Maturity

Chapter, Verse, Blog

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No, that’s not a new law firm. We need more legal eagles like we need more “spiritainment.”

Instead, that title exists because of a common criticism I see in the comments of other blogs. A Godblogger posts on some topic and, inevitably, a reader comments that the posts was essentially nullified by a lack of Scriptural citations. Never mind that the entire post speaks from the whole revelation of Scripture. Too few Bible verses plucked from Haggai or Philemon and the whole thing topples like an Enlightenment house of cards.

I saw such a criticism on another blog that linked to my post from last week, “Leer and Foaming in Las Wendy’s.”  The commenter at that other blog didn’t like that I failed to quote the same verses on modesty that we’ve all heard a million times. Never mind that part of my point was that we know what to do, we just don’t do it; because I cited no Scripture, I had no real Christian admonishment worth reading.

I’m not bothered by that comment. I’ve no verse citation quota to live up to. I’ve included enormous numbers of verses in many of my posts to underline points—enough to get the imprimatur of whatever Evangelical pope exists.

What bothers me is we’re potentially abusing the Bible by always rendering up select verses to make our points; we slice and dice the word of God to make it fit our particular theory. Like cluster bombs, our choice verses descend on our enemies in awesome, domain-name-shaking explosions that threaten to destroy the very foundational IP addresses that undergird the Internet. We quote passage after passage, highlighting them with whatever our blog theme summons for a blockquote. And before blogs—remember life before blogging?—Rock, Paper, Scissorswe filled our books, and sermons, and tracts, and on and on with this verse and that, carefully woven together to form a bulletproof “defense of the Gospel.”

But something’s missing. We’ve overlooked the best for the good. The result is a perpetual game of Rock, Paper, Scissors in which your passage from 1st Corinthians beats her chapter from Leviticus, which annihilates his verse from Revelation.

And yet I imagine that many Christians today are sitting back and thinking what all that verse-slinging has gotten us. I mean, are we truly happy with the state of the Christian Church in the West today?

Late last year, I read an excerpt from a book by Frank Viola, a house church proponent. The excerpt had little to do with house churches and everything to do with the way Christians today handle the Word of God. And unlike most things I read, eight months have gone by and I still can’t get Viola’s excerpt, “The Bible Is Not a Jigsaw Puzzle,” out of my head. I’ve exhausted more mental time thinking about the ramifications of Viola’s argument than nearly anything I’ve considered in the last year.

I’m not even going to attempt to excerpt his excerpt. Read the whole thing. I promise it’s worth it.

Most of us have seen the fallout from our overemphasis on chapter and verse. People can quote verse after verse of Scripture, but their micro-understanding of God’s Word suffers in comparison to His macro-revelation. It’s a little like being given the key to an Aston Martin Vanquish, only to rejoice in the key and not the whole car. If you never drive the thing because you don’t know a steering wheel from a ferris wheel, then what’s the point?

Too many Christians fail to grasp the overarching testimony of the Scriptures. We may talk about a Christian worldview, yet hardly anyone correctly handles the entirety of Creation, Fall, Redemption, and Restoration. Can’t I make a case for God’s enduring love for us humans, His ultimate creation, without citing John 3:16? If I don’t mention Romans 12:1, can I still talk about worship? If I cite no Scriptures at all, but appeal to their truth in their entirety, have I somehow slighted the Lord?

I think we’ve reduced the Scriptures to a potpourri of pithy sayings. I know that when I sit down and read an entire book of the Bible in one sitting it speaks in a way that no piecemeal reading will ever match. No rending of each verse to wring every ounce of meaning out of it, but just sitting down and reading a book all the way through. And while I admit that some books like Psalms or Proverbs are collections, Paul’s epistles were never intended to be read as a New Testament version of Proverbs. Nor were the Gospels. They have an arc in their writing that carries its own meaning, and when we neglect to read them in the form they were designed to be read, we miss more power and wisdom than we realize.

Moving away from piecemeal study into a more holistic handling of each book will carry over into a greater understanding of the entire testimony of Scripture. Our quiet times won’t be the same. Meditation on the Scriptures won’t be on just this verse of that, but on entire books, and possibly the whole of God’s revelation to Man.

An old book was entitled Your God Is Too Small. Well, I think our Bible reading is too small, too. Instead of chapter and verse, we need a more macro approach to the Scriptures that imparts a holistic view of the entirety of God’s speaking to Mankind.

Or we can keep on playing Rock, Paper, Scissors with the words of the Lord.

What the American Church Is Doing Right, Part 2

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Yesterday, I began a two-part series looking at six things the American Church is doing right. In the day since I posted the first part, I’ve added one more positive I feel needs to be listed, so the total now comes to seven.

So without further delay, four more things the American Church is doing right:

4. Addressing major American social ills positively

Much has been made of the culture wars, and there are good people on both sides of the engagement/disengagement battle. Yet no matter how much we shy away from discussing whether Christians should be engaging in those skirmishes, the reality is that some of our American social ills would be far worse if Christians weren’t out on the front lines.

Roe vs. Wade decriminalized murder in America. Christians were asleep at their posts in the early Seventies when this horror was enacted, but if not for Christians working hard against abortion since then, millions more human beings never would have been. Thumbs Up!Crisis Pregnancy Centers operated by churches and other Christian organizations have saved countless babies. Many mothers who were considering abortion ultimately found Christ through the ministrations of dedicated Christian workers. No matter where we stand on fighting culture wars, fighting against the abortion mills has reaped rewards. Just ask someone saved from being aborted how important it was that Christians got involved.

Other areas have seen Christians move in and bring life-altering aid. In a culture that lives to shop, millions of Americans have dug themselves a financial hole. God honors hilarious giving, but not ridiculous consumption. Many have been rescued from financial ruin by churches and individual Christians who stepped in as financial mentors and worked alongside the nearly bankrupt to pay off their debt in a responsible manner. That may not seem like much, but to a person buried under a mountain of credit card debt, having that free help might be the only thing that keeps some folks from homelessness.

At a time when nearly everyone in America has heard the Gospel, but fewer have seen it in action, Christians working to be salt and light in a dying culture have affected countless people. That’s impossible to write off.

5. Developing new evangelistic methodologies

As I just wrote, I’m of the firm belief that everyone in this country has heard the name of Jesus and had some minor education (whether wrong or right) in the Faith. This makes our situation today totally unlike that of Paul’s day, when no one outside of Jerusalem had heard the name of Jesus.

I believe this saturation has put us into a mopping-up mode when it comes to evangelism. People have heard some parts of the Gospel, but what they’re not seeing is us Christians truly live it out.

My former pastor, Steve Sjogren, has pioneered many servant evangelism strategies for helping Christians put their walk where their talk is. While these methodologies cannot substitute for the Spirit of God bringing conviction into a sinner’s life, they create enough cognitive dissonance to blast through the walls people have erected against hearing the true Gospel. People can rail against talk, but seeing Christians actually living out their faith by serving others can’t be argued against. Christian scholars have definitively shown that one of the reasons the early Church grew exponentially in Rome was because Christians tended the sick when no one else in Roman society dared even touch them. People saw that and took notice.

No, I am not for many of the evangelistic ideas that many are championing that make concessions to worldliness, gutting the Gospel message and substituting nonsense. But serving others in a way that lives what we believe isn’t nonsense. It’s what we need to be doing—and fortunately, many are.

6. Rediscovering experiential faith

I know I’ll be branded a postmodern acolyte for writing this, but I’ve honestly thought that the Church in this country has been too rational and cerebral. I run across so many Christians who treat Jesus Christ as a theoretical rather than someone to be known as a real person. The Bible is the document of experiential faith, yet so many Christians are living out a set of beliefs rather than a real relationship with the Lord of the Universe.

This has been slowly changing in the last twenty years, a good thing, if you ask me. More and more Christians have a hunger for God, not being satisfied with being told about Him, but actually encountering Him themselves. In a way, this is a repeat of what happened during the Reformation. It’s what’s been happening in non-Western countries for a while now. I believe it’s one of the many reasons that non-Western Christians are so vital.

Now it’s coming to America.

And yes, it can be a bad thing if we jettison all common sense in search of experiences. Truthfully, some of the experiential bent needs to be reined in or tempered with the intellect. I’d be a fool to claim otherwise. The pendulum has moved the other way, and has, of course, overshot the blessed middle tension between experience and intellect.

Still, I’m hopeful that it won’t perpetually stay at either extreme.

7. Understanding that the Spirit of God is moving

Though I thoroughly endorse the charismata and will be seen by many to be a charismatic, I don’t jump on “fresh move of the Spirit” bandwagons. Folks in charismatic and Pentecostal realms have been claiming a fresh wind of the Spirit is just around the corner since…well, since Azusa Street. Needless to say, that’s been a hundred years now.

But I’m seeing real signs that the Spirit of God is moving, and sources not usually given over those proclamations are, too. People are tiring of the Joel Osteen flavor of “Christianity”; they aren’t satisfied with feel-good pseudo-Christianity anymore. They want meat. And God will give them meat if they repent and cleave to Him.

Many of the pseudo-Christian fads foisted off on unsuspecting Christians have been weighed in the scale and found wanting. People who got burned once aren’t willing to rush into the next fad quite so easily. They’re looking for honesty before God. And God will honor that kind of desire in people who truly seek Him transparently.

Aslan is on the move, as it was once said. I think that’s happening right now. We need to be prepared when God moves.

Those are my seven things the American Church is doing right.

What are yours?

Spiritainment???

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The man whose soul is “growing” takes more interest in spiritual things every year…. The ways, and fashions, and amusements, and recreations of the world have a continually decreasing place in his heart. He does not condemn them as downright sinful, nor say that those who have anything to do with them are going to hell. He only feels that they have a constantly diminishing hold on his own affections and gradually seem smaller and more trifling in his eyes.
—J.C. Ryle

When amusement is necessary to get people to listen to the gospel there will be failure.  This is not the method of Christ.  To form an organization and provide all kinds of entertainment for young people, in order that they may come to the Bible classes, is to be foredoomed to failure.
—G. Campbell Morgan

One can only conclude that God’s professed children are bored with Him, for they must be wooed to meeting with a stick of striped candy in the form of religious movies, games and refreshments.
—A.W. Tozer

I’m writing two positive posts this week on what the American Church is doing right. In fact, I was going to start those posts today, but before the story got cold, I felt I had to tie in last Friday’s post “The Church of ‘Tomorrow? What Tomorrow’” with a press release from George Barna.

Barna’s announced that he’s now heading up a new Christian media company that promises to deliver even MORE entertainment to Christians everywhere. (Barna labels this “spiritainment.”) The argument here is that Christians NEED quality entertainment that looks and believes just like them. (Read the press release. I’ll wait right here….)

Beyond the obviously insulting, syncretistic name that combines the precious Holy Spirit with entertainment, Cover illustration from Postman's 'Amusing Ourselves to Death' I’ve just got  to ask the obvious: Do we Christians need to be any more entertained?

I struggle with this immensely as a Christian seeking to write novels. Does the world need another novel right now, Christian or otherwise? To lift a book title from the late media critic Neil Postman, aren’t we already amusing ourselves to death ?

This plays into my last post on the expediency plaguing the American Church. Too much of our thinking is short-term. Our dependency on short-term fixes is due in part to our inability to break out of a media-induced five minute attention span. Because we’re so focused on entertaining ourselves, long-term goals are out because they don’t meet our craving for instant feedback gained through our perpetual need for entertainment. The result? We’ve made boredom the ultimate spiritual enemy.

What better explains the megachurchianity so rampant in this country? We’ve substituted a dog and pony show to keep people entertained, but at the cost of their souls. Who can plan for any thing long-term if the mildly-satiated crowd demands another quick fix to keep the experiential buzz going? If God’s not going to rend the sky and rain manna down on us at our beck and call, then why hold prayer meetings? Why slave for years as a missionary in a foreign land if you only get a few converts? Your Powerpoint won’t be all that interesting when you share in church next Sunday. People might yawn—the evidence needed to show that your act needs some refining.

Revival isn’t going to come through movies, no matter what George Barna thinks. Nor books, though it pains me to say so. The Spirit of God isn’t all that interested in entertainment, Christian or worldly. He’s calling out to you and me to die to self so that others might live for Him.

We North American Christians…

…watch too much TV.

…waste too much time at the movies.

…drop too many dollars on music.

…spend too many hours trying to stave off boredom.

…spend too little time before the Lord living out the Gospel.

In short, we need “spiritainment” like we need an electric dog polisher. All this entertainment is a drug that keeps us numb to what we should truly be doing: serving the Lord Jesus until there is nothing left of us.

I’m not against Christians having fun once in a while. However, I believe that in the United States of 2006 the pursuit of fun has completely overtaken the pursuit of God, even among Christians.

Speaking of the pursuit of God, I’ll let A.W. Tozer speak eloquently here:

No one with common human feeling will object to the simple pleasures of life, nor to such harmless forms of entertainment as may help to relax the nerves and refresh the mind exhausted by toil. Such things, if used with discretion, may be a blessing along the way. That is one thing; however, the all-out devotion to entertainment as a major activity for which and by which men live is definitely something else again.

The abuse of a harmless thing is the essence of sin. The growth of the amusement phase of human life to such fantastic proportions is a portent, a threat to the souls of modern men. It has been built into a multimillion dollar racket with greater power over human minds and human character than any other educational influence on earth.

And the ominous thing is that its power is almost exclusively evil, rotting the inner life, crowding out the long eternal thoughts which would fill the souls of men, if they were but worthy to entertain them. The whole thing has grown into a veritable religion which holds its devotees with a strange fascination; and a religion, incidentally, against which it is now dangerous to speak. For centuries the Church stood solidly against every form of worldly entertainment, recognizing it for what it was—a device for wasting time, a refuge from the disturbing voice of conscience, a scheme to divert attention from moral accountability.

For this she got herself abused roundly by the sons of this world. But of late she has become tired of the abuse and has given over the struggle. She appears to have decided that if she cannot conquer the great god Entertainment she may as well join forces with him and make what use she can of his powers.

So, today we have the astonishing spectacle of millions of dollars being poured into the unholy job of providing earthly entertainment for the so-called sons of heaven. Religious entertainment is in many places rapidly crowding out the serious things of God.

Many churches these days have become little more than poor theaters where fifth-rate “producers” peddle their shoddy wares with the full approval of evangelical leaders who can even quote a holy text in defense of their delinquency. And hardly a man dares raise his voice against it.

I haven’t read too many critical voices of Barna’s call for “spiritainment.” Add mine; I see this as little more than a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist. Don’t label me a prophet here, but I can’t help but think this “spiritainment” is all going to turn out very badly in the end.