Best of the week entry 1

Comes from Ed Stetzer and it is simply a marvelous post on Involving all of God's people in all of God's mission. Here are two choice quotes to give you some flava:

Consider, for instance, the architecture of most churches. People enter and sit in rows (like shelves at Wal-Mart) all facing the same direction (the stage) where performers alternately bless us, if things are going well, or entertain us, if they are not. By default, our gathering areas tend to passivity rather than activity. As a result, what members are asked to do when they leave the gathering is the opposite of what they were asked to do an hour ago when we were together. When we leave it's "Go and change the world," but when we are gathered it's more of "Hey, sit still and listen. Welcome to Coma Land. We'll wake you when it's over."
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People are called to ministry at conversion, not at some subsequent event. It is the ordinary who are called to ministry, not the extraordinary. All God's people are called to the ministry, all God's people are sent on mission. The only question is "Where?" and "Among whom?"

Good stuff from Ed!

The intolerance of those who consider homeschooling intolerant

Michigan has some of the least restrictive laws on homeschooling in the U.S. and that galls many people to no end. Periodically that anger over parents actually being permitted in a free country to make decisions on their own regarding the education of their own children leads to rants from ill-informed citizens. The latest salvo comes from Dennis Smith of Sturgis, Michigan in a letter to the editor of the Kalamazoo Gazette. He writes in response to a essay penned by Justin Wing, a homeschooler who is on the Gazette’s Young Editorial Staff that argues against embryonic stem cells. Mr. Smith responds in a less than charitable fashion. When you have a letter that starts out…

The trouble with homeschooling is not so much that it serves as a smokescreen for havens of child abuse, but that it can, with state sanction, substitute ideological indoctrination for actual education.

…you know you are in trouble. Nothing like poisoning the conversation right out of the gate by implying that homeschooling is little more than a means for child abusers to hide their misdeeds from the watchful eye of public school officials. In that one paragraph Mr. Smith, who styles himself “Reverend Dennis Smith”, demonstrates that he has no understanding of the homeschoolers of Michigan outside of the slander and propaganda that he parrots back in his letter. The letter in question is supposed to be a defense of stem cell research but apparently Mr. Smith sees this as an opportunity to attack the homeschooling families of Michigan by painting us all as child abusers and brainwashers.

Mr. Smith apparently cannot differentiate between “schooling” and “education”. What you get from the public schools, i.e. rote memorization and behavior control in a state run institution, is the furthest thing from actual education that you can find. Kids who come out of the public schools with an actual education do so in spite of, not because of, the public school system. Rather than castigating parents who take a more active role in the education of their children, Mr. Smith and others like him should be pleased to see parents getting involved .

What is especially galling is the naïve attitude that public schooling is a value neutral learning environment. According to Mr. Smith, homeschoolers are indoctrinating their children with religious drivel while the public schools are turning out open-minded thinkers. The reality, as anyone with even a passing understanding of the public education system in America knows, is that the public schools are heavily influenced by all manner of ideologies and that many of those ideologies run contrary to the values of parents. The idea that the public school bureaucracy that is doing such a bang-up job in Michigan should be given even more kids to oversee is laughable. What sort of solution is it to give a failed system even more control?

It is one thing to disagree about a topic like embryonic stem cell research. It is quite another to engage in demagoguery that slanders an entire population of parents and children because they have exercised their right to choose an education that reflects their own worldview instead of the worldview of the public school bureaucracy and those who see the public schools as a Petri dish for social experimentation aimed at undoing the values instilled in children by their parents. The homeschooling population of Michigan is far from a monolithic block of mindless drones. We are a vibrant community that runs the gamut from families like mine that are homeschooling for primarily religious reasons to those that are seeking a more challenging curriculum for their children. To declare homeschooling a haven for child abusers and slack jawed yokels because you disagree with a well written editorial penned by a homeschooler shows an incredible lack of perspective and what can only be labeled ignorance and intolerance.

It is ironic that the man who describes the homeschooled population as a pack of ignorant, controlling child abusers shows himself to be completely incapable of engaging with an argument without resorting to name-calling and caricatures. Maybe if Mr. Smith had been homeschooled he could have put together a more cogent argument.

What unites all other religions

The Fo-Mo Chronicles: A testimony you should check out

I blogged about the testimony of a brother in Christ who was saved out of mormonism this morning at the Fo-Mo Chronicles. What was really interesting is that he captured the essence of every non-Christian faith which is boiled down to this: what must I do to make myself right with God? The answer is that there is nothing you can do! You can never be good enough, work hard enough to be right with God. It is only by faith and faith alone that we can be saved, only by embracing the righteousness of Christ our Lord. It is a sobering reminder. It is not that great a leap to go from justification by faith to justification by faith (and a little of my own works). We are not saved by our works nor by our own piety but thinking that remains the great temptation, to see our own righteousness as somehow making us inherently more saveable than that other guy. The truth is far more humbling, none of us is worthy of being saved but in His mercy God still chose to save a remnant and He did so in spite of, not because of, our righteousness.

Muslim Outreach Financial Assistance Needed

Muslim Outreach Financial Assistance Needed

There is an outreach to Muslims in Dearborn, Michigan coming up and they could use some funding. The people involved are trustworthy folks and Dearborn has an enormous Muslim population. If you can help financially or in prayer (or would like to get involved), click the link above and check out the info at Deliver Detroit.

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THAT is more than a bit of a stretch

I have to call foul on this from Mark Driscoll, and it is not because of foul language: Big Teams Need Smaller Teams Within the Team...

Lesson #8: Big teams need a smaller team within the team

Mars Hill Church is a big team. Ten campuses, a couple dozen services, forty-something elders and growing. I don't know how many hundreds of deacons, hundreds of community group leaders. There are a lot of big teams that need smaller teams within the teams.

Jesus has the seventy. They're mentioned as a number in the Bible. There are twelve that he's appointing as apostles, and within that team he's got Peter, Andrew, James, and John. Peter's the senior leader, but the inner team of leaders is Peter, Andrew, James, and John. They're listed together. They get special access to Jesus. They get special training from Jesus, and they make certain decisions that others don't get to make. So big teams need teams within the teams.

Is he really comparing the Mars Hill organization and hierarchy to the twelve apostles and the seventy who were sent out? I can't imagine he is but boy it sure sounds that way. It is always appropriate to be extraordinarily cautious when reading your tradition or organization or preference back into the pages of the New Testament.

Desiring God conference 2010

I am pretty much swearing off theology conferences but I have to admit I am tempted by this one. I love the topic and the idea of seeing Al Mohler, Rick Warren, R.C. Sproul and Francis Chan sharing a stage makes me giggle!



What do you think? By the way, that might be the highest production value conference trailer I have seen.

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Stuff

I have never travelled outside of the United States (except Canada which isn’t really a separate country anyway) but I have to believe that no other culture has the same fixation on stuff that we do. We love to have stuff and to display our stuff. We have stores full of stuff to replace the stuff we already have which is probably still perfectly good stuff. With the advent of Wal-Mart we can get tons of stuff really cheaply and all in one store. Not only can we buy lots of stuff, we can buy other stuff to display the stuff we bought. We work and work and work to buy more stuff and I have to say that most of the stuff we buy is far from a necessity. America is all about getting stuff, protecting your stuff from other people who don’t have as much stuff and doing everything you can to make sure your kids can get a “good job” so they can afford to buy more stuff than you did. Having lots of stuff in your house and raising kids who have more stuff than you is the American dream.

This hit home for me this week. We were asked when we gathered with the church last Sunday to collect books for a missionary distribution center. Missionaries back in the states can get books, Bibles, commentaries, homeschool materials, etc. from this center. What a great opportunity to help! I have lots of books that I have already read that might be a blessing to others. So I got out a box, turned to my very nice bookshelves that are handmade by my dad to store and display my books and…hesitated. Why did I hesitate?

Here is an example. Along with a copy of The Purpose-Driven Life (it was a gift), an extra copy of John Piper’s Don’t Waste Your Life and a couple of books on pastoral ministry written by Ergun Caner (that I was required to buy for a class at Liberty and I was frankly embarrassed to have on my books shelves), I put a couple of commentaries into the box. Now I am not talking about my complete set of Calvin’s commentaries. I am talking about a couple of old commentaries that I got via eBay a while ago that I haven’t opened in years, likely will never open again and which contain information that is readily accessible for free online. So why in the world would I hesitate to get rid of them? Because they are mine. My books are the biggest source of “my stuff” for me and I am a lot more of a book collector than I am book reader. Don’t get me wrong, I do read a lot for someone with eight kids. I don’t read anywhere near enough to be in danger of running out of unread books to read and since I buy several new books on a regular basis and have started getting advanced review copies of books, I am in not going to have to reread books anytime soon.

When we look at the church, the place we see inequality the most poignantly is in stuff. Many Christians have a lot of stuff. I mean a LOT of stuff. Lots of other Christians don’t have nearly as much stuff and there is a substantial population of our brothers and sisters around the world who don’t know what stuff even is because they are too busy worrying about feeding their children to consider stuff accumulation. It reminds me of Paul’s chastisement in 1 Cor 11: 20-22

When you come together, it is not the Lord's supper that you eat. For in eating, each one goes ahead with his own meal. One goes hungry, another gets drunk. What! Do you not have houses to eat and drink in? Or do you despise the church of God and humiliate those who have nothing? What shall I say to you? Shall I commend you in this? No, I will not. (1 Cor 11: 20-22)

Paul is not upset because the church in Corinth failed to observe the supper with the proper liturgy or because it was served on a table without “Do this in remembrance of me” carved on the front. What he seems most upset about is the division of God’s people, some eating and drinking to excess while their brothers and sisters go hungry. Paul is not calling for socialism where the government enforces equality of misery on everyone. Having said that, there is a very real and at least partially unnecessary inequality among Christians. I am not talking about one guy having a 50” TV and the other a 55” TV. I am talking about a situation where many Christians are struggling, through no fault of their own, to make ends meet while other Christians live lifestyles that would be considered luxurious anywhere else in the world.

So I clearly struggle with this. I have a hard time reconciling my conservative, free-market political philosophy with the self-sacrificial life a disciple of Christ is called to. American culture says raise your kids to be successful, make their mark, look out for number one. Christ calls us to deny ourselves, to love others and put their needs ahead of even our own. I need to learn to let go of my stuff because all it is doing is weighing me down with the concerns of the world and when we are focused on the concerns of the world we cannot be focused on the Kingdom of God. I need to remind myself that it is just stuff and it is OK to let it go.

I am still not giving away my set of Calvin's commentaries.

The view from the denominational trenches

I read a very interesting post this morning at The Aquila Report, an site designed for confessionally Reformed/Presbyterian Christians. The post I read was titled The Future of the PCA and it looked at the grim path the PCA is finding itself on and how it got there.

The “why” is instructive. The PCA is facing a lot of the pressure that most of American evangelicalism is facing, i.e. they are a mostly white, middle class denomination in a country that is rapidly becoming less white and probably less middle class and that is certainly less attracted to traditional worship services, denominational distinctiveness and hard-core theology. The facts are pretty indisputable, the question really is what to do about it.

I think it is interesting to see the response. Some of it is predictable. Younger generations are not interested in “doing church” in the traditional way so what the PCA should do is….plant more churches to “do church” in the traditional way. Huh? Some of it is more hands in the air surrender. We are who we are and that is not changing so decline is inevitable.

The PCA is one of the primary Reformed denominations and like a lot of what you find in the Reformed movement it is a pretty heavily white, middle class, well-educated crowd from what I have observed (look at the crowd at T4G and you will see 5000 men that look by and large like me, except taller and not dressed as snappily). The decline in the PCA is easier to see because it is a much smaller denomination than some of the other biggies like the Southern Baptist Convention but the trajectory is the same. Show me a new Southern Baptist church plant and you will likely be showing me a church without the word “baptist” in its name.

Denominational American Christianity is dying. That is simply a fact and that is not a bad thing by and large. Perhaps not in my lifetime, but certainly I think in my children’s, denominationalism will largely cease to exist. This will occur for no other reason than the lack of people to populate churches. When you look at Europe and see the tiny percentage of people who are churchgoers, you can quickly surmise that we are not going to be able to support dozens of different churches in every town to choose from. Towns with five different flavors of Baptist/evangelical churches and three Presbyterian churches and a couple of Methodist churches are not in the cards.

So what does the future look like in American Christianity? I think consolidation is going to continue to be the name of the game in many corners as larger, higher production value churches continue to attract people especially in the more affluent suburbs. On the flip side, in rural America and urban America I see the opposite happening. Smaller churches and house churches will become more numerous. Many towns in rural America are dying out and many cities are becoming largely vacant. There simple are not going to be enough people and enough money to support a typical evangelical church of 100-150 people, a building and a paid minister. People are going to have to drive to a centralized bigger church or get really simple and small.

What do you think? What does the future of Christianity in America look like 20, 30 or 50 years down the road?

More thoughts on “train and release” versus “convert and retain”

As a follow-up to my prior post. The focus of the church, by and large, is to bring people in to the “worship service” to sing some songs, drop a contribution in the plate, hear a sermon and then go home. We want to get people to come to church. We use all manner of methods to get them to show up: mass mailings, pushing Christians to invite their neighbors to come to church, offering VBS and youth group to attract kids hoping that parents will follow. We have signs advertising the times of services and provide lots of info on church webpages to make sure people know what a particular church believes, why you should come to “this” church and not “that” church and how to get to the building. It is all about getting people to come to us.

Shouldn’t the focus of the church be to equip the saints to leave the church building and go about the business of making disciples? Instead of recipients of ministry, aren’t we all called to be dispensers of ministry? That is what Ephesians 4: 11-16 is all about, i.e. the mature leaders in the church equipping the rest of the church (and being equipped as well) to go out and minister to people. It is not about equipping them to invite people to church, it is about acting like the church.

For all of my criticisms of church buildings, perhaps none is more pointed than this. The church building is a hiding place, somewhere for Christians to go that is safe and somewhat anonymous, a place that makes us feel like we are being “good Christians” while not doing anything we are called to do. We are not called to come and sit and listen, we are called to go and serve and proclaim. Anything that impedes us from doing so probably needs to go or at least be radically changed. I wonder if we should replace our comfy pews with folding chairs, remove the A/C and overhead projectors, anything to make sitting around less appealing. Maybe if we stopped looking at our church buildings as destinations and started seeing them as launching pads we would finally see the Great Commission taking place.

Train and release

I appreciated this quote in Total Church:

Jesus has a 'train and release' strategy, while overall we have a 'convert and retain' strategy. (Total Church, pp 35-36)

That is quite true. While the church should be in the business of being agents for disciple making with the leaders and more mature believers in the church equipping people to send them out of the church to do the work of ministry, our focus is getting people into the church to be ministered to. It is completely opposite of what Scripture tells us.

Anabaptism is not the answer

Well, unless the question is “Which faith tradition in the last 1500 years looks the most like the early church?” I make no secret of my admiration for much of what the Anabaptists stood for, how they lived their lives and how they viewed the church. As with any movement, there is a real danger of going too far in my admiration. There is much that we can learn from the Anabaptists, much to glean from how they viewed things that run counter to our traditions (which is why, in my humble opinion, they get slammed so severely by so many evangelicals who have never read a thing about them). I also recognize that the Anabaptists were flawed sinners like me and every other Christian who has ever lived. The original Anabaptists and their modern progeny have much to praise but likewise they have much to be cautious about. I try to remember when praising the Anabaptists that they have their flaws and that we should not seek to “become Anabaptists”. Anabaptism is not the answer, but Anabaptism does help point us to the answer.

This is true when examining any movement in the church. History is replete with movements that spring up, often die out and are looked back at with nostalgia. It is easier to look longingly at the days gone by than it is to ask the hard questions for today, the “good old days” syndrome where the past always seems better than the present.

Nowhere is this more prevalent than among the Reformed. Ah for the glory days of Calvin’s Geneva! If we can only plant more Reformed churches, or convert existing churches to become Reformed. If only we can have more Reformed seminaries and more Reformed conferences. If only less educated Christians would just read more books by Reformed authors. If only we could just get everyone to be Reformed, things would be better. The blogosphere is chock full of evangelists for Reformed theology. What is forgotten or ignored is that so much was left “unreformed” in the Reformation, chiefly the practices and theology of the church. Now don’t get me wrong. I cherish the great Reformed theologians, past and present. What the Reformation recovered from Rome is nothing less than the recovery of the Gospel itself. It can be easy to forget that in the two thousand years since the cross, more than half of that time the Gospel was denied by “the church” and the faith was reduced to empty rituals controlled by power hungry popes. The Reformers risked not just reputation and livelihood but their very lives to take a stand and declare the Gospel of God in the face of violent Roman opposition. So there is much to learn and appreciate from the Reformed but being “Reformed” is not the goal.

How about another stream of the faith? The group we gather with is part of the Plymouth Brethren tradition although you would be hard pressed to ever hear that uttered. We enjoy meeting as we do because we love the people we gather with and because the meetings are so open and participatory. In marked contrast with the incredibly loud church services that typify evangelicalism, our gatherings are quiet and simple. Brethren Assemblies across the world meet in open, unscripted meetings where we break bread every week and every brother has an opportunity to speak. We gather in simple buildings for the most part with little of the pageantry and pizzazz of modern evangelical churches. Having said that, there are concerns in this movement. Even an unscripted meeting can become very rote. We may not have bulletins but we do things in a particular pattern each week. Not as much where we gather but there are aspects of pride and legalism that crop up among the Brethren. We are still far less of a community than we should be. There is a lot to love about the assemblies that come under the umbrella of the Plymouth Brethren but converting the entire church to this movement is not the goal.

When I say we need to be careful when looking at every faith tradition in the church, do I really mean every one? Even the early church? Yes. Recall that Paul rebuked Peter for his fear of eating with Gentiles in front of his fellow Jews. The church in Corinth had all sorts of troubles. The church in Galatia? Don’t get me started! We should not seek to emulate every aspect of the early church because there were plenty of problems. Where we should turn to the early church is for guidance in the key principles of how the church should function as well as warnings about how things can go wrong. When we read the words of Paul and Peter and James and Luke and especially Jesus Christ, we see what the church is all about and how it should behave. In this quest we can learn much from the Anabaptists and the Reformers even though they were at odds in the Reformation period and spoke pretty critically of each other. We can learn a lot from the Plymouth Brethren and from modern Anabaptist movements. The Puritans have much to teach us as well. Ultimately though all of these movements are useful only inasmuch as the help us to be more faithful to Scripture and none of these movements were perfect in that respect. We can and should be discerning and take what is helpful and discard what it not without regard to which faith tradition it comes from. Just because something was written by a Reformed writer doesn’t mean it is right and just because something is written by an Arminian doesn’t mean it is wrong.

The church would be a lot healthier if we would all look outside of our pet faith tradition and humbled ourselves to learn from those we might disagree with. One thing I have especially been blessed by over the last couple of years is exposure to authors and ideas that I would have recoiled from as not being “Reformed” a few years ago. As I have moved away from the idea that being “Reformed” is the pinnacle of the Christian experience, I have actually come to cherish the very real contributions of Reformed writers even more, in spite of their flaws.

Christians living off the grid

This was interesting. CNN did a report on Christians living “off the grid” to various extents. The report, Unplugged Christians living off the grid, profiled a few fairly extreme examples of Christians who are seeking to remove themselves from the world. The people profiled practice a lot of what you would expect: homeschooling, self-sufficiency, house church, eschewing worldliness. Lots of anti-government rhetoric, more aimed at the welfare state than the apocalyptic “one world government” types. There was some kookiness like the guy who legally changed his name to “Pro-Life”. That is kind of odd.

I will admit that I have a great deal of sympathy for some aspects of this movement. It is hard to not look around in disgust at the way things are going and seek to withdraw completely. The world has taken up comfortable residence in the church and most Christians (myself included) are far more worldly than is healthy. Having said that, many Christians have lived in various times and places that were far worse as far as immorality and government oppression goes (does the name Nero ring a bell?) with an effective witness, so withdrawal is not the only option.

My biggest concern is that in withdrawing from the world, it becomes pretty hard to be a witness to the world. There is a delicate balance. It is easy to become overly worldly and in doing so you start to look and act like the world to such an extent that your witness is lost. I think that is the more applicable danger for the church today. On the other hand, you can be so withdrawn from the world that you likewise cease to be a witness. We are called to be salt and light in the world but also to be distinct from the world. Balancing that can be hard and frankly I understand the urge to withdraw completely with "better safe than sorry" as your motto.

It seems that the proper balance is to seek to live peaceably in a world that is lost and opposed to the Gospel, even though that means discomfort, persecution and even death. Christians live for this time among the weeds of the world as explained in the parable of the wheat and tares. There are going to be unbelievers all around us and that is to be expected. Our role is to witness to the lost through the Gospel proclaimed in Word and lived out in Christian community. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be living distinctly different lives, that we shouldn’t seek to carve out the worldliness and live more simply in our homes and in the church. I think there is much to commend in a lifestyle that looks intentionally different than the rest of the world and I think you can accomplish that without completely withdrawing from the world that we are called to evangelize.

What do you think? To what extent, if any, should Christians withdraw ourselves from the world?