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What Past?

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I play drums on the worship team at my church. It's no stretch to say that you'd be hard pressed to find drums in a church sanctuary before 1970, but that's a whole 'nother post.

Having been involved in church music for years, I know a bit about the mindset of worship musicians. Universally, these folks honestly love using their musical talents for the Lord and for the edification of others. And while you do encounter a few moody introverts, my experience is that folks on worship teams are some of the most honest and open people you'll find in a church.

So it's always been odd for me to hear their reactions when I bring up the issue of playing some old hymns now and then and not the same praise and worship-style music we're trapped in. The response 99% of the time: "Yeah, wouldn't that be great? I sure miss singing those old hymns."

And yet we never get around to playing them. It's like those hymns are from a distant past so dusty that to even trot one out would cloud the gleaming modern edifice we call "The 21st Century Church."

Now some of you are saying that this is not your church. Yours sings those hymns with gusto. Fine. But somewhere in your church a paradigm shift occurred that relegated anything from the Christianity that existed before 1860 to the dark recesses of history, regardless of whether you know who Isaac Watts is or not.No Augustines I've yet to encounter an Evangelical church that doesn't seem to live solely in the moment.

Too many churches today act as if the Church sprang into existence after the Civil War. Eighteen and a half centuries flew by and with the exception of a couple of crusty old Europeans with names like Luther, Calvin, and Knox, Christianity didn't actually exist. Heck, history didn't actually exist, right?

One of the most tortured experiences I ever had in a Third Wave church was when the pastor of the one I was attending was given a portion of the text of Isaiah that was unearthed in the Middle East. It was more than a thousand years old. The group presenting it was tickled pink about their gift, but despite the fact that nearly three thousand people sat packed in the church, I would suggest that maybe ten folks in the seats weren't intellectually yawning. "So what?" would be the collective mantra.

I'd like to know when the American Church put a gun to the head of the Ancient Church and pulled the trigger. What happened that we got so arrogant and self-centered that we looked back on all those Christians who came before us, folks who often went to the flames for their faith, and said, "I'll take a pass, thank you," without considering the ramifications of that stance?

The simple truth about every pitched doctrinal battle now erupting in numerous denominations of Evangelical and Mainline Christianity is that the furor would cease to even be a whimper if we gave credence to what Christians a thousand years ago were saying. The Emerging Church, Open Theism, you name it, someone dealt with it a long, long time ago. But post-Enlightenment, it seems that our minds are stuck on our perceived superiority to what those Dark Ages savages thought.

I'd like to make an exceedingly controversial statement. It's not proffered in most genteel circles because some people would consider it borderline racist or sexist. At the risk of losing readers, I'm going to say it anyway. Just hear me out and think past the rhetoric.

I believe that one of the reasons that many American Christians today have rejected pre-Civil War Christianity as having anything useful to say to us today is because of slavery. The belief here is that if we got the slavery issue wrong back in those days, what else did we get wrong? If there were Christians in those days that thought it was okay to own slaves, then obviously folks back then weren't as smart as we are.

The same goes for how some might perceive women as being treated before that war. Afterwards, we got women's suffrage, their leadership in the temperance movements, and women moving into the workplace. But before that there was only ignorance.

Those two issues (and some others, like the Crusades), I believe led today's Christians down a dark path of swearing fealty to anti-traditionalism. Trying to rationalize older Christian positions on topics that make us queasy have led us to abandon en masse any previous age that did look like our more "enlightened" one.

No one is advocating a return of slavery! But our collective guilt about those less enlightened days must not force us to abandon everything associated with them, particularly the solid theology espoused by spirit-filled men and women of God who lived prior to women's suffrage and the Emancipation Proclamation. Many of those older theologians advocated for greater roles for women in society and the church or were staunchly anti-slavery—but we're just not willing to read them, so they cease to exist.

We cannot live believing that we who comprise the Church in America are the pinnacle of Christian thought. Millions have gone before us blessed of God and we are fools to think that we have nothing to learn from them. Their faith then means something for our faith today. It should come as no shock then that the fact we are adrift in so many parts of of the American Church is that we've grown to despise the very history that has made us who we are.

{Image: Woodcut of Augustine of Hippo, artist unknown}

What the Church Is Not Learning

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Carnage is the best word to describe what is happening in New Orleans. I pray the Church in this country is watching. What we are seeing may very well be the future, although on a scale restricted to one city in this country. Should more cities than one be involved in a more catastrophic event many days from now, it won't be pretty.

This is not a happy post. People may never want to come back here again after reading this, but I feel compelled to write.

I don't consider Jerry Falwell a spokesman for American Christianity. I want to say that up front. But on 9/11 he commented that perhaps what happened in New York that day was the judgment of God against America's sin. After being shouted down by a protest spearheaded by other Christians, Falwell was forced to retract that statement.

After hearing Falwell's comment, rather than immediately taking sides on it, I thought about it for a long time. Though I never did come to a firm position on what he said, Hurricane Katrinawhat shocked me was that so few people were even willing to consider for a brief moment that what Falwell said might be true.

Now we have a monstrous hurricane decimating a city known for it profligacy and overt sensuality. We have the gambling centers of Mississippi washed out into the Gulf. A couple folks have proffered the same reasoning as Falwell for the wreckage of New Orleans and Biloxi, but once again no one is listening.

Again, I don't have the perfect answer here. Judgment of God or not? I'm still pondering that. What troubles me is that so few Christians are willing to entertain for a second the possibility that Katrina is Wake-up Call #2.

Why does this trouble us so thoroughly that we relegate this possibility to the dumpster so quickly? Can we take a day to ponder this before we say that this is not the judgment of God against this nation? If it's not, then we move on. But what if it is?

The Church here has something to learn through all this. If we cannot discern the judgment of God, a judgment His righteous people easily saw in our Scriptural examples, what does that say about the American Church today?

The images and stories coming out of the Gulf are shocking. They so clearly show the utter depravity of Man that I can't see how we can be the same country after this. All the bravery that we hailed in New York almost four years ago has been swept away. The courageous stories of Katrina are buried in the rubble of vice and sin we see paraded on our TV screens.

What unnerves me about this is that the Church here does not understand that what we are seeing and hearing in New Orleans is far closer to the truth about Man than some are willing to admit. Worst of all, the events in Louisiana only prove that we as a Church are not prepared.

How are we unprepared? Look at the ripples this Gulf event is creating through all the strata that make up this experiment called America. The glaring weaknesses in our government, our energy reserves, our food and water supplies, and most of all, our souls, are on display for all to see. I read today that the area that makes up the most afflicted parts of the Gulf contributes a little less than two percent to the American economy. What if five or ten percent had been affected? Would total chaos reign nationwide?

It saddens me that the Church is largely unprepared to meet a major meltdown in America. We are not planning for a day when times get brutal. In truth, we act as if bad days will never come, the veritable grasshopper to the ant. Only in this story, there appear to be no ants.

He answered them, "When it is evening, you say, 'It will be fair weather, for the sky is red.' And in the morning, 'It will be stormy today, for the sky is red and threatening.' You know how to interpret the appearance of the sky, but you cannot interpret the signs of the times.
—Matthew 16:2-3 ESV

Church, should we not be the ones who interpret the signs of the times? Have we filled our lamps with oil or have the reserves gone out?

Did we learn anything from 9/11?
Did we learn anything from the prolonged recession from 2000-2004?
Are we going to learn anything from the aftermath of Katrina?

From what I can see, we ignorantly go on, blithely brushing it all aside. What else can explain the fact that we have not changed our course?

Just the other day I read that the underground Church in China is praying that persecution will come to America so revival will break out here. While I don't exactly side with that way of thinking, are we prepared if God answers the prayers of the persecuted Church in China?

I don't want the Church here to learn the hard way, but it looks as if we need a more catastrophic event to wake us from our slumber. God help us all should that catastrophe come and we are unprepared.

The Little Things: Homes & Churches That Say, “Keep Out!”

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Michael did particularly well in the Internet boom. He and Linda bought a large home as a result of that success. But that home was never just theirs alone; that home belonged to their church—and to anyone else who wanted to drop by. And there was always someone dropping by.

My wife and I had the pleasure of hanging out at Michael and Linda's place. We witnessed some baptisms in their pool, ate several dinners there, and I weekly practiced our worship music in their basement. Magnifying GlassWhen they learned we would be moving away, Michael and Linda sent us off by taking their time to make us Cincinnati-style chili from scratch. Nice touch.

Michael and Linda are the epitome of hospitality. Their home is open to anyone because they understand that God has a heart for sojourners and those who need a place to lay their heads. Michael and Linda are our inspiration.

It doesn't take a protracted examination of our American society to see that we have fostered a culture of desert islands upon which a family here and a single there and an elderly couple over there float in the same social ocean, but have virtually no real contact. With civilization itself based on a foundation of strong social ties, we seem to be heading for a collapse of that civilization if we do not restore the broken-down relational machinery God built into us.

Last year, as I was trying to understand the whole Emergent thing, I picked up a book by Joe Myers called A Search to Belong. This book was getting great press within Emergent ranks, so I read it and promptly felt my stomach sink. One particular passage flat-out made me seethe. Myers insisted that it was too much for some people to enter another person's home and that we should not expect people to want to do this.

Now I'm no expert on sociology, but the bigger question has to be, What happened to hospitality that we've bred people who suffer fits of anxiety should they have to come to someone else's house?

Church, what happened to hospitality?

Do we no longer practice it because

  • It takes too much time?
  • We have too many expensive things in our homes that can break?
  • It costs too much money to be hospitable?
  • We have no physical energy reserves that we can use to make others feel connected?
  • We don't like our space being invaded by others?
  • People, in general, give us a rash?
  • We're too busy shoring up our own nuclear family?

I wonder if the problem stems from this passage:

Above all, keep loving one another earnestly, since love covers a multitude of sins. Show hospitality to one another without grumbling.
—1 Peter 4:8-9 ESV

Maybe we are trapped in that sinful no man's land where if we did practice hospitality, we'd grumble about it—grumbling's a sin, right? Better to not grumble by not having anything to do with hospitality and then everything's okay. Who can say?

I remember my parents entertaining people at our family home all the time. They went to other people's houses all the time. But as I look around, I get the discouraging sense that this idea is passing away with that generation. I hope that isn't the case, but it's what I see.

You would hope that the Church would do a better job of this, but I find that hospitality is as commonly practiced by people who don't know the Lord as those who do. I'm just as likely to hear of someone who acts like the devil's compadre but who lets his buddies crash at his place as much as I hear that Christians welcome even their own kind into their homes.

And what is the point of having greeters at a Church? They have greeters at Wal-Mart, but that doesn't make me feel loved by Sam Walton's megacorporation. Sure, it feels nice to have someone shake your hand, but if it goes no further than that, what's the point? Too often the onus is on people visiting a church to reach out to the church members rather than it being the other way around. Shouldn't we be the ones to note the visitors—or in our own fractured relational world within our churches can we not tell the regulars from the visitors? And if you consider Myer's comment, if folks get a nervous tic thinking about going into someone else's home, what does it mean for them to go into their church—and then have to be the one who makes small talk?

Even before we met Michael and Linda, my wife and I decided that we would be the ones who sought to bring people together and show others hospitality. We've tried very hard at this, but the results have been middling. As much as we want to be hospitable, we sometimes wonder if people want to receive that hospitality. Perhaps Joe Myers is right. We may have reached a place where being in another's home is too much of a freak-out for too many people. Maybe the failure of people to practice hospitality has spawned a generation unable to not only practice it, but receive it as well.

But we will not stop being hospitable.

As for our churches, we should identify the people who are blessed with the gift of hospitality and underwrite them. Huh, you say? Well, what if we designated church funds for use by the most hospitable people in our churches to locate the new people every Sunday, then offer to take them out to a local restaurant for lunch after the meeting? The church could pick up the visitor's tab. Those same hospitable people could have visitors over to their own home later (regardless of what Myers says.) Wouldn't that be more effective to reaching out to others than what we are doing now? If the Church is not overflowing with the grace that pours out through hospitality, then where will people see it practiced?

What if the hospitality of early Christians was one of the very things that set them off from the people around them, the practice of hospitality being the very aroma of heaven to the lost and perishing?

Do we really believe this verse?

Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.
—Hebrews 13:2 ESV

Or don't we? How many individual and corporate blessings have we missed because we failed to be hospitable in our homes and churches?

Remember, we are awaiting a heavenly dinner party called "The Marriage Supper of the Lamb." If we're not emulating that idea this side of heaven, will we appreciate that Supper when we finally sit down for it?

Some things you can do to practice hospitality:

At home

  • Pray that God would fill you with love for other people and with hospitality
  • Let other people know you have an open home
  • Let your children know that you have an open home
  • Invite all your neighbors over for a backyard BBQ
  • Periodically invite one neighbor family over to your house for a 1:1 time
  • Invite people from your church over who would not get invited elsewhere
  • If you are worried about a dirty house, pay a responsible young person in the neighborhood or your church to help you clean before and after get-togethers
  • Host church events at your home
  • Take a cooking or entertaining class
  • Teach a cooking or entertaining class in your home
  • Cook for neighbors and church members when they are sick or overwhelmed
  • Remember that you need no reason to have people over

At church

  • Pray that God would fill your church with love for other people and with hospitality
  • Identify the most welcoming and hospitable people in your church and work with them to develop that gift
  • When visitors come:
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    • Make certain your hospitality folks identify them and offer to sit with them
    • Offer to take them out to lunch—on the church's tab—after the service
    • Don't put the onus on visitors to identify themselves, but put that on the hospitality team to identify visitors
    • Hospitality team should offer to have them over for a home cooked meal (pastors should consider this also!)

If we worked harder at this little thing, I believe we would go a long way to strengthening families, couples, singles, churches, and neighborhoods for the Lord.