Relevance

My Hope for What the Church Will Be, Part 1

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As someone who revels in the outdoors, most of my hobbies get me out into nature. I've been birding since I was fourteen, taught outdoor education in zoos and camps, and would rather spend a night out under the panoply of the heavens than any stuffy old bedroom.

When I consider the heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the moon and the stars that Thou hast appointed, what is Man that Thou art mindful of him, and the son of man that Thou dost care for him? Every time I catch a glimpse of the night sky, Psalm 8 rolls off my lips from out of my heart.

I recently added geocaching to my arsenal of outdoor activities. Together, my son and I have found 55 hidden caches in our area in our first six weeks. It's a challenging activity and a whole lot of fun.

Geocaching presents another intriguing benefit. Not being in the typical workplace, I've witnessed my personal network dwindle to only a handful of names. Since I have no hobbies that require other people to make them happen, I decided to attend a geocachers meet-up to broaden my contacts and get my face out there.

Last Friday, my son and I met up with our fellow geocachers. About 33 people showed up. Curiously, I knew most of them by their "cache name" nicknames as I'd already come across their log entries in the caches and in the electronic logs at Geocaching.com .

I was new. No one knew me. Everyone greeted me and my son. We were immediately welcomed into the greater body of local geocachers.

Time ticked on, but none of us noticed. People shared their exploits. Stories about hard-to-find caches abounded, including one notorious one that had sent my son and me sliding along with trees and rocks for about a hundred feet when the hillside we were standing on collapsed. (Yes, very scary, but God was faithful and we were remarkably unhurt.) When I got engrossed in the conversation, the lady presiding over the get-together spontaneously watched my son so I could hang with the veterans and soak up the geocaching wisdom. And while the meeting felt like a throwback to the kinds of engineer parties I remember in Silicon Valley (I now know the hot sport for techies in my area), everyone was glad to have me there. They clued me in to insider talk, showed me their collections of treasures harvested from various caches, and made me feel like I'd been a part of their little cadre forever. We had to leave a little bit early, so we didn't get to see the gifts handed out to those geocachers who had achieved certain milestones (like 1000 caches found). That would have been nice to witness, though.

Driving home, I couldn't shake a few thoughts about that meeting:

  1. Though I was a sheer beginner, no one looked down on my lack of experience and feeble knowledge. They respected me for how far I'd already come.
  2. People made sure my son and I felt included.
  3. The wise among them wanted to let me know their secrets.
  4. The host looked after me, took care of my child so I could learn more, and dropped me an e-mail later to say how glad she was that we'd been able to attend.
  5. People there were genuinely excited about what they did and shared stories that bolstered comraderie and the activity itself.
  6. Anyone who shared in the love of the activity was welcomed. Old people, families with young children—it didn't matter.
  7. If people didn't immediately grasp all the rules, that was okay. Questions were eagerly answered and without judgment.
  8. The very best among them were esteemed for what they'd accomplished. 

You can probably see where I'm heading, so I'll just say it:

Wouldn't it be great if all our churches in America were like this?

Honestly, a geocache box is nothing in the scheme of things. Geocaching will pass away like all things in time. But why then do we Christians, the ones who are ambassadors of the Living Christ, seem far less excited about Him than these geocachers do about a piece of Tupperware hidden inside a hollow log in the woods?

Wouldn't it be great if our meetings were filled with people talking about what Jesus meant to them? Unity, Mercy, LoveWhat He'd done in their lives today, yesterday, and the day before that? If people can get excited about finding a 35mm film canister wedged in a woodpecker hole, why do we seem so bored with Jesus, who is Lord of the Universe?

We wonder why it's harder and harder to get the lost to take notice of Jesus. I can say with all honesty that if we were as excited about Him as these geocachers are about their sport, and we conducted our meetings as welcoming and as informative as that geocachers get-together, our churches might be packed—or at least people wouldn't write them off so easily.

If you're a Christian, then you have a built-in network of people who should be on your side for eternity. Yet all too often that network suffers in comparison to some of the networks the world has to offer.

When his buddy upchucks the evening's revelry, the barfly cleans him up. When the drug addict has no place to sleep, he calls another addict who lets him crash at his place. The bartender, out out on the town on his own for once, leaves his waitress a big tip because he knows how it is.

The Bible says this:

For the sons of this world are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than the sons of light.
—Luke 16:8b ESV

The sons of this world get it. They know they have to fight for everything because they have nothing else to back them up. That's why a real friend means something. A real friend will cover your back.

We take for granted what the Lord bought for us when He created the Church.

That's where we'll pick up in the concluding part of this pre-hiatus series. Look for it before the week is out.

Reality, Part 1

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What now?In the nearly three years that Cerulean Sanctum has existed, I've posted many times about the disconnect between the American Church and economic issues. We've approved of Crown Financial or Ron Blue budget classes because they cater to the individual making personal decisions (reinforcing the stereotype that Christianity is all about "a personal Jesus"), but we're pathologically quiet about macro monetary issues.

I believe this to be an enormous mistake. If the Church cannot speak to larger issues than personal ones, we will increasingly be seen as irrelevant. We may already be there.

Many blanch at the mere mention of relevance, but I think that what is at issue here is not relevance per se, but the fact that we Christians in America can't seem to live out what we believe on any scale beyond the personal. That gives Christianity the sheen of being a religion that might speak to me, but can't speak to my neighborhood. In lieu of this, our faith falls into a category of just another personal decision, like whether to shop at Target or WalMart.

Gasoline is poised to spring up to $4 a gallon in some parts of the country. To the minimum wage earner, this translates into heightened desperation. Many people who work minimum wage jobs are forced to live outside the more costly areas of town, necessitating longer drives. If I make $6 an hour and have a forty mile round trip to make every day, I'm in trouble.

When I lived in Silicon Valley from 1996-2000, the cost of living was so exorbitant that the average two bedroom apartment rented for more than $2000 a month. No one making less than $15 an hour could possibly live there. Those folks lived in outlying areas and suffered through daily one to three hour commutes from up to a hundred miles away. I once talked to a Safeway grocery store clerk who commuted an hour and forty minutes one way to get to work every day. Now ask her to pay $4 a gallon for gas.

Ford announced record losses last week. They piggybacked a historically large recall on top of that bad news. Their bonds are junk. Toyota just passed them as the second largest automaker in the world. And carmakers aren't looking to build more plants in the US, but in China.

The sheer number of companies in this country that depend on Ford for business should give us pause. The sheer number of Americans who are now paying spiraling prices for every staple of life that is transported by oil-consuming vehicles should start us talking.

But the Church in this country has nothing to say about any of this.

When my wife and I moved into our house five years ago, gas in our area was about $1.35 a gallon. The digits swapped this year and the price of gas this last Saturday was $3.15. We own a thirteen-year-old four-cylinder pickup truck that gets about 22 mpg on the highway and a compact car that gets about 38 mpg. In 2003, we spent about $290 a month on gas under normal usage. We now drive less than we did then, but with inflated gas prices, we're at nearly $600 a month now.

We're not rich; nor are we poor. Kissing $310 a month goodbye hurts. It hurts even more through the ripple effect. The cereal we bought two years ago for $1.50 a box is now about $2.75. Multiply that ad infinitum.

We hear about a good economy, but the real facts are depressing. The latest numbers reported one year ago show that while Americans did enjoy more income, with steadily rising salaries, factoring out the top one percent of wage earners nearly eliminated all gains.  In fact, 99 percent of Americans enjoyed a 1.5 percent increase in salary over the dog days of the last recession. The 12.5 percent increase in wages among the top one percent accounted for the offset. Translation? The rich got richer and inflation ate the average family's wage increase.

Being better educated didn't help, either, despite the prevailing wisdom. Salaries for college educated Americans declined in 2004.

And don't talk about savings. Last year, Americans on average saved zero percent of their income. Nothing. This year, economists are already saying that we could be looking at a negative one percent savings rate. 

The figures cited here are the most recent we have. And that's before gasoline above $2 a gallon and Ford and GM bonds falling into the basement. 

Yet what are we as a Church doing in light of this? Not one thing that I can see. Did we champion the recent push for an increase in the minimum wage? (In Ohio, the $4.25 state mandated minimum wage hasn't changed since 1990!) Certainly no Evangelical worth his conservative salt mentioned this lest he be lumped in with Jim Wallis. Are we Christian conservatives true to our nomenclature by calling for conservation of resources? All such calls that I've seen have been lampooned. What are our plans to help each other cope with looming economic disaster for many households? Or is the mantra we're chanting in our churches today, "Every man for himself"?

I don't know why we're so shortsighted.

I want to tell you something you may not consider: There are people in your church who are really smarting from this increase in the cost of gas that is progressively trickling down into all goods and services. They're wondering how they'll cope. With China and India industrializing faster than you can say "globalization," capitalism's market forces dictate that demand drives price, and that demand for oil will only increase. What then, if salaries do not keep pace? As we've seen, they aren't.

I'm not a fearmonger. I'm only calling for common sense. Our churches MUST speak to this reality and start doing something immediately to ensure that the least of those in our churches are not bankrupted by forces they cannot control. Because right now, someone in your church is weeping over bills they could easily pay two years ago, but not today.

That person might even be you. 

More tomorrow… 

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?