Relevance

The Evils of Community?

Standard

Tuesday, I wrote on the need for us Christians to understand that community and relationship with others is at the core of who we are as Christians, especially as it relates to the Great Commission and meeting the needs of others. You simply can’t have a ministry without people.

Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal ran a sidebar column that absolutely blew my mind. It shows exactly what we Christians are up against when it comes to fighting for depth in community. I almost never reproduce an entire article, but this one (“What’s Hurting America? Widespread Homeownership“) contains mind-boggling assertions in nearly every sentence:

Widespread homeownership has proven benefits for the nation but the Atlantic‘s Clive Crook says it brings some serious economic drawbacks with it. Citing research from Warwick University economist Andrew Oswald, Mr. Crook says the main problem with homeowners is that they are less mobile than renters. Less willing to leave their homes for greener pastures when the local economy falters, homeowners slow the nation’s economic growth and exacerbate unemployment issues by staying put. Communities of homeowners also often suppress new development by calling for new zoning rules.

On the plus side, homeowners are more invested in their communities, more likely to vote and work harder to improve their neighborhoods, but the overall societal good in homeownership isn’t clear-cut, Mr. Crook says. To that end, he questions the wisdom of the mortgage-interest tax deduction, a subsidy set up to ostensibly encourage widespread homeownership.

Mr. Crook said the deduction often promotes over-borrowing and higher spending, thus artificially increasing home values and placing borrowers in greater financial risk during downturns, such as the current housing market crunch. On a broader level, higher investments in housing †“ fueled by the tax deduction — come at the expense of investments in areas that expand the economy, such as commercial building and spending on business equipment, he says. — Troy McCullough

This is what we Christians are up against. If we fight tooth and nail to preserve our communities, we’re labeled “malcontents” for doing so. Bad! Bad house!We “exacerbate unemployment issues by staying put” and cause untold hardship fighting for zoning laws that restrict sprawl and consumerism.

Unbelievable.

Want to hurt the Church in this country even more? Increasingly force congregants to move every few years to chase jobs.

Want to bring most ministerial works within a church to a standstill? Keep changing the mix of people in the church so the wheel must constantly be reinvented.

At least nomadic tribesmen stay together as a tribe, but the kind of thinking listed in that article pretty much ensures alienation and disconnection.

Americans are already some of the most mobile people in the world. Studies show most families stay in one spot for less than seven years. Multiply that by a hundred families in a church and it’s no wonder little gets accomplished for the Kingdom. Everyone’s constantly on the move. People don’t get extended years ministering Christ to each other or to their communities.

This constant nomadic existence chasing fleeting jobs from one part of the country to another is why the Church in America MUST start speaking to issues of work and the revitalization of local and regional economies. The world is telling us that we can’t be good citizens if we want to put down roots and minister for years in the same community.

I’m not saying that we petrify in one spot. Even Jesus said that those of us who leave houses and lands for the sake of the Gospel will be blessed. Still, I suspect that most people in my town aren’t born again, so what is my obligation?

If my living situation is so transitory that I never truly get involved to any depth in the lives of those around me, then I’m less effective as a messenger of the Gospel. Just the disorientation of having to adjust to a new place means people who move are preoccupied with everything BUT ministry. The amount of bureaucracy and paperwork alone that accompanies moving within the same city is a nightmare, much less chasing jobs from city to city. That constant disequilibrium is the world’s way of distracting us from what truly matters.

We Christians have got to get serious about creating our own alternative/underground economy. We’ve got to be better networked so that people in our congregations don’t have to leave town to find work. We’ve got to start thinking of innovative ways to bring in income, even if it means exploring communal living arrangements that eliminate our need to duplicate goods to survive . If we can be freed of the need for the kind of jobs that force us to move from town to town looking for work, then let’s start working toward that goal.

I keep hoping and praying that someone on the national Christian stage will start speaking up about these issues. They play into the busyness that is crippling our effectiveness as the ambassadors of Christ in a dying world. If we’re constantly having to plan what city we’re going to move to next so we can follow the jobs willy-nilly, we’ll be distracted and ineffective our entire lives.

And that’s just what the Enemy wants.

(In similar news, it looks like we’ve been lied to for years about the lack of engineers and scientists in this country. If anything, there’s a glut. This hasn’t stopped Congress from continuing to demand H-1B visas to bring in more foreign workers to displace American engineers and scientists. I’ve been saying for years that the shortage of tech workers is a lie. Now the lie comes out. I think our government owes us former tech workers an enormous apology. If I had a Benjamin for every tech worker I’ve met who was forced into a nomadic existence to find work, or who bailed from tech altogether, I could’ve retired by now.)

Radical Thoughts, Real Community

Standard

Sunday night, my church shared a Thanksgiving feast together. And while some may believe Lutherans have cornered the market on potluck dinners, my Pentecostal church did a fine job.

So I went off my diet for a day. Sometimes you have to savor the moment with friends.

When I think about one area of our lives as Christians where our walk doesn’t match our talk, it’s in building real community. The word community lingers on the lips of so many  Christians today, but when I look around I don’t see much community. At least not real community that bursts ungodly societal constraints.

In talking with a friend from church, Don, we both commented on how dependent we have become on technology in our lives. Don mentioned that one finely placed electromagnetic pulse over the United States, crippling most of our electronics, would have a destabilizing effect on our society. In many ways, we have made ourselves so dependent on our cell phones, computers, cable TV, and even the simple electronics that run a stoplight, that to lose them for an extended length of time would wreak utter chaos.

I believe Don is correct. When I lived out in California, an intersection lost a stoplight for a few minutes and someone who didn’t like the snarl that occurred got out a gun and started shooting. With people wound so tightly by our modern society, should we be surprised?

Even if society should fail to collapse without our tech gadgets, those electronics have changed us in profound ways. Call me a neo-Luddite, but I believe that many of those devices have already had a destabilizing effect on our society, especially when it comes to experiencing genuine community.

The items we buy, especially advanced machinery and electronics, may make our lives simpler, but they also make us self-sufficient to the exclusion of others. We live in an age dominated by the idea that we do not need each other. Our machines have made it possible for us to exist apart from other people. Many would consider this a positive, but when it comes down to how God made us, it’s clear that the very foundations of community are specters of their former selves.

The result? We have become a disconnected and depressed people.

One of the radical truths of the Gospel we can’t escape is that Jesus is NOT so much a personal Savior as He is a a Savior of a people, a people He is drawing to Himself. The Marriage Supper of the Lamb will not be you alone in a room with Jesus, but with the whole host of believers from all time. If we are being fitted to heaven by our time on this blue orb, then that fitting must be thought of in terms of community.

Yet we do little this side of eternity to live in community.

Our problem stems from our inability–to use a much overused phrase–to think outside the box. I remember many years ago how my old neighborhood experienced a power outage that blackened TVs, silenced video games (Atari 2600s back then), and stilled the bits and bytes of computers (Commodore 64 and Apple IIe).  Right after supper, the electronics stilled, the soft voice of that beautiful summer night  called to people. The next thing I knew neighbors were chatting in each other’s yards, kids were playing impromptu games of Kick the Can and softball, and the neighborhood came alive. But when the power kicked on an hour or so later, the neighborhood took on the feel of a tomb. People had trudged back to their electronic distractions, each homeowner shutting on the door on his or her personal fortress.

We’re still locked up today. Perhaps more so.

But the Bible is a story of God and the community He is creating. The Gospel exists for people and is meant to be shared between people, to be celebrated in community. Christ’s clarion call in the Great Commission is Christ’s call bids us, his people, to go out and bring in more people to the Church. We exclude no one. The widow, orphan, and immigrant are to be welcomed in our midst. Jew and Gentile, all are welcome. What Christ is building has no limits and no boundaries, save for our own unwillingness to participate in the work.

This is why we Christians MUST rethink how we view the Gospel and the Kingdom. Every effort we make, the very way we live, must be oriented toward outreach. Even when we play, we don’t play alone, but with others. It’s our mandate.

Do we see how this is at complete odds with our societal constructs? We talk about relevancy in the Church, but the truth is that most of how we are to live cannot be shoehorned into society and culture. Instead, they must conform to the ideals of Christ. This means we Christians must learn to think like Christians and not like the world.

Well, no duh, right? We all know this.

Do we?

Think about a common activity we enjoy today: listening to music on our iPods. We Christians should ask ourselves how this solitary activity connects us in community to other people. Truth is, it accomplishes quite the opposite effect. Worse, it disempowers the listener, forcing him or her into a consumer mode. The music is disconnected from the hearer and from the community. Something is ultimately lost in the process.

So what is the truly Christian response, the one that works toward community and sharing among people?

What would happen if instead of reaching for the iPod, we make music ourselves? And what if we make it in community, getting together with others to play and sing? Just hanging out together and jammingSuch a move makes us less dependent on consuming and more dependent on each other. Not only this, but we encourage others to use their gifts. We provide an example to the young and to each other. The musical talents we share uplift the community that forms around our music.

When we keep community in mind, we form relationships that build networks of dependency that shatter our self-reliance and return us to God’s ideal interaction. He walked with Adam in the garden because He is a relational God. How then do we approach all of life with this mindset?

Why do our families eat alone? What if the rarity was to eat just by ourselves? Should we not have others eating in our homes on a regular basis? Wasn’t this one of the unusual hallmarks of the early Church? I believe we Christians must start opening our homes on a regular basis so that few of our meals are eaten just with our own nuclear family. What better way to talk with others about what God is doing in our lives than in this kind of atmosphere?

How would this kind of thinking change our culture?

What if Christians were at the forefront of the slow food movement, taking time to prepare good food made without extreme processing, and always share that food with a group? What if we set aside our evenings for being with other people around a table of homemade food? How would that transform our understanding of community?

Even if we were to go out to eat at a restaurant, why not pay the way of some people we don’t know well so they might join us and begin to share in our community?

What would it mean for the Christian community to live in such a way that we share what we have rather than buying redundant copies of everything we believe we need? Would we be able to work fewer hours and devote more time to the Gospel and to others?

Consider what might happen if we begin to forgo purchasing more junk for ourselves so that we might consider the needs of others. Watch this video to see how one church thought better of building a new building and decided to put that money to a more Christ-centered use. Then consider how saying no to extravagance might change the lives of others. What if we lived that way every day?

Think about what might happen to us and those around us if we turned off the TV. What would we do with that free time that would place us in the lives of other people?

What might come about if truly esteemed others better than ourselves?

If we begin to ask how we might be more others-centered, I suspect that we’ll eventually change how we live and, ultimately, change the world for Christ. It doesn’t take much more than making a few decisions differently each day. If we do that long enough, our lives are transformed. Hospitality doesn’t become so frightening to us anymore. People aren’t left on the vine to wither. The Gospel goes out into new venues. Others see that Christians really care, rather than just talking about caring.

Radical thoughts lead to real community.

Readers, what are some of your suggestions for taking the worldly way of looking at a situation and turning it into a godly means by which we encourage interaction with others and build community?

A Bag Full of Wet Tribbles

Standard

A couple weeks back SF Gate columnist Mark Morford wrote an op/ed piece called “American Kids, Dumber than Dirt” in which he quotes a longtime teacher friend as saying that kids today are stupid to the point of verging on inert:

It’s gotten so bad that, as my friend nears retirement, he says he is very seriously considering moving out of the country so as to escape what he sees will be the surefire collapse of functioning American society in the next handful of years due to the absolutely irrefutable destruction, the shocking — and nearly hopeless — dumb-ification of the American brain. It is just that bad.

I know that I’m perpetually saddened (yet oddly amused) by what people don’t know. And that’s not in some kind of snobbish way. Watching a high school graduate grossly mis-tally a simple three item receipt from a restaurant makes me wonder how such a lapse can exist.

You long-time readers know that I have a degree in Christian Education and know all the educational theorists. You know that I homeschooled up until this fall. You also know my child is in public school right now. You know that I believe that no educational system is perfect.

But as much handwringing goes on today about education, I keep returning to one inescapable truth:

Kids are only as smart as their parents are.

The apple doesn’t fall very far from the tree, and in most cases today, a lot closer to the trunk than some would like. A classroom (and a home?) full of dunces...But when it comes right down to it, smart parents have smart kids—no matter what kind of education (public, private, or homeschooled) their children receive—because the parents themselves value education and pursue it in their own lives.

If the parents of a child are about as sharp as a bag of wet tribbles, then how can we expect the child to exceed the parent? That rarely, if ever, happens.

We expect most homeschoolers to be winners of spelling and geography bees, but look at the parents in those cases. They’re engineers, scientists, academics—the national brain trust, in other words. The only way they’re going to turn out a dim bulb is if they give birth to a brain-damaged kid. And even then, that’s going to be the brightest brain-damaged child of the lot.

But even when it comes to homsechooling, the weak link in the chain is the parent. A parent with smarts that rate a 6 on a scale of 10 is probably not going to teach their kids to a level 8 or higher. Why? Because that parent will be uncomfortable exceeding his or her own knowledge. This leads to what is known as the law of diminishing returns.

Parents are never going to feel adequate to teach their kids to the limits of their parental smarts—ever. That truth wipes out most distinctions of public, private, and homeschool. As much as a we’ve castigated public schooling, smart parents who put their kids in public school are not going to turn around when that kid is eighteen and find a numbskull. This truth works in the opposite, as well. If parents can barely tally three lines on a restaurant bill, why should we expect their children to? Yet we’re perpetually astonished by the seeming ignorance of youth today.

“But Dan,” you say, “isn’t your blog about the Church in America? How does this fit with your theme?”

If we wonder why the youth of today can’t theologize their way out of a damp paper bag, we have to look at the parents.

Christian parents suffer from a few maladies that make them inadequate to the task of teaching their children about the Lord:

  1. They’ve been told that they are inadequate for the job… – This same instructor superiority afflicts parents in all types of learning environments. The educational elites turned up their noses at the bourgeois attempts of parents to teach their own children and slapped their knuckles with a mighty big ruler in the process. And just as it afflicts the public and private school systems, it afflicts Christian education.
  2. …so as a result, parents have abandoned their role in education – This is not only the parents’ fault for being weak-willed and lazy in their children’s Christian education, but also the willingness of most church people to treat the educational staff at their churches like divine oracles who can do no wrong. Worse, those so-called oracles believe the hype and even fan it into flame. That’s got to stop, on all counts.
  3. We’ve made the Faith either too complex or too rudimentary. – It seems we can’t find the balance. We either make the faith into an intellectual exercise of splitting infralapsarian and amyraldian hairs (or whatever esoteric argument floats your ark) or we make it a brain-dead exercise in being nice to people. Well, shame on us—all of us. So parents think they either have to possess a seminary degree or else they think they can skate because there’s nothing to “this Christianity thing.” Either mentality jumps the educational tracks.

So how do we get parents into the right mindset and smarts-set to do this important job?

  1. We emphasize the importance of the work—and our willingness to help. It seems to me that part of the problem of Christian education today stems from either asking for the world of parents or asking nothing at all. We need to find a solid middle ground. But more than that, churches need to understand that they must partner with parents to ensure the next generation gets some theological smarts. Not by being condescending. Not by dumping all the load on parents. Not by pointing a rifle at anyone’s head. But by walking alongside parents and helping them learn how to teach their own kids. (I’ve long contended this should be the primary role of the youth minister!) The Christian education conducted by the church should always be viewed as a gap-filler, not as the primary source of education. That’s the parents’ job.
  2. We teach the parents what they need to know. As I’ve noted, kids will only be as smart as the parents. If the parents can’t grasp the atonement or what it means to die to self, there’s not a chance their kids will. If the parents won’t talk about those topics outside church (where the greatest growth occurs), their kids won’t hear it. Churches, this is your core emphasis in Christian Ed: Instilling a solid Christian worldview and theology in your adults, particularly those adults with children.
  3. We set attainable educational goals. Every child the age of seven should know why it was necessary for Jesus to come. That should be right on their lips if asked. Littler ones should at least know who Jesus is. A solid Christian curriculum should not only repeat the basics at every age level, but also add onto the previous age level. There’s no reason our teens can’t be asked the differences between the different views on the atonement. Or to explain covenant theology. Or to be able to stand up and expound a rational pneumatology. (In my Lutheran catechism, I got a one hour grilling on theology in a private session with the pastor and youth leader.) But to get there, set appropriate, attainable goals.
  4. We work to counter culture. Our society is in the brink of disaster with our busyness. Sadly, modern Evangelicalism contributes to our harried schedules by adding more and more things we MUST do that, in the end, aren’t necessary. Educating the next generation about the Lord is about as necessary as it gets. Getting your kid into a time-intensive soccer program that will score them a spot in an Ivy League college DOES NOT MATTER ETERNALLY. Yet this is what too many Christian parents want. A recent Barna poll, one of the most disturbing I ever saw, showed that Evangelical parents thought getting their kids into elite colleges outweighed whether those same kids knew Jesus Christ or not. God help us! We have to start demolishing these strongholds that entrap us if we’re to be a vital Church.
  5. We stop the school choice derangement syndrome. Homeschooling parents must desist in their schismatic, judgmental, and outright wicked accusations against non-homeschooling parents. This is not just an issue of “secular” education. If we wish to utterly negate the truths of the Gospel in front of our children and nullify Christlikeness in them, then by all means, let all sides on the school choice issue treat each other like vermin. That’ll teach the little ones the right people to hate and for the correct reasons. We all know that’s why Jesus came, right?

So yeah, it IS all about the parents. If we want smart kids, we better make smart parents. And there’s no better time to start on that path than today.