Our Biggest Need?

Perhaps I am simply not aware of it but it seems an important discussion is missing within evangelicalism. In the past evangelicals have spent a lot of energy discussing the priority of evangelism in mission in light of an increasing move toward a social gospel. McGavaran, Hubbard, Stott, et al protested mightily during the several mission conferences held throughout the last century like Uppsala in ’68 and Bangkok in ’73. They felt that that evangelism was not given the first priority it deserved.

It is not that they felt that the church didn’t have a role to play in society. But “The greatest single step the church can take toward creating a new world order, says McGavaran, is to multiply in society, ‘cells of the redeemed’ . Once this has happened, God ‘inevitably’…. causes them to seek a better social order.” The cure for the world’s problem was evangelism.

Though I have my own opinions as to how this is balanced I am surprised that I have not heard this discussion in regard to the many evangelicals (and their organizations) who are increasingly becoming involved in the political scene in the U.S. It seems that to many of them the cause-effect dichotomy has been reversed.

At first glance it could be argued that we are simply seeing the “inevitable” that McGavaran talked about. But if anything the U.S. is a much less Christian society than in the past and it can hardly be claimed that what we are seeing is a tipping point caused by Christianity reaching a critical mass in this country. That this is not the case is further evidenced by the sharp division that seems to have resulted from the 2004 presidential election.

Another possible reason for the silence could be that this “social gospel” is different than in the past. In the past it targeted hunger, poverty and injustice. The targets this time are issues like abortion and homosexuality and perhaps it isn’t even recognized as a type of social gospel. However, these groups seem to have taken an oppressed mentality which seems to relate closely to liberation theology.

Evangelicals do seem to be moving at least a little bit toward the ecumenical position. The report on World Evangelical Fellowship meeting in Wheaton (1983) did not give a priority for mission. (before that evangelicals always insisted that evangelism was the first priority.) And in South Africa, in 1986, “Concerned Evangelicals” articulated a very social response to the injustice of apartheid and the political situation in South Africa at that time.

So what happened? Have we joined the ecumenicals? Do we now believe that the best way to bring about the Kingdom is through politics? Is evangelism now simply assumed so we don’t have to talk about it? Is evangelism no longer the priority for evangelicals?

True Leaders and Followers

"Leader presumes follower. Follower presumes choice. One who is coerced to the purposes, objectives, or preferences of another is not a follower in any true sense of the word, but an object of manipulation. Nor is the relationship materially altered if both parties voluntarily accept the dominance of one by the other. A true leader cannot be bound to lead. A true follower cannot be bound to follow. The moment they are bound they are no longer leader or follower. If the behavior of either is compelled, whether by force, economic necessity, or contractual arrangement, the relationship is altered to one of superior/subordinate, manager/employee, master/servant, or owner/slave. All such relationships are materially different from leader/follower." Dee Hock, "The Art of Chaordic Leadership"

In spite of all the books on leadership I think very few "leaders" really understand this. It is much easier to compell someone to do something than it is to induce them to do something. But it is a short cut that shorts out in the long run.

Unfortunately most leaders I know can't see any other way to get things done so they continue in the same fashion. The frustrating part is that they will not accept that there is even the possibility of doing things another way and if you try to explain you are quickly written off as either being rebellious, a quack or lazy.

Persecuted Christians

“There is a fine line between being persecuted for being a Christian and being persecuted for being a [jerk].”

I had to change the word in brackets so as not to offend anyone who might read this. Of course it may offend people anyway. The quote comes from an unnamed person who calls it one of his parables. I got it from Johnny Baker's website who used it as one of his worship tricks.

Anyway, back to the quote. Have you ever felt that way? Sometimes it seems “Christians” do some of the dumbest things and then wonder why people get upset with them. On the other hand, I have done plenty of stupid things myself so I don’t want to condemn stupidity. I guess what bothers me is that some Christians have a way of reducing very complex issues to a level of simplicity that doesn’t do the issue justice. In the process they act like jerks and take away the focus from Christians who truly are persecuted.

The Great Tolerator

I had a sinking feeling as I watched the news this morning. On the news they were saying that some conservatives were opposed to a new video coming out that uses cartoon characters that sing a version of the 70’s song “We Are Family.” Apparently this video is to be distributed to thousands of schools.

But that’s not what has got the conservatives all worked up. Apparently the problem is with the group that made the video. You see they have as part of their values that they tolerate…. well, people, including homosexuals. They have not tried to smuggle “Suzy Has Two Mommies” into the school system but they tolerate homosexuals. Therefore, the assumption is that they must be using Sponge Bob and the like to push a hidden agenda. Gee, I hope no one discovers the secret message embedded in the background of this blog’s title.

At first I thought I must not understand the word tolerate. But according to Webster it means to endure or put up with. I suppose it is possible for one to follow roots of the word and somehow get it to mean endorse and encourage but I don’t think that is the typical understanding. I then discovered that the actual wording is “in” the “Toleration Statement” and actually calls for “respect .” Can’t we be respectful of people in spite of each others sin.

The sinking feeling I had was that as a Christian who believes that homosexuality is wrong I would be associated with this attack on this video. I held out some hope because after all the host did say “some” conservatives. But that hope was shattered when I checked out the CNN website this morning. There it was. “Christians issue gay warning on Sponge Bob video.”

What I don’t think people like Dobson understand is how foolish this looks. Remember they still haven’t shown any part of the video as promoting the homosexual agenda. What they are doing is handing over every cartoon character on the video to the other side. Probably the thing that got this going was the fact that Sponge Bob appears in the video. The gay community apparently took a liking to him several years ago so now anything that has to do with him must be gay. Now every Christian probably feels guilty if they let their kids watch him even though there is no gay content in his cartoons. I personally get a kick out of him and I’m not giving him up.

The next thing you know we will be back to playing rock n roll records backwards looking for hidden messages from Satan. In fact this brings up a new tactic that the other side could start using against us. All a gay rights group needs to do is make a perfectly innocuous video using popular characters to deliver a good message. They know that they can produce a perfectly acceptable video and it will be attacked by "Christians" because of their association with it. In the eyes of the world it will look like Christians are against something good.

All this brings us back to the word tolerance and the greatest tolerator of all. Scripture tells us that God hates sin but it also shows us His incredible ability to tolerate people in spite of that sin. In fact isn’t that basically the Good News that we talk about so much. I’m sure glad he tolerates me. By the way, there is no hidden message in this blog’s title background.

Power Trip

"Evangelicals are enarmored with power and control. That's why numbers and measures are so important to evangelicals, and why compliance is next to godliness. What's important to evangelicals is freeing you from the world that squeezes you into its mold so evangelicalism can, in turn, squeeze you into its mold. Evangelicals resist and declare as enemy anything they can't control - including God, by the way. A post-evangelical is not a one-time evangelical who's given up on truth, she's an evangelical who's given up on control." Mike Yaconelli, comment in Dave Tomlinson's book "The Post Evangelical."

Though this might be the case in some instances I would tend to believe that control is the issue more than power.... if you can have one without the other. I especially agree with his statement on compliance though. I've found out many times that compliance is considered the eleventh commandment. Dissent isn't tolerated to well. As far as the obsession with numbers and measures... I think that has more to do with insecurity and a problem of self-worth.

At least Jesus loves me! :-D

Shrink-Wrapped Vision

Reggie McNeal in "The Present Future" ( I hate the title by the way.) writes, "This is what life in the church bubble can do to you. It shrink-wraps your vision down to the size of your church."

He is talking about what happens when we get all of our church people involved (tied up, overworked, stressed out) in ministry in the church. This is a common strategy. I like how he puts it in regard to gift tests. "Many church members have come to see spiritual gift inventories as a recruiting tool for the nominating committee and church staff to use in 'mining' church members' talent to fill church jobs." How true.

What he is calling for is for the church to allow people to become engaged in the world. The problem is we can't see, and more importantly, can't count the results of this. So we insist on doing everything in the church.

Obviously this decentralizing of the church is also, or should also, be taking place on the denominational level as well. But for the same reasons it is regarded with deep suspicion. I wish I could convince people that we could actually develop stronger relationships if we did this. Then we would see others as fellow workers rather than competitors or even overlords. As it is I think a lot of people would rather keep quiet and duck because they are afraid that no one will understand their ministry or see any validity in it. I also think this mentality causes us to focus on what our denomination can become rather than what the Body can become through us.

I don't know if this counts but I'm trying to get our church to focus more on being a giving church. Not giving to the church but giving to other minitries. Maybe its working. Yesterday we gave our church van away to a ministry in Kentucky and then a quartet in our church gave away a keyboard to a church planter who was speaking at our church. I tried to give him our organ too but he wouldn't take it.

Brought Together By God

Thomas Merton writes, "So now is the time to tell a thing that I could not realize then, but which has become very clear to me: that God brought me and half a dozen others together at Columbia, and made us friends, in such a way that our friendship would work powerfully to rescue us from the confusion and the misery in which we had come to find ourselves, partly through our own fault, and partly through a complex set of circumstances which might be grouped together under the heading of the 'modern world,' 'modern society.' But the qualification 'modern' is perhaps unnecessary and perhaps unfair. The traditional Gospel term, 'the world,' will do well enough."

I would suggest that a lot of churches, and maybe even denominations, form this way. There is a large element of mystery about it because we often don't see God working behind the scenes. It is this mystery that also makes this thought repulsive to many. If it is true it requires us to change how we think about churches. We have a long established habit of judging churches.

I watched a small church die a slow death. It's numbers dwindled until finally they couldn't keep the doors open any longer. "What a waste," I thought. Why don't they pack it in and start using there resources in places that had life. I even preached there a time or two and gave them hell, fire and brimstone in the ridiculous hope that it might cause a spark.

I wish now I would have been more gracious it was God who brought these people together like this. Perhaps they were making some sense of the chaos around them. Perhaps they were providing for each other what each one needed. Perhaps they way they slowly died out was God's plan for them all along. Wasn't it presumptuous of me?

Many would answer, "Not at all. God would never be pleased with what happened in that church," they would say. But I think I will let God speak for himself on that. Perhaps I am simply not aware of enough pieces of their story. I don't know much about their families or their community or their history. Perhaps I don't see their story through God's eyes. Perhaps at one time they found themselves in confusion and misery. Perhaps God brought them together so that he could work powerfully among them.

I think I'll be okay with the mystery.

Lost In Translation

I recently bought “The Five Books Of Moses” by Robert Alter. It is actually a translation with his commentary. So far I really like it because he seems to be very good with pointing out the literary quality of the books. Sometimes he can do this in the translation but other times he has to fill in with commentary due to the difficulties of translating. It just seems like he provides a lot more depth to the translation.

Here is an example of the commentary from my reading today from Genesis 32:21 where Jacob prepares to meet Esau.

21. “Let me placate him with the tribute that goes before me, and after I shall look on his face, perhaps he will show me a kindly face.” The Hebrew actually has “face” four times in this brief speech. “Placate” is literally “cover over his face.” (presumably angry face); and “before me” can be broken down as “to my face.” To “look on his face” is a locution generally used for entering the presence of royalty; and “show me a kind face,” and idiom that denotes forgiveness, is literally “lift up my face” (presumably, my “fallen” or dejected face).

I don’t think many people understand how difficult it is to translate an ancient language into a modern one. There just isn’t corresponding words for a lot of ancient words and the “extra” words used to craft phrases that convey similar meaning get in the way of the literary quality. Translations like this help.

On a related issue, I wish I were better with words. I think too many of us pastors take language for granted and aren't careful enough about the words we use. I don't mean that we are careless and use words in an offensive way, although that happens too, but that we could do a much better job of creating pictures with our words that truly communicate.

Most pastors I know use a language that is simply meant to transfer information. That's what most of our sermons have become. The problem with that is that such language doesn't do much to transfer beauty, passion or love. The only time pastors seem to use a language like that is in an attempt to "exploit your emotions or pocket books". Matt. 7:15-20 (MSG) (Okay, so Peterson takes a lot of liberty here. I love the picture though.)

Still Sore

Last Friday our conference camp sent out a plea for help. An ice storm knocked down a ton of trees and branches and also wiped out the power. They wanted help with the clean up.

When I got the news I had mixed emotions. The last thing I wanted to do on Saturday morning was get up early and drive over there to work in the cold. But as the day went on the plan came together and early Saturday 9 of us headed over with chainsaws to lend a hand.

We put in 4 or 5 hours of work and then headed home. We knew we still had to get the church sidewalks cleaned off and we wanted to do it before dark. We got a lot done and there were still crews working there when we left so hopefully they made even more progress. I think it was good for the camp director to see people come and lend a hand.

As I expected my muscles ache more today than they did yesterday. It is just another reminder that I don't do enough physical labor any more. All in all it made for a hectic weekend but I think it was worth it.

Change

Question: How many UBs does it take to change a light bulb?
Answer: What? ......change?

Okay, I couldn't help myself. Sometimes it's fun to adapt an old joke.

2004 Technology

The technology I use really changed dramatically in 2004. Here is a round up of the major changes that I can think of and how I would evaluate them now.

MediaShout became our presentation software in 2004. I absolutely love it but can’t wait for v 3 to come out. What I really like is the ability to aggregate all sorts of different media and present it through one program. When v3 comes out I think it is supposed to work with DVD a lot better and that will make my day.

Swishmax is one of my favorite new pieces of software. If I could afford the macromedia stuff I would probably go that route instead but swishmax is so easy and does a good job creating flash files. I have found that flash files allow me to raise the creativity level far beyond what I was doing before. One of my favorites was a simple Thanksgiving announcement that looped all the information through a screen that had falling leaves floating down.

Opensong is fairly new to me but I love it. It’s open source and anything free already has a big head start in my book. I don’t use the presentation stuff but I use it for handling my guitar music. It makes it easy to create and manage lead sheets and the ability to change keys and print capo chords is just awesome. Now I just print the songs I’m going to play each week and throw them away when I’m done. Of course, there are a few quirks as with most open source stuff but I think this program ranks very high. I bet all the piano people wished they had something similar.

We also upgraded our computers and installed a wireless network. We have two 3 ghz P4s, one in my office and one in the sound booth. Needless to say we have plenty of power and speed. My old computer is in the secretary’s office. All three are networked.

On the shaky side of things we use a Terk Leapfrog to send our presentation from the presentation computer to our projector wirelessly. It solved a problem we had and for the most part works pretty well but I’d rather be hardwired.

There were also a few failures and disappointments this past year:

I pretty much stopped using a pda. I was totally dependent on one but I don’t like living my life that way. If you can call it living. My wife loves hers but I don’t use mine very much.

We also found that video editing software is still not very good. It seems like you have to use three or four programs to get everything you want. All in all any talk about video editing makes me groan. Maybe this year someone will make something good and affordable.

Of course there was also the biggest technology mess-up of the year. I downloaded a large flash file from my office computer to the presentation computer but when I was building the service in mediashout I linked to the file on my office computer instead. Wireless isn’t that perfect and it stopped and started about three times during the song that was playing on the flash. Just for information, it is never a good idea to run media through a wireless network to a presentation computer and then through a second wireless transmitter to the projector. There is just way too much that can go wrong. Someone mentioned something about Satan being the prince of the air.