Self-Sacrifice

What Being a Church Family Means, Part 1

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Since my last post, I’ve been struggling. No, not with some metaphysical angst like you’ve come to expect. Instead, I’ve been trying to manage the sheer amount of need I continue to encounter in the lives of others.

Regular readers know that my family’s health insurance company pulled out of the market after the Health Reform Bill passed. They simply terminated our policy and told us Obamacare would take care of us…four years from now. Circumstances make a 1:1 replacement impossible. While we may have found a solution (praise the Lord!), it’s still more tenuous than I would like. The wrong kind of diagnosis or procedure could find the chink in the insurance armor and wipe us out financially.

Reports keep rolling in from all over of other people who face enormous medical bills or can no longer afford or qualify for health insurance. A relative recently got a $4,000 bill for a simple MRI. That’s one big chunk o’ change most people don’t have lying around. Given the median household income in America, that bill for one test comes close to 7 percent of the entire household income for the year. Adding that the savings rate is negative, with people spending more than they earn, where’s the rainy day fund to pay for that MRI?

What made my relative’s situation all the more aggravating is that the MRI was inconclusive. A $4,000 swing-and-a-miss.

The fear that I hear in people’s voices when they talk about being unable to pay for essential medical procedures or being forced to roll the “may have to skip this one” dice when a diagnosis could go either way—it just breaks my heart. The number of people dropping their health insurance and gambling with the future because insurers are jacking rates in advance of the Obamacare mandatory insurance fiasco is skyrocketing.

Everywhere I turn, people are getting gouged. I talked with someone whose mechanic replaced the transmission of his car, without prior approval, as part of an approved engine overhaul. Now the shop is holding the car hostage, waiting for the owner to cough up an additional $2,500+. While that’s an extreme case, it’s not unusual to buy an affordable item only to find that it costs twice as much to repair. (Ask me about our washing machine.)

It’s a litany of woe out there. And I think it’s going to get worse.

It’s ironic that I planned to reference an old post of mine and the date on it is exactly six years ago. Not much has changed in six years, sadly, especially on this issue.

I wrote in “The Anti-Church” about how churches and the people who comprise them go awry when it comes to meeting internal needs. We take  a simple request for help and bury it under Jesus’ words about the poor always being with us. We find myriad ways to excuse not meeting the need of a brother or sister in Christ who could use a hand. And we look the other way when it all goes wrong for those requesters.

One of the defining episodes in my life was in 2001. I was sitting in the seats of the huge, suburban church I used to attend. The man sitting to the left of me told me about the massive, multi-thousand-dollar plasma TV he’d just bought and how he was going to spend the whole weekend watching sports. On my right, a man who looked like he didn’t have a friend in the world sat dejectedly. When I asked him what was wrong, he said that he’d been out of work for more than a year and had just received his first foreclosure notice from his bank. (Remember, this was 2001, though it sounds like both are ripped from today’s current headlines.)

Two men. One church. Big disconnect.

If you were to ask me what we need more of than anything else in our churches right now, it’s to let those who have a need stand up during the service and make their request before the congregation. Why this doesn’t happen in our churches is beyond me. Seriously, what is the Church for if not to bear the burdens of our brothers and sisters in Christ? And what can be a bigger burden than facing foreclosure or a a five-digit medical bill that can’t be paid?

Yet I continue to talk with people who suffer in silence. And I continue to hear church people tell me there’s no place for that kind of request in the Sunday worship service.

Bull.

Maybe if we got off our high horses such a time to share practical needs would wake us up to the reality that people in the pew right next to ours are suffering and that we Christians need each other. Maybe it would shatter our illusions of control. Maybe it would break the stranglehold of consumerism around the necks of too many of us. And maybe it would make us all more humble and drive us to be nearer to God.

Maybe? No, actually it totally would.

So why are we reluctant to do this?

I suspect that church leaders regularly hear needs confessed to them in private. In all too many cases, though, the need never gets past the pastor’s office door—and it never gets met.

It’s vacation time. Millions are hitting the skies or the road. Why not consider scaling back the expectations of vacation or curtail it entirely so as to meet the needs of people who are genuinely hurting, even people in our own churches? Do we have to go to Disneyworld? Or is a local amusement park a better value? Do we have to go out of town every year? Or can we stay in town this year and use the money to help others? Do we even have to have a formal vacation at all this year?

Does this kind of thinking mark today’s Christian? Or is the response always kneejerk and self-serving ? Do we have any idea what it means to go without a want to meet another’s need?

Lost people aren’t blind. They’re watching what we do. And when they see us living the same self-serving life that they do, they don’t see any need for this Christ we talk about every once in a while.

Julie at Lone Prairie is one of the bloggers in my Kingdom Links blogroll at right. She’s an artist and a compelling writer. She also bakes a fine cupcake, from what I read. Last week, she posted how a recent health insurance rate increase due to the Health Reform Bill was proving difficult to meet.

Want to help? Buy some of Julie’s art, T-shirts, and so on. How hard is that?

In closing, I want to share one more defining episode in my life.

Both my wife and I endured a lot of job layoffs. We always had great performance reviews, but when a company eliminates an entire department, all the great reviews ain’t gonna save you if it’s your department. Helping handsWe went through eight combined layoffs in the first 11 years of our marriage. (Trust me, that’s devastating.)

During one of those extended times of unemployment, when we were most concerned about our finances, a gentleman at an online Christian forum, someone I’d never met and barely knew online, sent us some money. It was quite generous, and I cried after I opened the envelope. I had no idea how he’d tracked us down or where he’d developed such a heart to reach out to strangers as he did.

In the end, that gift wasn’t as much about changing our finances as it was about changing my heart. That generosity altered the way I think about other people and their needs. The action of giving proved more valuable than the amount on the check.

Seriously, how hard is meeting any need, no matter the size, when we band together as the Body of Christ? Most people’s needs are not insurmountable when we work together as the Lord said we should.

Because that’s what a real family does. And when we live that way, we are changed to be more like Jesus, who gave His very life for us. How then can we not pay His gift forward?

Other posts in this series:
What Being a Church Family Means, Part 2
What Being a Church Family Means, Part 3

A Ministry That Flows from Love for God and People

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In response to my post “Asking the Radical Questions,” Nate Spencer of The Jesus Paradigm commented with a quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer (one of the patron saints of Cerulean Sanctum) that I wanted to expand:

If you love the vision you have for community, you will destroy community. If you love the people around you, you will create community.

I think this can be distilled into a generalization that always works:

If you love the vision you have for {desired ministry outcome}, you will destroy {desired ministry outcome}. If you love the people around you, you will create {desired ministry outcome}.

We live in a Church age where the visionaries of the Faith hold increasing sway over how we do church. These are usually people on the national stage who have successful churches and are always on the leading edge of ministry. Smaller or less successful churches often try to latch onto the vision promoted by these leaders, but the outcomes inevitably fall short, and everyone looks around and wonders what happened.

What happened is that Bonhoeffer’s warning came true: The church loved the vision more.

I don’t believe that this is ever a case of not loving God enough. I think that any movement in the Church that aims at a new vision begins from a love of God.

Where the Bonhoeffer warning comes into play is when the vision fails to love people as much as it loves God or loves the vision itself.

If you look closely, I believe you can find numerous examples in the American Church of the love for a vision overwhelming the love for people.

Take the way we worship, for example. It’s easy to fall in love with worship as an event. We may even go one further and do a good job of loving worship because to worship is to love God.

But how easy is it to have a vision for worship that actually excludes a love for people? And in contrast, what does worship that loves people look like?

I’ve been involved with worship as both a worship leader and as a supporting musician. I have planned worship, led worship, managed playlists, played and sung music, written new worship songs, and so on. I have a bit of expertise.

One thing that I see continually is that forgetting to love people leads to worship that

1. Reflects only the favorite style of music of the worship leader or musicians on the worship team

2. Contains powerful, anointed music that, unfortunately, the ordinary people in the seats find difficult, if not impossible, to sing

3. Fails to incorporate what have been past favorite songs of the people in the seats because those favorites do not match the current vision for worship

4. Mimics the worship style of whatever “famous” church the local church is trying to emulate, regardless of the past worship history of that local church

5. Fails to consider what leads nonmusicians into worship

I don’t mean to pick on worship alone here, but the worship wars are a continual topic online and worship is readily witnessed in our churches.

The reality is that any vision for doing ANYTHING in our churches that does not prominently uphold a love for people as much as it does a love for God or for the vision itself will ALWAYS produce lackluster results—or worse, heartache and burnout.

I’ve mentioned before my career in camping ministry. A surefire vision for burning out camp staff is

God first

Campers second

Staff third

Frankly, you can sink any kind of ministry with a vision that puts frontline workers third. As they are the people with whom most ministries have the deepest connection, Love thy neighbor billboardthey need to be higher up on the priority list and need to be loved almost as much as God. I’ve worked in ministries that got this right and ministries that didn’t. Let me say that any ministry that puts its staff third is a terrible place to work, a place that pours out staff until the vessel is empty. And the opposite is true: A ministry that loves its staff will see ministry come from the carefully cultivated overflow of staff’s hearts, never running dry.

There’s not a person reading this who doesn’t have a horror story of how a vision for ministry steamrolled simple love for people. Isn’t that sad?

Truly, any life-changing ministry that continues to produce results comes down to loving other people more than the vision for the ministry itself. Why this is so hard to see is one of the most maddening mysteries in the modern American Church.

In the end, one of the things the Lord is teaching me goes back to what you and I learned as Little Sunbeams (or whatever your childhood church used to call preschoolers):  Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

It seems so simple, yet we tend to forget it when it comes to ministry. The question remains though: Does the vision for ministry take into account the Golden Rule?

When I led worship, I tried to always ask the question of what best leads the people in the seats into worship because I genuinely desired to love those people. And that end result didn’t always lead to  my favorite kind of music. Many times it was simplistic songs or hymns everyone knew word for word,  the two or three classics I’d been trying to move beyond for years.

But it wasn’t about me or my vision; it was loving God and loving people. Everything else proceeded from that mentality.

This isn’t so hard, folks. Yet if we fail to heed Bonhoeffer’s warning, it always will be.

Resigned to a Powerless Christianity?

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I talked with fellow believers a few days back after hearing a message about forgiveness. The topic is a standard in Christian circles, but the speaker was well known, so I thought we might hear something new.

The speaker talked about the power of forgiving another person and how freeing that is to the soul. No arguments from me.

But I think that people today don’t need to hear more messages about forgiving individuals. I think many of us realize that we are dust and so are the people who oppose us. How can we be mad at other people then?

When I look around America today, I don’t see people who are mad at individuals. I see people who are mad at systems.

A system is hard to define. It’s more than just a mass of people. It’s a way of doing things. It’s the collective processes that lead to a result, often which is unintended, which in turn causes anger. And sometimes those systems possess an almost palpable malevolence.

Americans today are mad about out-of-control health care systems. I know I certainly am. My health insurance company sent me a note a couple weeks ago saying they will be raising my premium 30 percent March 1. They raised it 30 percent back in September.

Yet to whom should I direct my anger for this? At motorcyclists who don’t wear helmets and don’t have insurance so that my rates go up to compensate their lack of payment to hospitals when they sustain a costly head injury? Or should I blame doctors who order round after round of tests just to ensure they account for that one percent chance at catching a rare disease and thus avoid the inevitable malpractice lawsuit? Should I blame Congress for not removing state-imposed protections for insurance companies, thus preserving high premiums due to a lack of open, national competition?

If I don’t know at whom I should be angry, how do I know to whom I should offer my forgiveness?

Aren’t we all more likely to feel anger at entrenched systems we seem to have no ability to change? Doesn’t that define the corporate anger Americans are feeling right now toward Wall Street, Capitol Hill, and the world at large?

I brought this up with these other Christians. I asked them how we can forgive systems. And if that’s what many people are angry at, why aren’t Christian leaders addressing that anger—and the subsequent means by which we can forgive nameless, faceless systems?

The answer, I was told, is found in the classic “Serenity Prayer” of President Obama’s favorite theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr:

God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.

Living one day at a time;
Enjoying one moment at a time;
Accepting hardships as the pathway to peace;
Taking, as He did, this sinful world
as it is, not as I would have it;
Trusting that He will make all things right
if I surrender to His Will;
That I may be reasonably happy in this life
and supremely happy with Him
Forever in the next.
Amen.

I want to focus primarily on the first section of that prayer.

My issue with American Christianity today is that you and I have somehow taken that idea of acceptance and “gigantified” the bucket containing “the things I cannot change.” In short, our “wisdom to know the difference” between the alterable and inalterable is hopelessly broken.

I’ve had some very sad conversations with young, 5-point Calvinists in the last few years. I’ve never met people so resigned to “fate.” Their concept of God’s sovereignty has gone so far off the deep end that they see no reason to ever wrestle in prayer for anything that seems unchangeable. In truth, they are nothing more than nihilists. I have no idea what they must think of Abraham’s pleading before God in Genesis 18 for the sake of Sodom. They resign themselves to think that God has set the top in motion and nothing can be done to alter its course. They are like the unbelieving leaders in John who asked,

“Is this your son, who you say was born blind? How then does he now see?”
—John 9:19b

How indeed.

But it’s not only the young Calvinists who seemed resigned that nothing can be done. It’s us other Christians too involved in our own lives to lift a finger to make a difference. Our inaction in the face of evil systems will cry out against us come Judgment Day because we loved our own lives too much to become martyrs for some “unchangeable” cause.

Folks, where is the Christian battle?

For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.
—Ephesians 6:12

Look, you and I can’t change our chronological age, our ancestry, the era into which we were born, and a few things like that.  But nearly everything else is up for grabs. Ours is not a calling to serenity but to go out there and fight systems, no matter how innocuous they may seem.

And we can do it too:

For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds.
—2 Corinthians 10:4

So how is it that so many Christians just roll over and play dead?

If Christians in Rome didn’t fight the prevailing evil Roman system of leaving the old, infirm, and sick to die, how would the Church have grown so rapidly?

If Martin Luther didn’t pound his worthy complaint to the door of the monolithic Roman Catholic ChurchSword-wielding soldier, where would the Church universal be today?

If William Wilberforce rolled over and relented to the seemingly unchangeable slave trade in England, where would our world be today?

If Martin Luther King Jr. didn’t stand up for the cause of civil rights in the face of catcalls, baseball bats, and the ever-present threat of a noose on a tree limb, where would American society be today?

And that list can go on and on.

When I hear Christians telling me nothing can be done, the simple answer is that they don’t want to be bothered. They won’t put in the time, energy, prayer, and faith to help make change happen. They don’t want their status and incomes threatened by standing up against tough, systemic opponents.

Increasingly, resignation seems to be the state of much of the Church in America. Doesn’t matter that the Bible repeatedly says that all things are possible with God. We keep thinking that some things are beyond His ability to change.

As for me, I contend that such a god is not the God of the Bible.

Christian, the Enemy is at the gate. Don’t resign your commission by resigning yourself to the way things are. Stand up and make a difference.