Postmodern Evangelism

Despite all the heat he takes there may not be a better little book on evangelism out in the last five or ten years than Brian McLaren’s More Ready Than You Realize.  You may not like his ambiguity on questions about homosexuality, but you will find him unambiguous about sharing his faith.  Honestly, more emergents need to read it and take it to heart.  And at the risk of giving my friend Benjie an overload on his reading list let me say that more non-Emergents need to do the same.

David Fitch also has some intriguing things to say about evangelism in his book The Great Giveaway.  In particular he critiques apologetics as evangelism and "seeker sensitive" evangelism.  Regarding the former he writes this:

In the earliest stages of a person’s evangelism, evidentiary apologetics endorses the authority of science.  The logic goes like this: if I can prove it scientifically, then Scripture must be true.  In the earliest moments of one’s conversion, science and historiography are set up as final arbiters of truth, not the Scriptures, the Holy Spirit, or the church….  Evidentiary apologetics shapes the new believer to forever look over one’s shoulder at science as the authenticating truth test rather than Holy Scripture and the Holy Spirit working in his people (p. 54).

That’s what I’ve been trying to say for a while and just haven’t been able to say it all like that quite so succinctly.  That, my friends, it the biggest downfall of the inerrancy debate and Fitch does a great job pointing that fact out as well.  In the end the inerrancy debate puts science as an arbiter over the Scriptures.  No.  Seriously.  It does.  If you don’t believe me try to disprove it in the comment section.  But beware.  I’m winding up for a stiff uppercut.

Regarding the latter he writes:

The second practice of "seeker services" assumes objective truth is available to the rational powers of the isolated individual.  Churches using seeker services therefore seek to craft the presentation to be as appealing as possible to draw in the individual so he or she will eventually hear the message.  All that matters is that the individual hears the simple message.  The seeker service strategy therefore works to draw seekers into a large anonymous setting where they can view a professionally produced, entertaining presentation of the gospel that attempts to be contemporary and appeal to "felt needs" (p. 54).

The problem is that most people understand that the cultural appeals they see on a day-to-day basis (whether in advertising or elsewhere) are ultimately inauthentic.  I mean, come on.  If guys could really get hot bikini-wearing babes by drinking lite beer Resolution #5 wouldn’t have had a snowballs chance in hell of passing.  But we all know that’s just a bait-and-switch so beer companies can get your money.  Slicking up your worship services in Madison Avenue/Broadway style sends a similar message to postmoderns.  They see through the glitz and glitter and leave thinking that all the church wants is their money or their name on the roll.  Especially if they can come and go without the slightest chance of being noticed.  And that is positively detrimental to the evangelism of postmoderns today.  In fact, Fitch suggests that if his analysis of what postmoderns are looking for is correct it will mean a very ugly future is in store for "seeker" churches.

More on The Great Giveaway to come.

Picture This

Flyin’ High.

Thinking Blogger

Joe Kennedy tagged me on the Thinking Blogger Award meme as one of the bloggers that makes him think.  Well, at least I’m not one of the bloggers that makes him puke, or suffer migraines, or become incontinent.  Hey…..maybe I should start my own meme…..  Well, thanks Joe.  I’m not sure if that is a tribute to me or if I must now conclude that you receive intellectual stimulation from something like coughing up phlegm.  Just kidding.  If you haven’t seen Joe’s blog then get yourself on over there right this minute.  I highly recommend his series on Our Identity In Christ (be sure to look for the previous installments dating back to the Introduction on Jan. 28th and four others besides the two linked to here).  It is muy bueno.  He also has a really good one on Heart Attitudes.  Check them all out when you get a chance, and keep going back.

So, as I understand the rules I am now supposed to link to five other blogs that make me think.  I am tempted to ignore some of those that are more well-known, but I will avoid that temptation because I believe my list will still include a good number that most of my readers would probably not be all that familiar with.  So, in no particular order:

• John Frye at Jesus The Radical Pastor.  I’ve said before that I would read John twice before I would read many others even once.  He is incredibly pastoral and always leaves me scratching my chin, nodding my head and mumbling under my breath, "Yes……yes…."
• Michael Bird and Joel Willets over at Euangelion.  These are two young theologians who are bright, articulate and in the stream of conservative Biblical studies, yet without being angry about it.
• Bob Hyatt at the bob.blog.  Bob is pastor of the Evergreen Community in California.  He’s emergent-sensitive, humorous and insightful.
• Scot McKnight at Jesus Creed.  For most this choice will be painfully obvious.  Nevertheless, there it is.  A theologian for the church.  Prolific.  In fact, my only complaint is that I have a hard time keeping up with the volume of his posts.  If I get behind in my reading it becomes easy to get waaaaaay behind.  But it’s always worth catching up.
• Alan Cross at Downshore Drift.  Alan is able to see beyond the moment and expose the big picture in all its context.

So there you have it.  I was going to list some honorable mentions, but the list was getting very long.  Yes, you were on that list.

This meme originated at the thinking blog.
 

Snowball - A Parable

When I was a kid, somewhere in grade school, we acquired a little white puppy that we named Snowball.  I don’t recall how we got Snowball.  I remember our neighborhood being an occasional roaming spot for strays.  The most notorious/glorious stray to ever countenance 17th Street was a scrawny gray cat.  We fed the cat for a couple of days, but we weren’t a cat family.  We were a dog family.  Cats are not pets.  Cats, at least to us boys, existed for various forms of experimentation.  As in, "how far do you think I can knock that cat with a three wood?"  But the gray cat was rescued by our next-door neighbors and within a year that scrawny little cat had grown to a behemoth of gross proportions and had been decorated by the neighbor with a gem-studded collar.  Talk about rags to riches!

So Snowball may have been a stray.  I don’t know.  But we liked Snowball enough to take in as a new member of the family.  We already had one dog, Sandy.  Sandy was some kind of Heinz 57 mutt with some Collie-like features, but not nearly as big or sleek as a Collie, and not nearly as small as a Sheltie.  There was definitely some other genetic presence as well.  Sandy could be mean.  He was protective of the family, but woe to you who were not family.  He lived in the backyard - never inside, but his thick coat kept him warm throughout the winter.  As Sandy got older he seemed to get meaner.  There was only one thing a stranger could do to get on his good side and that was food.  Preferably something of the yummy dog-loving sort like red meat.  I remember times when I’d go into the backyard and rub his tummy.  As soon as it looked like I’d quit he’d show me his teeth and growl at me.  I thought I might be there rubbing his tummy for the rest of my life.

Well, Snowball wasn’t going to be an inside dog either.  We tossed the little fella out back with Sandy, and they seemed to get along just fine.  They played and rough-housed constantly.  But they were also biting each other’s ears.  A lot.  Drawing blood.  It was kind of gross looking at those scabby ears.  And they just wouldn’t stop.

Even in dog world rank has its privileges.  Things were getting out of hand and one of the dogs was going to have to go.

To this day I can remember my mom loading me and my brothers in our ‘65 Ford station wagon and driving us out into the middle of who-knows-where and just dropping Snowball off on that country dirt road.  We were all bawling our eyes out.  We trusted that some home out there would take in this stray that we could no longer keep for his own well-being and for the harmony of the family - which, of course, included Sandy.

Whether we did the right thing dropping him off in the middle of who-knows-where, whether he found a good home, who knows?  I’m sure that today we would take him to shelter or maybe the dog pound.  I know the reason we didn’t do that then was out of the fear that he would simply be put down.  Fending for himself in the country was better than that, we figured.  Were we right?  We simply had to trust that we were.

Sometimes dramatic, heart-wrenching changes are necessary in a family for the good of all involved.  You bawl your eyes out and wonder if you’re doing the right thing.  Often you just have to trust that you are and let God take care of the rest.

This may seem like a pointless little story to many of you.  Others will know with more clarity what this little parable is about (it really did happen, by the way).  If you think you do, don’t read too much into the details.  Remember, there’s one overall point to parables and even Augustine showed us that the details could be stretched beyond recognition.  In the end, I wrote it for me because I just had to get it out.  Someone has said that blogs are narcissistic and this post may be evidence of that.  Sometimes they’re also a little therapeutic.

Goodbye, Snowball.  We pray you’ll find a good family to love you and care for you.

The People Soon To Be Known As The Church

I’m really, really tempted to plagiarize an entire blog post over at John Frye’s Jesus The Radical Pastor.  Instead I will quote two paragraphs and beg you, or command you, or entreat you, or do whatever I must to get you to go read it for yourself.  Here’s the quote:

"But the funny thing is… it IS the body of Christ. A messed up,
messy, ego-saturated, hypocritical institution on earth. With idiots
like you and me running it, what did you expect? Oh yeah, and one more
thing - it is also His Bride. The glorious, triumphant, sinful yet
forgiven, cleansed, spotless Bride against whom the Gates of Hell shall
not prevail.

"If you turn your back on His Bride, you turn your
back on Him. And since you are His, you won’t do that. You will come
back and help make the Bride beautiful again. Because you care. There
is enough piss and vinegar and sadness and passion and real,
Spirit-groaning hope in these blog threads to start a new Reformation.
It’s high time we started. Who’s got the nails for the Door? I’ll bring
the hammer."

And now here’s the link.  Get thee thither and read yon post.  Twill edify thee greatly.

There Are Lies, *$%@ Lies, And Then There Are Statistics

In his book The Great Giveaway (see Now Reading in the left sidebar), David Fitch writes about the church’s definition of success.  The subtitle of the chapter is "When Going from Ten to a Thousand Members in Five years Is the Sign of a Sick Church."  One of the things he suggests in this chapter is that the modern evangelical church often measures the wrong things in attempting to determine overall health. He says that the things we typically measure - "decisions for Christ" [or baptisms, if you are Southern Baptist], and church attendance are standards of success borrowed more from corporate America than from the Scriptures.

"Hypothetically at least, we could be achieving great success in the number of decisions for Christ and church attendance yet be failing in the ultimate purpose, that of making ‘disciples of all nations, baptizing them…teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you’ (Matt. 28:19-20).  Those numbers will not tell that story.  In fact, they may mask thin notions of salvation or business marketing principles that lie behind them.  Again, by using numbers in this way, we may subtly displace the pursuit of being Christ’s church with the counterfeit goal of achieving success in the terms laid out by the American economy and capitalism.  And so evangelicals may be building something akin to a Hollywood Western movie set - its exterior looks real, big, and impressive, but what is actually there is a lot less than meets the eye."

According to this LifeWay report Fitch can go ahead and drop the "hypothetically" and the Southern Baptist Convention can go ahead and elect Clint Eastwood as President of the Convention in San Antonio.  That, or someone can buy our entity heads cowboy hats.  With over 16 million baptized members the average weekly attendance is just over 6 million.  But we go on talking and writing as if there is something hopeful in all of those sort of numbers and there simply isn’t.  The concern that is being expressed is that the numbers of baptisms are down…again.  But if we aren’t retaining even half of those we are baptizing then we have bigger problems yet.  And the most spiritually damaging of those problems is that we are consistently baptizing people who actually show no sustained commitment to being discipled to Jesus or learning to do the things he commanded us to do.

The Southern Baptist Convention needs to scrap the Annual Church Profile (ACP), and evangelicalism needs to scrap its love affair with size and numbers.  Throw them into the fiery nether regions.  Fitch continues:

"Perhaps most disturbing is the way we evangelicals are attracted to big numbers.  It goes with the evangelical territory that the biggest churches get the attention, the acclamation of success.  Inevitably we ask, How did they do this?  What is their secret?  How can we model and duplicate this success?  These kind of numbers steer the direction of our churches and the goals we seek to attain.  We are attracted to big numbers because we think they measure effectiveness.  But herein lies the danger.  Because, as the criticizers of modernity teach us, effectiveness can itself become a value that may be at odds with the purposes of the church.  Effectiveness and efficiency draw their agendas from American cultural forces that define success in terms of numbers, size and capital.  This kind of effectiveness may be alien to Christ’s church. We therefore need to reexamine what is effectiveness in terms of faithfulness to God’s call to be the church and why we are so attracted to big numbers."

Indeed.

Picture This

These are from a track meet earlier in the Spring.  The left pic is a b&w version of the original color photo.  The one on the right is the same pic through a red filter (software, of course).  The filter completely washes out the orange cones and almost completely washes out the red track and the jumper’s red shorts, but notice how it darkens the sky and lightens the skin tones, actually making his face clearer.  I was also able to edit out a light pole that looked like it was sticking out of the jumper’s left arm as well as an electrical pole that appeared to be sticking out of the head of the young man in the background on the right.  I used the free photo editing program The Gimp.  It isn’t as intuitive as others out there, but it is nearly as powerful as Adobe’s Photoshop which will set you back several hundred dollars.

Which one of these pics do you like better and why?

On The Move - A Review

Last February Bono spoke at the National Prayer Breakfast.  It was a powerful speech.  W Publishing Group, a division of Thomas Nelson, has put the speech into a book titled On The Move.  Here’s an exerpt:

"…The one thing, on which we can all agree, among all faiths and ideologies, is that God is with the vulnerable and the poor…God is in the slums, in the cardboard boxes where the poor play house…God is in the debris of wasted opportunity and lives, and God is with us if we are with them…"

This speech, and now this book, mean to inspire those of us who live in the midst of some of the greatest prosperity the world has ever known to share our blessings with others in this world who endure some of the harshest, grinding poverty this world knows of - specifically in Africa.  His primary point is that if America and other wealthy countries would forgive the debt of the poorest countries, and would dedicate 1% more of the federal budget to poverty relief efforts in Africa, it would literally revolutionize that continent in terms of education, business opportunity, AIDS relief, health and hunger.

The book is 64 pages short, which includes the speech in two formats.  There are many compelling photographs of the faces of those facing unimaginable living conditions in Africa today.  All royalties from this book will be donated to The One Campaign to make poverty history.  This was an important speech, the text of which is now available to you in this great format.  The drawback is the price ($10.39 from Amazon.com) - a little high for such a small little book, but the royalties are going to a great cause in the One Campaign.

We’ve Sprung A Leak

Posting may be sparse for the next day or two.  We’ve had a water leak in our parking lot and several of the men went out to try to fix it.  In the process….well….all I can say is there was something about a backhoe, phone lines, a question about how deep the gas lines are buried, and right now there is a crater in our parking lot that could be turned into a decent stock pond. With the rain we’ve had that may be what we discover it has become by morning.  Our facilities are without water or phone service.  The staff is having to go home just to go to the bathroom.  Needless to say the DSL is a no go as well.

In the mean time, I do not know who Marcus Jackson is.  If you know him, please tell him that I do not need any more e-mails telling me how to enhance my manhood with or without pills.  Six children in the home - including two teenagers - has pretty much left me thinking I need that about like I need a third buttock.  I could especially do without those that include pictures.  I would tell him myself, by obviously my e-mail is down.

Always Reforming

I confess to some postmodern tendencies.  I say tendencies because I do not believe in absolute relativism, yet I do believe that a notion that human beings can know purely objective truth is a tremendous overstatement.  I don’t doubt that there is "true truth" out there and that God determines what that is.  But I’ve lived long enough to know that no two people see exactly eye-to-eye on some objective body of truth.

I believe that we can sufficiently and savingly perceive and understand God as he reveals himself to us, but only as the Spirit of God moves in us bringing that truth to light in our hearts - or more specifically bringing Christ alive in our hearts.  Deep down I don’t think God’s primary goal for his children is to have the proper amount or kinds of truth in our heads but to have an encounter with that ever-living God that transforms us, mind, will, emotions and body, all through-and-through.

It appears to me that the modern Reformed tradition has codified the principles of the Reformation in the same way the Catholic Church has codified its own traditions.  The five "solas" of the Reformation carry as much weight as Scripture itself.  Yet the Reformers did not view their commitments as being the be-all, end-all in the theological project.  Semper reformanda was the call for the church to be always reforming.  The reformers were certainly not talking about mere methods, either.  Martin Luther was not simply reacting badly towards pointy hats and music outside the Gregorian Chant genre.  The Reformation went to the heart of the message.

Were we to jettison certain theological commitments we would, surely enough, become heretics.  I do not question that.  But the weakness of many among the modern Reformed bunch is the belief that the pinnacle of theology came and went nearly 500 years ago.  I’m as big a fan of the Reformation as most, and consider myself a part of the Reformed bunch, so this is a critique from within.  However, I don’t believe the Reformers ever intended the church to look back on them as the final word about the faith.

The modern (postmodern?) church still has a responsibility to evaluate and re-evaluate the very nature of the church - both what we do (methods) and what we believe (message).  I know that we are fond of saying that "the message does not change."  Perhaps it doesn’t.  But our understanding of it most certainly does.  Our ability to express it in words changes.  Even the words we use to communicate the message change.  We may deny that in theory, but we affirm it in practice.  After all, what is the historic origin of "the sinner’s prayer?"  How about, "invite Jesus to come into your heart," or "make a decision for Christ?"  None of that is Biblical language - and I might even suggest that some of it is not Biblical in thinking, either.  No doubt that language has been used to convert people, a testimony to God’s grace.  We Southern Baptists have an uncanny ability to re-package the message in new ways at astounding rates.  F.A.I.T.H., Share Jesus Without Fear, Continuing Witness Training, The Cross, MostImportantThing.org.  If I could think up something catchy I’d try to get LifeWay to sell it for $79 myself.  Ok.  Maybe not.

Still, this is not your grandfather’s church.  Shoot.  It isn’t even your older brother’s church.  Our world is changing.  The church has been given the task of speaking on behalf of God into the world not of 500 years ago, but the world of today.  Faithfulness is not simply a calcified commitment to centuries old declarations.  Faithfulness is a commitment to speak meaningfully to the accountant and school teacher, the electrician and government official, all who now live in the Year of Our Lord, 2007.  After 500 years it is proper for the church to continue to reform out of faithfulness to God and the good of the world.

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