition is worse than the first.”

—Luke 11:24-26

“The road to hell is paved with good intentions” is likely not a favorite aphorism of many—mostly because it may be more true than any of us would care to admit.

Exorcising a demon out of a man may, on the surface, seem about the most positive thing that could happen to that man, but Jesus said that unless other events transpire, that demon may return and bring more noxious demons with it. And so, an act of good becomes something much worse.

Because we lack a crystal ball to scry the future, and because we often don’t know or can’t manufacture the necessary next ingredient to keep a good situation from souring, we need to be more sober about what happens to us and whether that positive happening is only good in the moment, with its gotcha component still to come.

I don’t know what it is about American Christians today that we can’t get over exclaiming, “It’s a God thing!” whenever some positive event or windfall occurs. Fact is, we don’t know that—at least in the most basic way. Maybe it’s just a thing and we need to reserve judgment, allowing time to reveal its future aspects.

Winning the lottery would sound like a “God thing,” but when you read the horror stories of lottery winners whose lives crash and burn post-windfall, you start to wonder. Did God bless them with money only to destroy them later because of it? That’s a theodicy I don’t want to wander into, and yet many people do carelessly. How they manage to reconcile such dichotomies leads me to believe they never attempt to, and they just move on as if nothing happened, living in perpetual denial.

In contrast to the “from blessing to doom” pathway, we have this in the life of the patriarch Joseph:

Then Joseph said to his brothers, “Please, come near me,” and they came near. “I am Joseph, your brother,” he said, “the one you sold into Egypt. And now don’t be grieved or angry with yourselves for selling me here, because God sent me ahead of you to preserve life. For the famine has been in the land these two years, and there will be five more years without plowing or harvesting. God sent me ahead of you to establish you as a remnant within the land and to keep you alive by a great deliverance. Therefore it was not you who sent me here, but God. He has made me a father to Pharaoh, lord of his entire household, and ruler over all the land of Egypt.”

—Genesis 45:4-8

Joseph was beaten by his brothers and left in a hole to die. He was sold into slavery, had a brief respite, and was later thrown into prison to rot. Everyone forgot about him, even the ones he asked not to.

But eventually, God not only restored Joseph, He elevated him to the second-in-command of the Egyptian empire, where his insight and blessings of God upon him resulted in saving a majority of the world from years-long famine.

The hubris of many of us American Christians is acting as if we know everything God is doing. But we don’t. In fact, we have almost no idea what God intends out of this happening or that circumstance. One day you get a promotion to an executive leadership position at work, and a month later you are indicted along with the rest of the leadership team for securities fraud. Welcome to the federal pen. Must be a God thing.

Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will travel to such and such a city and spend a year there and do business and make a profit.” Yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring — what your life will be! For you are like vapor that appears for a little while, then vanishes.

Instead, you should say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.”

—James 4:13-15

I write all of the above to leave with this: Consider being more circumspect of pronouncing such and such as a positive or negative. Consider being more wary of the surface appearance of good that comes your way, for underneath the tip of that cool, refreshing iceberg may lurk something catastrophic. Likewise, today’s doom may set you up to save your life and the lives of many. Not everything bad today is bad forever.

Most of all, pause to allow for time to reveal all things. There is no evil in saying you will reserve judgment until you know more. “We shall see” is not a pronouncement of faithlessness but one of a right mind governed by godly sober thinking.

Image: “The Struggle of Good and Evil Spirits” (1875) by Ivan Tvorozhnikov

Thoughts on Ed Stetzer’s “3 Things Churches Love That Kill Outreach”

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Ooutreach by outstretched handOver at Outreach Magazine online, Ed Stetzer, president of LifeWay Research, notes three things churches do or believe that inhibit their ability to do outreach. Obviously, outreach is one of the major tasks for the Church, so knowing how NOT to do it is a big deal. As they say in the biz, “Read the whole thing.”

For the purposes of discussion, here are the three Stetzer items:

1. Too many churches love past culture more than their current context.
2. Too many churches love their comfort more than their mission.
3. Too many churches love their traditions more than their children.

Let me begin by laying some groundwork for my thoughts.

For the past 35 years or so, the Church in America has been on a tear to reconstruct itself. In that time, we have seen major initiatives within most churches and denominations to adopt seeker-sensitive practices, to move toward church growth models, and to become more culturally relevant.

Considering the state of the Church in America today, one must be forced to admit that almost all those initiatives have failed miserably to produce more or better disciples. I’m not sure we can find any Christian leader who thinks the Church, as a whole in America, is better off, by nearly any measure, than it was before this experimentation began. Biblical knowledge, conformity to Christian doctrine, evangelism, retaining our youth, community—those initiatives mentioned above failed to produce desired outcomes in any of those areas.

I want to focus on one aspect of those initiatives especially, since it pertains to the core of Stetzer’s comments: the Church meeting as outreach tool.

When you have dominant seeker-sensitive churches confessing that their model failed entirely to make disciples, have we put too much confidence in our switch from “church for believers” to “church for unbelievers”?

I think that outcomes show us the answer is yes. Not only did turning our church meetings into a nursery for non-Christians NOT gain us the outcomes we desired for them, but we sacrificed our ability to make deeper, stronger disciples of the people we already have who already believe.

“Church meeting as outreach tool” backfired. We moved away from sending Christians out of the church to make disciples out in the world before we bring them into the church, and it cost us dearly.

What we do in our meetings must be for the edification of those who already believe. Changing that to cater to nonbelievers has been a stunningly bad decision that must be reversed if the Church is to start rebuilding itself.

My concern with the Stetzer piece is that it’s trapped in the amber of the 1980s, promoting a ministry philosophy that over 35 years has proved largely incapable of creating disciples, which is the primary mission of the Church.

Moving on…

Stetzer’s points #1 and #3 above are essentially the same, just tweaked for different age emphases. I’ll address them together.

Stetzer writes:

“It’s remarkable, and I’ve said it many times: If the 1950s came back, many churches are ready. (Or the 1600s, or the boomer ’80s, depending on your denomination, I guess.)

“There is nothing wrong with the fifties, except we don’t live there anymore. We must love those who live here, now, not yearn for the way things used to be. The cultural sensibilities of the fifties are long past in most of the United States. The values and norms of our current context are drastically different and continue to change.”

Let me counter with this Scripture:

“To what then shall I compare the men of this generation, and what are they like? They are like children who sit in the market place and call to one another, and they say, ‘We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we sang a dirge, and you did not weep.'”
–Luke 7:31-32

The modern American Church has tried desperately in the last 35 years to show itself culturally relevant and hip. Pastors drop references to The Walking Dead or Breaking Bad in their sermons. Churches have small groups based on cultural affinities such as video gaming or hip hop music. In fact, whatever is cool in culture is what drives our youth ministry. If society talks about a cultural issue, we talk about it too. Heck, like a dog, we wallow in it and then say to society, “Look how up we are on the stuff you like!”

Again, what has this gotten us when it comes to making disciples? Nothing.

Stetzer’s main beef is with tradition. I think that’s an old argument left over from 35 years ago. It’s not the point.

Going back to that Luke passage, the Church is missing that point when it focuses on being counter-tradition. What it should be is counterculture.

More than ever, I believe the fix for what ails the American Church is not culture but counterculture. I strongly believe that many people today are desperate to get away from contemporary culture and back to a slower, more personal, more meaningful place that does not shift daily at the whims of style leaders and their thought leader cohorts. That word authenticity keeps rearing its head.

In fact, I have come to wonder if the solution for the Church is to instead examine culture and then head 180 degrees in the other direction.

That mentality may also ask that we examine tradition and see if it is, in fact, already 180 degrees. If so, then rather than throwing it out because we are counter-tradition, we instead consider embracing it when it’s counterculture.

Stetzer derides being stuck in the 1950s, but I think it’s not just the elderly who are nostalgic. Young people are growing sick of modern culture too. They’re looking for counterculture, but what they’re finding instead in our churches is cultural concession. The world piped, and the American Church danced. For the last 35 years or so, that has benefited no one.

As for Stetzer’s #2…

While I agree that the mission of the Church must, in many ways, conflict with comfort, cultural concession is tiring. I may be speaking solely for myself, but when I come to church on Sunday, the last thing I want is trendiness and the very cultural crap I’m forced to wade through daily. When the Church looks just like the world, no option for a “set-apart place” exists.

Yet people are desperately searching for such a place. In a world governed by clocks, where are they to find the comfort of timelessness? In a world filled with 15-minutes of fame, where can they find the comfort of lasting meaning? They are NOT finding those essentials in a church that operates like a cultural haven, yet that kind of comfort is a necessary balm. We desperately need that kind of comfort if we’re to be refreshed to go out into the world and be countercultural.

Do you want effective outreach in your church? Here’s what I suggest:

1. Make the church for the Church. The seeker-sensitive model failed. Bring back the model that intends for Sundays to be the time when maturing believers are fed meat, not milk. Make it a safe place to practice spiritual gifts and to do the mature things a mature Church fellowship should do without fear that some unbelieving visitor will be weirded out or offended.

2. Remember that outreach means to reach out. The mission field exists beyond the four walls of the church building. Equip people to evangelize out there. Lead the lost to Christ out there, then bring them into the church.

3. Be countercultural. Instead of doing whatever the world is doing, ask if the opposite is the better, more lasting way and closer to the heart of God. You may be surprised how many people are looking to escape culture rather than to embrace it.

We’ve had 35 or more of failed outreach ideas. Time to stop doing what doesn’t work and get back to what people really need.

A Faith of One: Why the Church Must Teach to the Individual

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Fred Rogers of Mister Rogers' NeighborhoodFred Rogers of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood fame told a story about his seminary days.

Rogers and a group of his friends took a road trip to hear a famous minister preach. To their brutal disappointment, the minister was on vacation that Sunday and a visiting speaker would preach.

The replacement droned on, and Rogers grew furious. It was one of the most boring, pointless messages he had ever heard, and he cursed his bad timing.

Then he looked at the woman seated next to him. She was crying her eyes out, hanging on the speaker’s every word.

The incident proved a profound lesson for the young Rogers, who understood that no matter how badly that speaker missed connecting with him, someone other than him needed to hear those words. It was a truth he never forgot, incorporating that experience into the philosophy of his classic TV show.

If you’ve been a reader of Cerulean Sanctum long enough, you’re familiar with my rant about spiritual gifts. To sum up: I think leaders in a local church must make it their priority to assist in helping congregants identify and use their spiritual gifts. Our failure to do this on an individual basis is one reason why our churches fail in their missions. God put those people in that church with those gifts for a reason. Not employing their gifts properly hurts everyone.

It’s the truth of the Body of Christ: different people, different gifts, and different purposes within the Body.

It’s not just differences in giftings and uses, either. As Mister Rogers noted, people will react individually to different messages and different types of learning.

My degree is in Christian Education from Wheaton College in Illinois. Later, the major was renamed Spiritual Formation. Now it’s called Christian Formation and Ministry. They ought to cut to the chase and call it Making Disciples.

Just as God gives each person a special role in the Body of Christ, so He also equips us differently and by different means. No one-size-fits-all approach to making disciples exists because we all form spiritually in unique ways. I know people who came to faith through reading St. Augustine’s Confessions. I can’t imagine a more dry path, but then, it’s not entirely about me. My own conversion was quickened in part from an intimate and personal message delivered to a small group followed by time alone. That may work for some but not for others.

My college learning on this topic focused more on how Jesus taught, but even He didn’t use one means. He drew his disciples through miracles, discussion, confrontation, paradox, and friendship. He taught them by stories, Scripture, His example, and through their own personal experiences. He knew each person and reached out to each with what best grew each. And he addressed the failings of each individually such as Peter’s reinstatement and Thomas’ need to see and feel.

I don’t believe most churches take the individual into account. Spiritual growth is seen as a blanket endeavor, with blanket approaches, and blanket goals.

The problem here is that in going for blanket growth, we miss one of the most important aspects of that growth: connecting with each other one-to-one.

It takes time alone with another to find out how he or she ticks. Knowing how best to grow someone means observing that person and adjusting how we work with that individual. Parents do this naturally with their children, yet we forget personal distinctions when we approach making disciples of people outside our own households.

God asks that we individualize the way we make disciples, because in doing so, we build a connection to another life. We are forced to slow down, to observe, and to show genuine care for that one person made not only in the image of God but also made in His uniqueness and depth. It is one reason why Jesus had to go away and send the Spirit, because one person cannot reach everyone at the level needed for maturing growth.

A church with a one-size-fits-all approach to making disciples is likely also a church that doesn’t have time to get to know people. The result? A church with a stunted community. Likewise, if the interpersonal relationships within a church are shallow, the making of disciples will be also.

The individual, with all his or her quirks and distinctions, matters to God. An education and discipleship program that does not take the unique gifts, talents, and needs of each person into account cannot be effective. Such a customized approach is time-consuming and costly, but it’s God’s intention. Our balking at the cost is our failure to see with God’s eyes.

In short, the only way to counteract the anemic nature of Christianity in the West is to prioritize the needs of the one to nurture a many that can truly reach all of the world for Jesus.