CORH for 9/29

(My friends and I began a conversation of scripture over the summer, nicknamed "The Church of Rediculous Heresy" for our differing theological views views and struggles with our churches. I'd like to start blogging the amazing truths God is reveaing to me from His Word through these meetings.)

Last week we began a new text, the book of 1 Thessalonians. We chose 1 Thessalonians primarily because it can often be one of the "throwaway books" of the NT, lodged between the powerhouses of Paul (Romans - Colossians) and Paul's pastoral letters. We started with chapter 1, and Laura floored me with the realization that so many of our firends have fallen away from the faith. Combining that with going to a hookah lounge with some of Krissi's old friends, and I have been overcome lately with sadness over my college career - I spent so much of my time with Christians, and even some of them have fallen away, not to mention the non-Christians I didn't spend time with. That sets the context for this week.

"For you yourselves know, brothers, that our coming to you was not in vain. But though we had already suffered and been shamefully treated at Philippi, as you know, we had boldness in our God to declare to you the gospel of God in the midst of much conflict. For our appeal does not spring from error or impurity or any attempt to deceive, but just as we have been approved by God to be entrusted with the gospel, so we speak, not to please man, but to please God who tests our hearts. For we never came with words of flattery, as you know, nor with a pretext for greed— God is witness. Nor did we seek glory from people, whether from you or from others, though we could have made demands as apostles of Christ. But we were gentle among you, like a nursing mother taking care of her own children. So, being affectionately desirous of you, we were ready to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own selves, because you had become very dear to us." (1 Thessalonians 2:1-8)

One of the first things to hit me (because of my recent wonderings, no doubt) was the frequency in both of these first 2 chapters of "the gospel of God" or "the word of God". The passage is basically a defense of Paul's intentions in sharing the gospel with people. Aaron helped break it down into a sermon-like outline:

• message
• motivation
• method

First, the message of the gospel must be pure. Of course, this is something at the CORH that isn't completely solid (we have a number of denominations and a wide range of beliefs), but for me, this speaks to the basic tennants of Christianity. We must soak ourselves in the Word of God (4) so that we do not lose hold of the gospel.

Second, the motivation behind sharing the gospel must be godly. This was the big one we discussed. Paul assures them he does not seek to sow error among them (3), and he repeats an argument he uses elsewhere where he does not take money or position from those he leads so that he cannot be accused of preaching for greed (5-6). We talked about how Paul protects the gospel by doing this, and how we might also protect the gospel. This discussion revolved around keeping our "witness" pure (integrity), but that has often become churchspeak for simply living a life where we don't air our dirty laundry. Instead, we spoke about being transparent - attempting to seek a moral and holy life, but being open about our failures. Likewise, verse 8 crushed us. Paul writes this letter months or years removed from his time with the Thessalonians. I am mere months away from my time at FSU, and geographically I am closer than I have ever been. Yet my passion for that campus has fallen off a cliff. Paul, however, is "affectionately desirous", like a mother for her children, of them. You see in the beginning of almost every one of his letters that he prays desperately for these flocks. This is awesome! I am still turning over in my mind a conversation I had with Aaron about the motivations for helping people (works as gateway to the gospel?).

Third, the method of sharing the gospel is contextual to the area and the people, so long as it does not compromise the first 2. Again, verse 8 knocks it out of the park. Paul packages the gospel with his very self. He invests himself for years with people, working with them, struggling with them, and teaching them. Laura told a story about someone going to seminary in New Orleans who moved into one of the worst neighborhoods in the city and invested his life there because he loved those people. Again, this shames my ideas about moving into Frenchtown. I believe Christ calls us, when we are told to take up our cross, to find the specific sacrifice that will reach people for Jesus that we can do, just as His situation called for Him to take on sin for all of us.

All in all, I must not lose my heart for Tallahassee, and for our lost friends. One thing I resolved to do this week is to not repeat this mistake when we move to St. Louis. I want to get involved in some class or hobby where I'm not surrounded by Christians 24/7, and stick with it. I want to fall in love with that city instead of simply wanting to move on again.

just when i thought it was safe to go back in the water...

(This is a post from Michael Spencer on his blog http://www.internetmonk.com/. Michael has a long history with Southern Baptists, and God has used him in many ways in my life. He writes in light of a new proclamation by the SBC - that 2010-2020 will be a 'decade of evangelism'.)




Evangelism Won’t Cure It
September 18th, 2008 by iMonk


It’s a rant. Adjust your volume and thinking accordingly.


My denomination is about to have a ten year emphasis on evangelism. I’ve been a Southern Baptist since birth. As far as I know, my denomination has never had any other emphasis than evangelism. My denomination is more interested in evangelism than any other denomination in existence or Christian history. Its entire apparatus of denominational machinery is devoted to the promotion of evangelism. Its denominational publications and web sites are basically all evangelism, all the time. Oh there’s the occasional break for the culture war and to promote the new Kirk Cameron movie, but no one is missing the SBC’s concern with evangelism.


I’ve lived through more evangelism training programs than I can name.


I’ve been part of more evangelism emphases than I can list.


I’ve seen every kind of evangelism gimmick that the mind can conceive of brought out with a straight face.


I’ve seen the ethics and manners of normal human interaction go out the window in favor of confrontational tactics on beaches, on sidewalks and in public.


I grew up believing the entire Christian life was about soul winning and that if you couldn’t turn any conversation into an evangelistic conversation with closure, then you were a backslider.


I’ve been through evangelistic invitations at church, at youth group, at revivals, at youth revivals, at stadium events, at concerts, at ball games, at Bible studies, at Vacation Bible school, at movies, at meals and everywhere else.


My denomination is always starting a prayer emphasis in the cause of evangelism. We actually have an office of spiritual awakening, if you can believe it. I’m sure there’s a five year plan to move the hand of God somewhere.


I’ve heard thousands and thousands of evangelistic sermons. I’ve heard invitations that made me want to dig a tunnel to China.


I’m been exposed to guilt, manipulation, entertainment, scare tactics, lies, exaggeration, bribery and threats in the name of evangelism.


I’m part of a denomination that regularly baptizes five, six and seven year olds, then has the nerve to point at infant baptizing Christians and criticize them.


I’m part of a denomination that has rebaptized and rebaptized and rebaptized, again and again. And counted each one somewhere.


A few years ago, the baptism numbers started dropping for Southern Baptists. This year was the lowest in recent history. The problem we’re told, of course, is that we’re not evangelistic enough.


I want to put forward another theory. Just call it a hunch.


I think our baptism numbers are dropping because ALL WE ARE IS EVANGELISTIC.


We don’t want to talk about anything else because if we do, we’re going have to admit we’re in very, very bad shape.


We need to have healthy churches. (With all 9 Marks.)


We need to have a clear Gospel message. (What’s being preached in SBC pulpits in many places can hardly be categorized using normal English.)


We need meaningful church membership.


We need pastors who can grow disciples.


We need Christians on mission in the world where God’s placed them.


We need to love people.


We need to live authentically human lives.


We need a missional mindset for going into the world.


We need to see our prevailing sins, like materialism, classism, racism and involvement in the prosperity Gospel.


We need to repent of our pragmatism, because it’s not true that if just one walks forward, everything we did was right.


We’re proud and sometimes we’re almost unteachable.


When a younger leader does something right in our denomination, chances are he’s in trouble.


Thousands of our churches are two generations from closing the doors.


Thousands of our churches need to either stop abusing pastors and their families or shut the doors.


We need to realize God isn’t adding many to us because we’ve got problems.


Every time Southern Baptists see some evidence that the ship is lurching, they go and attempt to get more people to join the cruise.


We’re like a hospital with real problems. Doctor problems. Staff problems. Quality problems. Effectiveness problems. People aren’t getting well. Some are getting a lot worse. Some aren’t making it. And we are concerned……about getting more patients.


Millions of Southern Baptists apparently don’t even exist.


Millions of other Southern Baptists would leave their churches for $5 and couldn’t write a three sentence paragraph on why anyone should join their church.


I love what the SBC does right. I really do. My denomination can be awesome at some things, especially in the area of cooperative missions.


I’m not dogging evangelists. I spend a significant amount of my time in evangelistic ministry. It’s one reason I will remain an evangelical.


Our denomination has some wonderful churches and some great people.


But let’s just say it: We’re Johnny One Notes on evangelism because we don’t want to admit how flawed, hurting, confused and increasingly dysfunctional we are.


We need evangelism in its place, and that won’t happen till we stop and look at the whole, not just the parts we want to blame.


And 100,000 more baptisms won’t solve those problems.

...and the Hopi will dance

(Steve’s note: Currently, I am undergoing something that in years past I would have considered a spiritual crisis. Now, those same feelings are more encouraging and thought-provoking than downright hurtful. This realization helps me write about them – normally, I struggle with blogging, journaling, and most forms of recording my feelings because my muse is most often fueled by depression, anger, and cynicism. I pray these portrayals of experiences concerning my faith are not written in arrogance, but rather as an expression of joys to come.)

When I graduated from high school, God was in the process of shattering my world. I had always held the highest regards for my pastor, my church, the Bible, and all other foundational expressions of authority within Christianity, and in the waning years of my high school experience, I had come to question them all. A number of books aided me as I attempted to redefine the faith I had held to all my life. Among these was A New Kind of Christian by Brian McLaren, which I read along with Don Miller’s Blue Like Jazz on a plane to Maryland and the mission trip which would provide much of the direction my life would take for the next few years.

McLaren is considered by many to be a heretic now, yet in the summer of 2004 he was a psychic, having already read my mind and put my thoughts to print. A New Kind of Christian explained the transition taking place within Christendom between modernity and postmodernism, sounding a shot again that I had already discerned echoes of in the cracks of the armor of my own faith experience.

One passage in the book (it is important to note that the theology of the text is told inside the framework of a short novel chronicling the conversations between a doubting pastor and a science teacher) narrated by Pastor Dan tells of a conversation he once had with a group of Native American pastors. Following a time of fellowship and old-time singing, Dan asked the men if any of them ever used elements of their Native American heritages in their worship – he was met with silence. Eventually, one brother spoke out and said he still experienced ‘the sweats’, believing that stripping down and meditating in the burning conditions allowed him to be transparent before God. Another man countered this expression, saying that the first was participating in synchronism – the merging of faiths, which is considered heresy. Yet immediately after this, with tears, the same man recanted this accusation, stating that his first response was “the seminary talking through him”. Another man gave a history about his people, the Hopi, and their use of dance as prayer. His deepest desire was to someday lead his people in a dance to their Savior. McLaren went on in the book to explain the crime European Christian missionaries had perpetrated throughout modernity: equating right Christian teaching with a specific, European style of worship and culture. Thus, to become a Christian was to sing Puritan hymns, or to pray in Latin, or to dress in Western garb. This worldview also saw elements of any other religion as demonic by association – Buddhists who become Christians must no longer meditate, and Hopi Christians must never dance.

This story still sends chills down my spine, and draws me back in time to an experience I had as a teenager. Throughout my schooling, I had been active with the Boy Scouts of America, from my time as a lowly Cub Scout all the way up to achieving my Eagle during my sophomore year. Almost every month I would be somewhere in the woods, camping, hiking, canoeing, and growing into a man. Boy Scouts are organized into troops of boys led by a scoutmaster. I must have been 14 or 15, because I remember my dad still drove me everywhere, by my troop’s scoutmaster Mr. John died suddenly of cancer, and his brother Fred took his place. While Mr. John had been a lighthearted family man, Mr. Fred was a weathered man, quiet and mysterious. He was also deeply in touch with his Native American heritage – he often traveled to see his relatives on reservations and met with other men and women to sing and dance. Mr. Fred was also probably the first person I knew who openly practiced a religion very different from my own (Judaism and Islam being somewhat similar). Whenever he prayed before a meal or a ceremony, Mr. Fred thanked the Great Spirit, and talked heavily about his ancestors.

As most scoutmasters do, Mr. Fred shared many of his interests with us, including his heritage. One day he invited a group of us over to his house to participate in a drum circle: a group of men beating a large drum in unison while singing in a Native American tongue. They taught us everything from staying on rhythm to the nature of their music - I was surprised to learn that many of the songs they sang were prayers. The thing that stuck out to me, though, was their preparation ceremony. The men would each take a handful of fresh tobacco and sprinkle it over the drumhead, sometimes saying words as they did so. I think I was afraid to touch the tobacco, but I did something odd that astounds the older me today: I knelt and prayed over the drumhead silently. The men seemed to respect this, and we proceeded to drum and sing for hours.

I would go on to participate in this way many times during my Scout career, even once getting the opportunity to dance. However, my most vivid memory was when a younger Scout watched my own version of the preparation ceremony. He told the kind Indian man leading that particular drum circle that I wasn’t doing it right, to which he said “He’s doing it in his own way”. My favorite song we sang had a chorus that went:

God I’m crying,
God I’m crying,
God I’m crying,
Here my cry

McLaren’s conclusions floored me. He said that Christ was a Savior of all cultures, and that when He reveals himself to a people, the gospel does not eliminate their culture, but simply the evil within it. As such, we have much to learn from all cultures through Jesus’ eyes. I think back upon my experiences around the drum. Was I worshipping my God alongside others who were worshipping false ones? Yes. How and when such things are appropriate I’m still unsure. Still, I was able to participate in the beauty of a culture worshipping the Living God. My friends and I discussed once the passage in Revelation which states that every nation, tribe, and tongue will worship the Lamb in heaven. It has been argued that this is to prove that all men had access to God, that He forsook no people. However, I like to think it is because in that moment, God will be worshipped in every way possible: angels will sing, the living creatures and the elders will bow down, creation will declare the glory of the Lord, and every culture will praise Him. I’ll be drumming…and the Hopi will dance.

i miss you and dread you

A few years ago, Christian researcher George Barna published a controversial book entitled Revolution. Drawing on observations from his years as a pollster, Barna described what he believed to be the emergence of a new type of Christian. Calling them “revolutionaries”, he described them as “…devout followers of Jesus Christ who are serious about their faith, who are constantly worshipping and interacting with God, and whose lives are centered on their belief in Christ, [with] complete dedication to being thoroughly Christian by viewing every moment of life through a spiritual lens…making every decision in light of Biblical principles. These are individuals who are determined to glorify God every day through every thought, word, and deed in their lives.”

How is this any different than what a Christian is supposed to be? It’s not…but that wasn’t what made Revolution controversial. Barna observed that this group, numbering in the millions, was leaving the church to preserve their faith. Not rejecting megachurches in favor of organic house church models, not embracing ancient-future emergent conversational churches, not joining new monastic structures, or any of the other trends present in Christianity today. Just leaving.

When I first read this book, I had major problems with Barna’s analysis that this is a positive expression of faith, and that they are simply rejecting archaic and corrupted structure, not Jesus. Sure, I thought, these people may love Jesus and say they are worshipping him, but leaving the church is like having a best friend but walking out of the room the second his wife walks in. It may work once, but if he loves his wife, after awhile he’ll begin to wonder whether the problem is really his wife or if it’s you. Scripture tells us to not forsake the assembly, and that faith is something to be experienced communally (Paul became a church planter, not a self-help guru or a desert hermit). I still hold to that position, I promise. I don’t think you can be a growing Christian if you are not involved in a community of other believers, strengthening each other, holding each other accountable, learning under the authority of Godly elders, sharing communion and baptism, and following a vision for spreading Christ’s name everywhere.

But I can see their point.

Right now, I’m struggling with many aspects of my faith. Most of them can be traced back to my various experiences with the church:

-Churches that grow because they are a mile wide and a quarter of an inch deep
-Praise music that sounds as if it were written by Oprah
-Visions for church growth that involve building enough buildings to earn a separate zip code
-Corporate prayer sessions that become mini-sermon series about everyone else’s problems
-Doing things a certain way because ‘it’s worked in the past’
-Church programming that exhausts its members, muddles the vision of the church, and guilt- trips people into thinking that a GOOD Christian is in church whenever the doors are open, instead of living a life of witness in front of the world
-Church softball
-The lack of quality in everything with Jesus’ name on it
-The belief that such cheap cultural rip-offs will convince teenagers that Christianity is ‘cool’
-Children’s ministry that majors on games, hand-motion led songs, prizes, badges, and musicals instead of the Gospel

This morning I told Krissi I missed church very much…and dreaded it just as much. Coming from someone who has dedicated his life to serving the God of the universe THROUGH that same church, that sucks.

what scares me about what i believe...

I found this in Slate magazine today. Telling?

Pop Goes Christianity
The deep contradictions of Christian popular culture.
By Hanna Rosin

One night, a couple of years ago, I walked in on a group of evangelical college boys sitting on a bed watching The Daily Show. I felt alarmed, and embarrassed, as if I had caught them reading Playboy or something else they had to be shielded from. Jon Stewart, after all, spends at least one-quarter of his show making fun of people like them. But they eagerly invited me in. I soon learned that they watched the show every night it was on, finals or no finals. So strong was their devotion to Jon Stewart that I was tempted to ask: If Jesus came back on a Tuesday night at 11, would you get off the bed?

Over time, I came to understand this as a symptom of a larger phenomenon: evangelicals' deeply neurotic relationship with popular culture. Whether or not they were the butt of all of Stewart's jokes seemed irrelevant to them. The point was that the high priest of political comedy spent a lot of time thinking about them. Once, after I'd met Jon Stewart, they all crowded around and asked the same question: What does he really think of us?

At this point in history, American evangelicals resemble the Israelites at various dangerous moments in the Old Testament: They are blending into the surrounding heathen culture, and having ever more trouble figuring out where it ends and they begin. In politics, and in business, they've mostly gone ahead and joined the existing networks. With pop culture, they've instead created their own enormous "parallel universe," as Daniel Radosh calls it in his rich exploration of the realm, Rapture Ready! A Christian can now buy books, movies, music—and anything else lowbrow to middlebrow—tailor-made for his or her sensibilities. Worried that American popular culture leads people—and especially teenagers—astray, the Christian version is designed to satisfy all the same needs in a cleaner form.

The problem is that purity boundaries are hard to police in the Internet age. Show a kid a Christian comedian, and soon he's likely to discover that the guy is a pale imitation of this much funnier guy—Jon Stewart—who's not a Christian at all, and doesn't even like Christians. Which might then lead to a whole new set of anxieties, such as: Why are Christians so constitutionally unfunny? And, what is the point of Christian culture, anyway?

In the '80s, Christians were known as the boycotters, refusing to see movies or buy products that offended them. They felt about commercial culture much the way a Marxist might: that it was a decadent glorification of money and meaningless human relationships. Then, sometime during the '90s, when conservative evangelicals started coming out of their shells, they took a different tack. The boycotters became coopters and embarked on the curious quest to enlist America's crassest material culture in the service of spiritual growth.

Most non-Christians are aware that there is something called Christian rock. We've all had the slightly unsettling experience of pausing the car radio on a pleasant, unfamiliar ballad until we realized … Ahhh. That's not her boyfriend she's mooning over! But few of us have any idea of how truly extensive this so-called subculture is. Reading Radosh's book is like coming across another planet hidden somewhere on Earth where everything is just exactly like it is here except blue or made out of plastic. Every American pop phenomenon has its Christian equivalent, no matter how improbable. And Radosh seems to have experienced them all.

At a Christian retail show Radosh attends, there are rip-off trinkets of every kind—a Christian version of My Little Pony and the mood ring and the boardwalk T-shirt ("Friends don't let friends go to hell"). There is Christian Harlequin and Christian chick lit and Bibleman, hero of spiritual warfare. There are Christian raves and Christian rappers and Christian techno, which is somehow more Christian even though there are no words. There are Christian comedians who put on a Christian version of Punk'd, called Prank 3:16. There are Christian sex-advice sites where you can read the biblical case for a strap-on dildo or bondage (liberation through submission). There's a Christian planetarium, telling you the true age of the universe, and my personal favorite—Christian professional wrestling, where, by the last round, "Outlaw" Todd Zane sees the beauty of salvation.

At some point, Radosh asks the obvious question: Didn't Jesus chase the money changers out of the temple? In other words, isn't there something wrong with so thoroughly commercializing all aspects of faith? For this, the Christian pop-culture industry has a ready answer. Evangelizing and commercializing have much in common. In the "spiritual marketplace" (as it's called), Christianity is a brand that seeks to dominate. Like Coke, it wants to hold onto its followers and also win over new converts. As with advertisers, the most important audience is young people and teenagers, who are generally brand loyalists. Hence, Bibleman and Christian rock are the spiritual equivalent of New Coke. Christian trinkets—a WWJD bracelet, a "God is my DJ" T-shirt—function more like Coca-Cola T-shirts or those cute stuffed polar bears. They telegraph to the community that the wearer is a proud Christian and that this is a cool thing to be—which should, in theory, invite eager curiosity.

Straightforward, if somewhat crude, merchandizing so far. But there is also another level of questions, which the creators of Christian culture have a much harder time answering: What does commercializing do to the substance of belief, and what does an infusion of belief do to the product? When you make loving Christ sound just like loving your boyfriend, you can do damage to both your faith and your ballad. That's true when you create a sanitized version of bands like Nirvana or artists like Jay-Z, too: You shoehorn a message that's essentially about obeying authority into a genre that's rebellious and nihilistic, and the result can be ugly, fake, or just limp.
The Christian rockers Radosh interviews are always torn between the pressure not to lead their young audience astray and the drive to make good music. Mark Allan Powell, a professor who teaches a class on contemporary Christian music at Trinity Lutheran Seminary, describes the predicament for Radosh: Imagine the Good Rubber Tire Co. came out with an awesome rock song that just happened to be about tires. Musicians wouldn't want to play it because they'd think, "We're being used," Powell explains. Creative Christian types find themselves in a similar bind: They want to make good, authentic music. But they are also enlisted in a specific mission which confines their art.

The entertainers in Radosh's book complain about watchdog groups that count the number of times a song mentions Jesus or about the lockstep political agenda a Christian audience expects. They complain about promoting an "adolescent theology" of Christian rock, as one calls it, where they "just can't get over how darned cool it was that Jesus sacrificed himself." In his interview with Radosh, Powell pulled out an imitation of a 1982 New Wave pop song with the lyrics; "You'll have to excuse us/ We're in love with Jesus." This, he explained, was the equivalent of a black-velvet painting of Elvis. Only it's more offensive, because it's asking the listener to base his whole life around an insipid message and terrible quality music.

For faith, the results can be dangerous. A young Christian can get the idea that her religion is a tinny, desperate thing that can't compete with the secular culture. A Christian friend who'd grown up totally sheltered once wrote to me that the first time he heard a Top 40 station he was horrified, and not because of the racy lyrics: "Suddenly, my lifelong suspicions became crystal clear," he wrote. "Christian subculture was nothing but a commercialized rip-off of the mainstream, done with wretched quality and an apocryphal insistence on the sanitization of reality."

Striking a balance between reverence and hip relevance can be a near-impossible feat. Christian comedians, for example, border on subversive, especially when making fun of themselves. In one episode of Prank 3:16, the pranksters fake the Rapture and throw their victim into a panic because she's afraid she's been left behind. With true comedic flair, they're flirting with opposition and doubt, and even cruelty. But "the Christian is supposed to be secure in the loving hand of the almighty God," one of them tells Radosh. So, even if they don't sanitize, they're afraid to step over into the brutal, dirty truth comedy thrives on.

The new generation of Christians is likely to be a different kind of audience. Raised on iPods and downloadable music, they find it difficult truly to commit to the idea of a separate Christian pop culture. They might watch Jon Stewart or Pulp Fiction and also listen to the Christian band Jars of Clay, assuming the next album is any good. They are much more critical consumers and excellent spotters of schlock. The creators of Christian pop culture may just adapt and ease up on the Jesus-per-minute count, and artistic quality might show some improvement. But in my experience, where young souls are at stake, Christian creators tend to balk. It's always been a stretch to defend Christian pop culture as the path to eternal salvation. Now, they may have to face up to the fact that it's more like an eternal oxymoron.