Preparation

My Hope & Prayer for 2008

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I have a hope and prayer for 2008 that I wish to share. It started off from a series of negative experiences, but I want to make it positive because I believe the positive word comes from the heart of God.

I’m late to the show on the book Simple Church by Rainer and Geiger. Judging from Amazon’s rankings of the book as #1, #2, and #3 in various evangelical categories, it’s still hot long after its release in 2006. I’m also amazed at the number of strongly approving reviews. Amazed. In fact, if I could sum up my review, I would describe the book in one portmanteau word: Craptacular.

That encapsulates almost all the hottest books on “How to Do Church” that I’ve read in the last few years. The same hot churches are held up for mimicking. The same church problems are cited (correctly, I might add—the one nod I’ll give these books). But the solutions are always wrong. Always. Nearly all are just business principles given a good shellacking of Christianity to make them look smooth and shiny. Honestly, if Google and The Gap are the models for effective churches, all is lost. (That author Tom Rainer is the head of Lifeway Christian Stores should not surprise anyone.)

What is my biggest problem with all of these modern “How to Do Church” books? Every last one of them offers solutions that can be instituted without the Lord. The fixes are universally man-made. This, universally, makes them the arm of flesh. And the arm of flesh will always fail. Always.

But one fix never fails.

That fix is not a thing, but a person. We know Him as the Holy Spirit. He will lead us gently if we allow HimHe’s perfect. Unlike one craptacular, modern, “How to Do Church” book after the other, the Holy Spirit guides into all truth. Not some truth, but all truth. He’s the ultimate source for making the Church all She can be.

Here’s how I can save you hours of reading lame books on how to fix your church and turn it into the church God desires. You only need to listen to the Holy Spirit.

I suspect that’s not a very satisfying answer for some people. You can’t make money selling curricula, church models, and seminars by telling church leaders they need to dump all their craptacular books and start listening to the Holy Spirit. But that’s what church leaders need to do.

A church is made up of too many diverse people for a “How to Do Church” book to succeed. If you read the Bible closely enough, you’ll realize that it doesn’t even attempt to provide all the solutions to how a church should operate. Yes, some general ideas exist, but when it comes down to the specifics, that’s where the Holy Spirit comes in.

Take this passage:

Now there were in the church at Antioch prophets and teachers, Barnabas, Simeon who was called Niger, Lucius of Cyrene, Manaen a member of the court of Herod the tetrarch, and Saul. While they were worshiping the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit said, “Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them.” Then after fasting and praying they laid their hands on them and sent them off.
—Acts 13:1-3

No “How to Do Church” book is going to give you that. They’ll tell you a process by which you have to funnel everyone, but they won’t get down to this level of leadership.

Why not send Lucius? Or Manaen? Why send that guy who used to persecute the Church, that Saul character?

I would suspect that at the board meeting of your typical church, simple, complex, traditional, emerging, or whatever, the process would dictate who got chosen and for what purpose. What God thinks and the ones He would choose would probably be far down the list. Too dicey to depend on the Holy Spirit; just let the established process make the decision instead. We send the ones WE think are best, the ones who best fit our idea of who should go for the given job. And aren’t we the ones deciding what that job is anyway?

Give me a thousand copies of the bestselling Christian leadership books out there and I’d burn them all than trust one over what the Holy Spirit thinks. Why then, do our church leaders trust books so much and God so little?

The Holy Spirit provides perfect answers to intractable problems. He also provides specific answers for dealing with specific people in specific situations. He alone makes a church what it should be. He alone makes genuine disciples out of wrecked people.

We need to stop this craziness and get back to the Lord. If our churches are not run by the guidance of the Holy Spirit, then they are not churches. We must also keep the Scriptures ever before us, but with the understanding that people—sadly—can use the Bible to justify all manner of leadership styles that rely not one iota on the Holy Spirit. These “How to Do Church” books quote a million Scriptures, but they use the Scriptures to support their foregone premises, rather than seeing what it actually says. And what it actually says is that we’re blowing it if we’re not dependent on the Spirit for guidance.

My hope and prayer for the Church for 2008 is that we find a way to get back to depending on the Holy Spirit to guide our churches. And not just lip service, but genuine dependence so that we don’t do a thing unless the Spirit confirms that thing one way or another.

How do we get there?

1. Know the Scriptures—We’ve got to really know them,our leaders especially. The Holy Spirit calls to mind the Word of God, but if the reserves aren’t there, we won’t hear.

2. Holiness—It’s time to get serious about holiness. That means dropping out of the world’s game. That means being a people separated unto the Lord. You want to hear from the Holy Spirit? You want your church to prosper? Then tear down the altars and purify the temple. That never fails.

3. Waiting—The Holy Spirit answers on His time, not ours. Just because our society is enslaved to busyness doesn’t mean our churches must be. We must stop trying to force things to happen that aren’t in God’s playbook.

4. Humility & Repentance—We must repent and humbly admit that we’ve attempted to take the world’s ways and make them the Church’s. But what fellowship have Christ and Belial? None. We cannot continue to swallow fleshly business practices within our churches. Those ways end in ashes.

5. We must desire the leading of the Holy Spirit—The Holy Spirit leads where Christ is hungered and thirsted for. He is faithful to those who desire to hear from Him. The Lord does not leave His people adrift. He never has and never will. However, we did not believe this, so we gave up on His leadership and instituted the world’s. It’s time to get back to the Lord and desire Him above all.

I wrote this several days before it posted because I cannot escape the message. The Church that is not led by the Holy Spirit is utterly directionless, not matter how smoothly it may operate. God has a better way. My hope and prayer is that we rediscover that leadership by the Holy Spirit in 2008.

May you find the Lord in 2008, and know his guidance, when you seek Him with all your heart.

Still-in-the-Red Friday? – Further Thoughts

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Last Friday, after witnessing parking lots lacking the usual Black Friday crush of cars at local malls and shopping centers, I wondered if this holiday shopping season would disappoint retailers and further depress our struggling economy. I wrote “Still-in-the-Red Friday?” and closed my post by asking if the Church is ready for the economic issues coming our way.

If you’re a regular reader, you know that I take the position that God tabbed the Church to do the work of ministry. Yeah, you...Yes, He may rain manna from heaven for the starving, but since the Church was established, His primary means to meet needs is for the Church to meet them. That’s the plan, folks. You can’t read the New Testament and miss that very important fact. (I’ve quoted all the relevant Scriptures in dozens of previous posts. We should all know them anyway.)

What does a Church look like that doesn’t read the signs of the times? What does a Church look like that isn’t prepared to continue to meet the needs of others when times are brutally hard?

I can’t remember quoting a comment in toto, but David Riggins wrote an epic in response to last Friday’s post. I think it encapsulates the issue perfectly:

Interesting the confusion regarding how the Church faces reality. When economic hardships come, people lose their jobs, and when they have no income, they lose their homes. With the current stupidity regarding credit and its uses, people will lose their jobs and homes at a rapid rate. Two million sub-prime ARM loans are up for adjustment in the next 8 months. Those upward adjustments will often add 30% to the current payment those people are paying. Most of those people won’t be able to afford the higher monthly payments, putting $600 billion in bad loans on the books of already tightly stretched lenders like Countrywide. The loan industry has already lost 100,000 jobs in the last six months.

Each of those jobs is responsible for an average of four other jobs in the private sector, from auto salespeople to the bagger at Kroger. With the continuing collapse of the housing sector, home builders will start to go under, following the example of Neumann Homes in Illinois, which filed for bankruptcy protection this month. As more and more sectors of our economy are affected, an estimated 3 million jobs could be lost. This isn’t about spending more to motivate the economy, this is about making sure that what you spend actually has an effect on our economy. What you spend at Wal-Mart, Target, Circuit City or Home Depot lines the pockets of businesses from China to Indonesia, but little of it stays here. The credit used to buy housing is a commodity that pays for the estimated $18 billion net income of the major trading houses on Wall Street, where bonuses are expected to be down 5% from the average $136,580 in 2006. And this is a “bad year. It trickles down, but nothing like it flows up.

All this can be directly attributed to a lack of action on the part of the Church. Our society is corrupt because the Church is corrupt. Greed has run rampant, not merely in the corridors of power and money, but in the desire of the the Church to be seen as relevant and growing. We have created cults centered on charismatic pastors and exciting music, and have abandoned our role.

Is the church ready to take care of the people in the body who will lose their jobs, their homes, their savings? Are we willing to take people into our homes when they’ve lost theirs? If we don’t, who will? Is the Church ready to feed the homeless, provide care for the widow and orphan? As the mortgage crisis wipes out retirement funds, will we take care of the elderly who now only have social security?

I know most church-goers would scoff as these concerns. These are, after all, the responsibility of the government.

Not according to God, they aren’t. And ultimately, it is God we will answer to. I know that, personally, I am not ready to do anything to help anyone. I also know that our church is certainly not ready, and beyond a food pantry for the holidays, has no plan for taking care of the needy, either within or without our congregation. As conditioned as I am to clarion call of independence, I would find it hard to take care of someone who didn’t plan for hardship. It’s only by the grace of God that my family made it through the jobless times we’ve faced. It certainly wasn’t through the help of the “body.

Soon, the entire country could be facing the same situation that Ohio is in, with unemployment up over 7%, but this time, the price of fuel will be triple what it was in the last recession, and that will affect the price of everything else. Are you ready? Is your church? This is about looking out for your neighbor, and making sure they have what they need. This is about making sure your Church body is focused on meeting the real needs of the body, not bottle feeding the 200 pound infants.

We need to grow up, and it seems that we are about to enter one of those times when we either grow, or wither on the vine and get pruned.

Regardless of how well retailers do this Christmas shopping season, the issue remains: Are we as a Church the five wise virgins or the five foolish ones? Are we the Church who by prophetic word hears of the famine to come and prepares for it (Acts 11:38-40)? Are we hearing from God during the fat years so we are prepared for the lean years?

And so what if the lean years don’t come in 2008 or 2080. The issue is Are we ready?

Leonard Ravenhill once said,

The Church today wants to be raptured from responsibility.

That’s a stunning thought on dozens of different levels. Perhaps it even explains why we are not preparing as we should.

What will happen in our churches when we have dozens of unemployed families without medical insurance? What happens when someone in one of those families undergoes a medical emergency and gets stuck with a huge medical bill? What are we doing to be the church known for supernatural healings should that become the only means by which most people receive medical treatment?

As David mentioned above, what happens when people lose homes should the economy go down the tubes? What will your church do? What do you have in place right now to address that issue? And if your church has nothing in place, why not?

What will happen to evangelism when we’re trying to keep our heads down at work to lessen the chances of being the one pink-slipped when the inevitable downsizings come? Are our churches ready to pick up the pieces when our frontline people take that kind of hit? Or will that be chalked up to “the cost of doing ministry” with us leaving those frontliners to struggle in the aftermath?

We went through a precursor the last recession, which many believed lasted almost five years. What if the next recession is eight years and far deeper? It may have been your neighbor who got whacked last time. Tough for him, right? What if it’s you this time? What happens when you turn to your brothers and sisters in Christ and they look the other way?

What happens when the lost, people without the hope we have in Christ and without membership in the Body of Christ, come to us desperate for help and direction? Do we toss them a Bible and say, “Be warm and filled,” because we didn’t take our own membership in the Body of Christ seriously enough to seek the Lord so we knew in advance how He would have us prepare?

I’m not fearmongering here. What I’m doing is asking why the American Church is oblivious to these issues. Rather than being proactive, we’re reactive—and long after the damage has been done. We can’t continue to be so unprepared.

It’s not enough to say, “God will provide,” when the means by which He’s chosen to provide is asleep at the switch.

I ask again, “Church, are we ready?”

Still-in-the-Red Friday?

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I’m breaking my blog silence this week to bring this prognostication:

My family and I met other family members for an early lunch today. To get to the Indian restaurant, we passed a large mall complex (surrounded by big box stores) and a second shopping area a few miles further down lined along the main drag with strip malls.

And what did we see?

Not much, actually. Parking lots were a third as busy as this same “Black Friday” last year (and we didn’t shop then, either).

Now I can’t speak for the whole country, but at least in the Midwest I expect to hear a collective “Oh, $#*@!” come the close-of-business today as retailers wring their hands and wonder where it all went wrong.

Church, are we ready for what’s coming?