Sleeping with the Enemy, American Church Edition

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church demolitionIt’s hard to know where to begin to unravel the craziness behind the fallout of a Kentucky clerk of court saying she’s standing on the Word and refusing to issue–or let anyone else in her office issue–marriage licenses to homosexual couples. After a while, weariness is about the only emotion one can feel.

Yet not weariness that this has happened, but more the kind that comes from repeated efforts to awaken a sleeper who just refuses to wake up.

Christians who quote the Old Testament a lot are yelling about religious liberty and wringing their hands about the end of America. Christians who like to think they are more New Testament quote verses about obeying government authorities and seem bored with the whole fiasco. Solid Christians inhabit both groups, so it’s sad to see that neither group seems to understand the other.

I sit here somewhere in the middle, wondering if both sides are missing the point.

For me, the distress is not that this is the end of Christian dominance in America. It’s not that various Christian groups can’t come to consensus on the events in Kentucky.

If anything, what troubles me is that no one seems capable of understanding that the government of the United States is not the friend of Christians that Christians have always thought it has been, and that the Church has been doing nothing to distance itself from sleeping with the enemy, nor preparing for that day when the truth about that relationship finally crystalizes.

Friend Rick I. noted a case of the frankly delusional state of thought by some Christians. From the Answers in Genesis folks behind the Creation Museum (also, coincidentally, in Kentucky) comes this:

“Bowing to the pressure of anti-Christian secularist groups that have actively opposed AiG in the culture, the state was intimidated last year to withdraw a tax incentive for our Ark Encounter project that had already received pre-approval (see www.answersforfreedom.org). In order to receive the tax incentive, the state is now demanding that our future Christian facility open its hiring to everyone (which then would include applicants who agressively oppose the Christian message of the Ark project), and that the gospel message not be presented at the theme park. Christians increasingly are being treated as second-class citizens in this nation. Essentially it comes down to the fact that regardless of what the Constitution clearly states about freedom of religious expression, those who don’t have a Christian worldview will reinterpret the Constitution to make it fit with their own secular worldview. The Ark issue is a battle of worldviews.” (Source: AIG’s “Not Just Acceptance, But Coercion—Christians Now Being Told to Embrace Gay ‘Marriage’ or Else“)

It’s astonishing to me that any Christian organization can go to the government for money and NOT think there will be stipulations. Or that the government might bow to pressures from “enemy” groups. AIG looked for a handout and got its hand slapped instead. Wow, how utterly unexpected.  :-/

The even better question is to ask why a Christian organization is going to the government at all.

Rather than wringing our hands about what was surely the outcome the Bible predicted, why have Christians in America not been preparing for the day when the court of public opinion turns against us?

If we needed any preparation, Roe v. Wade provided the handwriting on the wall. Despite Christian groups’ repeated attempts to leverage supposedly pro-life forces in the House and Senate, Roe is still here, even when those forces held a majority. Despite the heartbreaking Planned Parenthood videos that should have galvanized our leaders, nothing has changed. Fact is, the powers that be don’t want it to change, no matter what they say they believe.

Yet Christians in America remain shocked at this. Shocked. Meanwhile, AIG is PO’ed that they may not get tax money to build their ark. We act as if Jesus never warned us that the world would hate us. That there would be consequences, difficult ones, for our faith.

The next battleground will be tax exemption for churches. I can almost guarantee that exemption will go away sooner than the Church thinks. Again, it was never a guarantee, but we have foolishly acted like it was.

What happens when the spawn of the Church Growth Movement, all these monster-sized churches with cathedral-like buildings sitting on a plethora of acreage, suddenly gets a million-dollar property tax bill?

What does it look like when a church goes bankrupt?

Whatever the outcome, it won’t look pretty.

I’ve been writing this blog since 2003. In that time, I’ve written extensively on the lack of preparedness by the American Church for times of want and for the day of persecution. Regardless of whether you or I think that time is now, we still are not getting prepped.

I’m not sure what it’s going to take, but I’m beginning to suspect the only way to wake up the Church here is the same way you wake of the board of directors of your typical Fortune 500 company: a string of brutal financial losses. I hate to think that for the Church in America it’s all about the money, but nothing else seems to be jumpstarting our efforts to future-proof the best we can.

Perhaps it’s time to sell off massive church buildings on gargantuan properties. Perhaps it’s time to stockpile food. Perhaps it’s time to draw up plans to secret ourselves. In countries where the church is actively persecuted, wise leaders have taken steps to survive. What are we doing here? Better yet, when are we even going to start talking about this in our churches?

Let’s get something straight, too: This is not panic mode anymore than is having a family escape plan should a fire break out in your home. It’s called being wise.

The American Church has slept with the federal government for a long time. Now we’re seeing that the lover is more a frenemy. Soon, the relationship will degrade even further.

Church, how are we being wise in all this? Does complaining about loss of funds for our fake ark really show any seriousness about the future? Yet that is where we seem to be as Christians in America 2015.

Time to wake up and start prepping for something worse.

What Is the “World System”? And Why Should Christians Be Wary of It?

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Earth from Apollo 17I’ve been reading the New Testament out loud with my son this summer. We are working  through each book in as large a chunk as we can so that we retain the original intentions of the writers.

One of the things I’ve noticed more deeply as we’ve moved rapidly from epistle to epistle is that most every writer warns believers about the world system. We all know that warning exists, but a quick move from one book to another really drives home that these writers were deeply concerned about that world system and how it negatively impacts the Christian life.

Here is a classic example of such a warning, but in a slightly different translation (J.B. Phillips’s New Testament in Modern English, the one we are reading) than some are used to:

Never give your hearts to this world or to any of the things in it. A man cannot love the Father and love the world at the same time. For the whole world-system, based as it is on men’s primitive desires, their greedy ambitions and the glamour of all that they think splendid, is not derived from the Father at all, but from the world itself. The world and all its passionate desires will one day disappear. But the man who is following God’s will is part of the permanent and cannot die.
— 1 John 2:15-17 (NTME)

We tend to make the world system in that verse into little more than some bad things that we shouldn’t do, usually associated with the “flesh” and any sin that directly proceeds from our physical bodies. Today, abortion, sex outside marriage, and homosexuality would immediately be lumped into that world system as things we Christians should avoid—and rightfully so.

But that’s too simplistic an understanding of the world system. The NT writers ask for us to be wary of much deeper issues.

My question for readers:

What parts of our daily existence do we NOT question

as to their place in the present world system?

Is it possible that Christians make peace with parts of that world system because those parts make us comfortable? How much of daily living in the United States circa 2013 embraces the world system without our acknowledgment—or our ire?

Given how often the NT writers address this issue (a brief overview of which can be found through Xenos Christian Fellowship), are we paying less attention to it than we should? And if so, what do we do about correcting that lack?

Your thoughts and insights are greatly appreciated.

Antisocial Media: Why We Are Angry on the Internet

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Angry man, weak manI’ve been using the Internet since it was the old DARPANET, having sent my first email in fall 1981. Though I obviously use the medium, I am not  a fan.

Over the years, I’ve seen the conversation on the Internet turn more shrill and caustic. It especially bothers me when Christians add to the acid. Something about the Internet can bring out the worst in us, particularly when it comes to things interpersonal.

A couple weeks ago, I had lunch with Rick Ianniello, a fellow Christian and Cincinnati-area blogger, and we started to touch on the phenomenon of being angry on the Internet. In keeping with the gist of that talk, I’ve ruminated on that face-to-face conversation and want to share a few thoughts.

In fact, I’m going to jump right in and post my basic points:

People still desire interaction with others.

The inflammatory draws us because it provides points for interaction.

In a world of wrong, something in us needs to be seen as being a defender of what is right.

“An eye for an eye” is embedded in our sense of rightness.

Because Internet communication is so instant, its fleeting nature demands we respond instantly or else face exclusion from interaction.

People  still desire interaction with others.

And thus completes the cycle.

I believe that this cycle explains much about our conversation through social media on the Internet and the way we interact with others through this faceless medium.

Thoughts:

Without a doubt, I spend far less time in face-to-face conversation with others. The excuse I hear is that people are so busy. I find it odd, though, that the vacuum that is the average day is increasingly filled with electronic communication, often hours of it. When someone posts an unusual (and often inflammatory) bit of info on the Internet, time was spent finding and reading that info. Add enough of that together and hours go by.

In a way, we suffer from a collective forgetful delusion: We no longer recall how we spent our time before the digital came to rule us. How did we interact before Facebook? How did we communicate before texting? How did we accumulate knowledge before Google? Instead of what we once did, which seemed to make us happy, we have substituted something else, and few of us are asking if we’ve made the right trade.

I used to spend a great deal of time talking with friends over a good meal. Now that almost never occurs.

But we humans still crave connectedness with others, so we post on Facebook or comment on blogs. It used to be long emails, but email is passé and Twitter taught us to condense everything into 140 characters. So we do.

And the way to generate conversation on the Internet is to post links to weird, interesting, or inflammatory statements we, or those who inform our worldview, make. Like the matador waving a red cape, we want the bull to notice us—except in this case, the bull is another person from whom we seek interaction.

We’re suckers for the red cape, aren’t we? It’s something in us. Both in waving it and reacting to it we reaffirm that we have significance at a time when so much of life seems pointless, redundant, and stupid.

“See? The bull charged. I still matter.”

We all want to matter. In the United States especially, inconsequence is a mortal sin. There’s always a cause to defend, an opinion to be had. Our democracy is built on the ideas of people who could not sit idly by without letting their thoughts be known. Something always has to be said. The Internet brings that ability to say anything about everything like no other medium in history. It is the public square on a globe-spanning level. Under that magnifying glass, every statement becomes inflammatory to someone.

So we react with what we’ve been taught from the Old Testament school of justice: an eye for an eye. If someone hits me verbally, I hit them back. I take their accusation and reverse it so that it hits them. Their strike is my counterstrike.

That sense of conversational revenge drives what passes for discourse nowadays. Few people ask whether it makes sense to lunge at the matador’s flung cape. They react with an animal’s mind and charge. That spear in their back demands a horn to the gut. And we witness all the gore played out in a public space.

Like a genuine bullfight, our reflexes must be lightning fast or else we get left out of the action. Who hasn’t come to an interesting Facebook post a couple hours afterward and found 25 comments and an already burned-out conversation? The matador and picadores went home. The flowers are already wilting in the ring. Too late.

The Internet waits for no man.

Impatience is the worst failing to pair with the inflammatory, and it’s here that we see the genesis of the anger that has come to dominate the Internet conversation and spill over into all other forms of discourse.

Before newspapers started to die because they are not fast enough to keep up with the lightning pace of information today, there was the letter to the editor. The op-ed section of the paper was our public arena for anger.

But the funny thing about a letter in those days was that it took time to write and mail. Plus, the conversation lagged by a few days. The inflammatory story of Tuesday became the slightly peeved letter to the editor of Friday. In the meantime, everyone had taken a few deep breaths and calmed down.

Whenever I was angry enough to write a seething letter, it’s funny how the seethe eased out of me as I wrote by hand. And more often than not, when I was truly livid, Jesus often said to me, “Why don’t you sit on this one for a day?” And I would. Ironic how many of those letters never got mailed. Something about a day passing made the anger of the moment seem like nothing more than an ill-thought, knee-jerk reaction.

Today, our online conversation demands the ill-thought, knee-jerk reaction. In fact, without that automatic, instant response, the Internet loses its raison d’être and no longer becomes the necessary touchpoint we have made it.

That said, for a lot of people, the Internet and social media are the only touchpoint with others they still possess. Yet what a sad trade this has been, as something precious has been lost in our rush to life online and too much coarseness has been gained.

People seem unhinged nowadays. Too many of us think we alone are the arbiters of all truth. Just witness the craziness in the aftermath of the death of Osama bin Laden, when people demanded to see his death pictures so they would believe. We’ve reached a point where only my seeing and my opinion define truth.

Christians need to take this all back and react differently. This is what we say we believe:

I am dust, a vapor that passes through today and is gone tomorrow.

All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, even me.

I am to esteem my neighbor better than myself.

I am to love my enemies and pray for those who hate me.

All the law and the prophets are summed up in loving God and loving my neighbor, for love is the pinnacle.

Truth is truth apart from what I think or say; it can stand on its own and will go on without me.

The wise listen much and speak little.

“An eye for an eye” has been replaced by incomprehensible mercy, even in the face of hatred.

No one is unredeemable until he or she draws that final breath, so I must trust God in His dealings with people, particularly foes.

God has been patient with me and my slow growth, so I must be patient with others.

Jesus did not break the bruised reed or snuff the smoldering wick, and neither should I.

God made us to depend on each other because each of us is differently gifted by Him.

If you and I forsake gathering together in person, we lose something invaluable.

I can spend hours unpacking those realities for you, but you are smart people. You know how they should apply to our discourse and how we interact with others.

Now if we would only believe those truths enough to practice them, think how the world—even the online one—would be different.