Quotable

I’m taking a breather in my series on the church until next week.  There have been a number of books I have that quote George MacDonald in them somewhere.  In fact, I recently read where C.S. Lewis considered MacDonald to be his "master" and Lewis was greatly moved by the writings of MacDonald, stating that there wasn’t a book he’d written where he did not quote George MacDonald.  What follows is from Creation In Christ.

"But I do not know how to awake and arise."

I will tell you.  Get up, and do something the Master tells you; so make yourself his disciple at once.  Instead of asking yourself whether you believe or not, ask yourself whether you have this day done one thing because he said, Do it, or once abstained because he said, Do not do it.  It is simply absurd to say you believe, or even want to believe in him, if you do not anything he tells you.  If you can think of nothing he ever said as having had an atom of influence on your doing or not doing, you have too great ground to consider yourself no disciple of his.

But you can begin at once to be a disciple of the Living One - by obeying him in the first thing you can think of in which you are not obeying him.  We must learn to obey him in everything, and so must begin somewhere.  Let it be at once, and in the very next thing that lies at the door of your conscience!  Oh fools and slow of heart, if you think of nothing but Christ, and do not set yourselves to do his words!  You but build your houses on the sand.

My Way Or The Highway

"People are not primarily looking to cooperate with our plan for their lives."

Joe Myers
in Organic Community

On Wednesday nights in our church we’ve been looking at John’s epistles/letters.  Last night we finished 3 John, a letter in which the apostle John calls out a man named Diotrephes not only for his own rigid practice of refusing Christian hospitality to traveling evangelists and missionaries, but for also demanding that others follow his course.  Those who would not were being put out of the church by Diotrephes’ own personal pronouncements.

Can you imagine how that sort of thing would go over today?  Just ask Chan Chandler or Frank Harber.  But there seems to be a growing trend in evangelicalism as a whole, and among Southern Baptists in particular, to lead with a heavy hand.  As an example, Pastor Dwight McKissic of the Cornerstone Baptist Church in Arlington, Texas recently appeared on TBN with several former Southern Baptists-turned charismatic/Pentecostals.  As a result pastors from all over the SBC now feel the liberty to tell Pastor McKissic what he should do to remedy the situation and how he must distance himself from these others.

Now, I’m no fan of TBN.  Just ask the people at our church.  Generally speaking I think a person’s soul would be more edified by watching static.  But I don’t know that Charles Stanley is less of a Baptist because he puts money into Paul Crouch’s pockets every time he buys airtime from TBN.  God knows Jan needs the money for pink hair dye and botox injections.  It’s not a venue I would choose, but I don’t suspect Charles Stanley, or Dwight McKissic, or Jack Graham are looking to cooperate with my plan for their lives.

Instead of cooperation we need more collaboration.  Joe Myers writes that "the spirit of cooperation is a rigid spirit, one that stifles creativity and discovery."  He’s writing from the context of the local church.  Of course  his ideas apply to larger organizational structures as well.  But in the local church people aren’t necessarily looking for ways to join in our program for their lives.  The structures we’ve established tend to serve the organization, not the people of the organization.  They perpetuate what we already have going, or what we want to get going.  Instead, people generally want to have some say in their own contribution to the group.  What’s amazing is that Baptists, of all people, are lost on that notion.  Of all church structures Baptists is theoretically one of the flattest - meaning there isn’t a top-down structure in Baptist church life.  There is no one (again, theoretically) sitting at the top telling others what to do and how to do it.

There are challenges with this structure, and perhaps even problems, but those are issues for another day.  But we are living in a strange day indeed when the Baptist police seem to be patrolling nearly every corner these days, blowing their whistles and making citizen’s arrests.  My way or the highway will not work for Baptists and will not work for evangelicals as a whole.  I know that there are many who are fearful of collaboration.  They are fearful of people in other denominations.  They are fearful of people who speak in tongues.  They are fearful of people who baptize infants.  They truly feel that collaboration rather than cooperation will lead to a broad ecumenical capitulation of certain distinctives and probably the good news about Jesus as well.  They see slippery slopes everywhere they turn, and the only way they believe we can maintain solid footing is to make sure everyone is doing things as they deem fit.

And it will end up killing us.  It already is.

I Wanted To Worship God

James Galyon posts about a conversation with a friend which led to his reading Robert Webber’s Evangelicals On The Canterbury Trail.  Galyon writes of Webber that, "while he was writing this work, Webber interviewed a large number of
evangelicals who also chose to become Episcopalian and asked them their
primary reason for doing so. Without exception, the reply was, ‘I wanted to worship God.’"

Galyon then gives this quote from the book:

First, I am impressed with the fact that worship in the Book of Common Prayer is directed toward God. . . . I have been put off by the narcissism of much contemporary worship. In
this setting the orientation of worship appears to center around me, my
feelings, and my experience, rather than around God, His person, and
His work in Jesus Christ. I am reminded of a prayer written by Hippolytus, a bishop in Rome at the beginning of the third century. In
the prayer he says, ‘Having in memory, therefore, His death and
resurrection, we offer to Thee the bread and the cup, yielding Thee
thanks, because Thou hast counted us worthy to stand before Thee and to
minister to Thee.’ The idea that worship is a ministry to
God, that He loves to be worshiped, and that He made us to worship Him
dominates the worship of the ancient church. It is early Christian conviction drawn from Revelation 4 and 5. . . . Second, I am impressed with the Christ-centered nature of worship in the Book of Common Prayer. The
central thrust of worship in the Episcopal tradition, just as it was in
the ancient tradition, is to celebrate Jesus Christ as the central
cosmic figure of the universe.

Good stuff.

Quotes Of The Day

"The men the American public admire most extravagantly are the most
daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to
tell them the truth."  H. L. Mencken

"Typos are very important to all written form. It gives the reader
something to look for so they aren’t distracted by the total lack of
content in your writing."  Randy K. Milholland

"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us
with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use."  Galileo Galilei

"The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments."  Fredrich Nietzsche

Big Church, Big Business

I remember the first time I read John Maxwell’s Developing The Leader Within You.  I was intrigued.  There were a lot of things I read in there that seemed to jive with my experiences in corporate America.  I remember leadership training I took while at AT&T Wireless.  I still have the books and manual we received.  And there were a number of similarities between Maxwell and AT&T.  So much so that I was a little uneasy.

I spent five years at AT&T Wireless.  That’s not forever, by any means, but it was long enough to get a good front-seat view of corporate leadership and how that leadership ties in with corporate goals and how all of that filters down to the front-line employee.  I’m not saying it is corrupt.  On the level at which I worked it was not.  I mean, we weren’t Enron - at least in our building - though I tried to follow closely what was constantly going on at the highest levels within AT&T.  I still didn’t see scandal.  Shoot.  We worked very hard to ensure employee satisfaction as well as customer satisfaction.  That was doubly and triply true prior to the merge with AT&T when we were McCaw Communications.  Craig McCaw is a corporate leader who knows how to run a first-class company top to bottom.  I believe it is one of the reasons he’s been successful in nearly everything he’s put his hand to.

But what made me uneasy is that my gut kept telling me that the goals of a for-profit business in a consumer culture are, or ought to be different from the goals of the church of Jesus Christ.  The means to reach those goals are different as are the ways we measure our progress toward the goals.  American business is undoubtedly and unashamedly bottom-line oriented.  At McCaw we had corporate values and value number one was "hire and develop great people."  That’s a great corporate strategy, by the way.  Nevertheless, it was a strategy ultimately aimed at the bottom line.  Great people work hard and think creatively thereby enhancing products which help the bottom line.

But I could never get away from this sense that Jesus often diverged from the path guys like Maxwell were laying out.  Maxwell and many in the Evangelical leadership industry today present leadership principles as being both universal and neutral.  They are universal in the sense that they apply in any setting and good leadership principles can be gleaned from any source.  So it isn’t unusual to see Maxwell hosting a conference where he invites leaders with the local church setting along-side leaders in the business community.  In fact, the speakers are as likely to come from outside of the church as inside it.

But spiritual leadership is often very unlike business leadership.  Jesus didn’t follow the Pareto Principle.  I don’t recall him teaching it, either.

In The Great Giveaway, David Fitch writes:

"Effective leadership" instructors describe a world where technique and skill can control the outcome of organizations.  Effective leadership pictures churches as organizations to be run for goals that determine success of some kind.  Effective leadership subtly trains pastors to act and behave as if they are in control of the church.  These CEO-pastor-leaders do not serve, they lead; they do not submit to the community and the mutual gifts of the Spirit, they direct the organization; they do not see the church as an alive organism in which the Spirit moves to discern the future, they discern the future.  This is the new language of church leadership, and it cannot help but shape the way pastors are oriented toward their churches and themselves.

And one of the highest tolls to be paid in the modern view of pastor as CEO is the isolation of the pastor.  Nearly everyone in pastoral or church ministry understands that the rules for them are different.  I’m not talking about the qualifications of leadership in 1 Tim. and Titus.  I’m talking about the prevailing situation where the pastor is really considered an outsider within the community of faith.  It is a strange thing, actually.  Here is the one person in the typical evangelical church who is perceived to have the greatest authority and influence, but he is a perpetual outsider.  Others in the church may be the pastor’s friend, but it is usually a friend of a different sort.  It is a friend who is still held at a distance.  And he is not going to be primarily judged based upon his character and faithfulness, but primarily on the sort of "results" he gets.

Churches looking for a new pastor are always looking for one who has a "proven track record."  They want to know that his previous church grew numerically.  I recall going through a lengthy interview process with a church about five years ago.  I was sent a survey to fill out.  There were between twenty and thirty questions on the survey and my response was around five or six pages long - typed and single spaced.  There was not one question on the survey related to my character, my devotional life or my overall faithfulness to the pastoral task.  Not one.  I remember telling my wife that it appeared that as long as I could preach a decent sermon, lead a church to moderate growth and hold the acceptable positions on certain theological and cultural questions it didn’t matter if I prayed, devoted myself to the Scriptures, beat my kids or cheated on my wife.  Those questions didn’t matter because they never came up.

And Fitch suggests that that may be a large part of the reason we hear about so many pastoral failures these days - as well as why we are often willing to look the other way if the one who has fallen is "successful."  But another reason for those sort of failures goes right back to the issue of pastoral isolation.  If a pastor is struggling with a sin in his life, who is he to tell?  Someone in the church?  Goodness no.  At least not unless he’s already secured a financial back-up plan.  Let the average person in the church fall into sin and the church will likely work with that person with a goal of redemptive restoration.  Let that person be a deacon or Sunday School teacher and there will still be a place in the church community for them.  Let it be the pastor or a staff member and they’d better have the moving company on speed dial.  Fitch writes:

Given this moral milieu, effective leaders reveal their character problems to anyone in the church at great peril, effectively placing their job and ministerial status on the line.  Such transparency would harm their ability to effectively lead.  This state of affairs is why most pastors have no accountability groups, and when they do, the groups are composed of members outside their church who neither see them in leadership nor know their week-to-week life among the church.  It is inevitable therefore that the effective leader/evangelical pastor is isolated from the very body that the Spirit uses to help one grow and overcome moral deficits, which surely exist i all pastors until death.

Some of the solutions Fitch proposes are: making seminaries places of spiritual formation, not just professional training, forming confessional groups for pastors from within their own congregations.  Of course, there will have to be some within the congregation who are ready to admit the reality that their pastor has not reached full sanctification in this life and that such a situation is still acceptable.  He also suggests training ministers in a bi-vocational setting where their gifts can be proven before they are given the full load of pastoral responsibilities, and establishing multiple leaders - not just a multiple-staff church, but a plurality of pastoral leaders where ministry responsibilities can be shared and accountability can be fostered.

A Day For Links And Quotes

This has been a busy week for me, so today I want to point you to two really good posts over at Todd’s blog (here and here).

Also, here are some quotes I like:

"The point of quotations is that one can use another’s words to be insulting."  - Amanda Cross

"Against logic there is no armor like ignorance."  - Laurence J. Peter

"The longer I live the more I see that I am never wrong about anything,
and that all the pains I have so humbly taken to verify my notions have
only wasted my time."  - George Bernard Shaw

"Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself."  - Leo Tolstoy

"The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side."  - James Baldwin

"Typos are very important to all written form. It gives the reader
something to look for so they aren’t distracted by the total lack of
content in your writing."  - Randy K. Millholland

"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us
with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use."  - Galileo Galilei

Rapture Ready

As you know I occasionally take it upon myself to update my readers on the current status of the Rapture Index.  Bad news.  It’s at 163 which is the highest it’s been since at least 2004 and already equals the high for 2006.  If those danged Democrats hadn’t taken over congress we might very well be sitting at a more comfortable 145 or so.

Of course, I was checking the Rapture Index out because I’m preaching through Matthew 24 right now and since there is no such thing as the rapture I was looking for a little something to make me smile to start the day.  I rather like Ben Witherington’s statement on the rapture (HT: Michael Bird):

Since the rapture is not a Biblical doctrine at all but rather something dreamed up by a teenage girl in about 1820 at a revival in Glasgow Scotland and then preached by Darby and Moody neither of whom were ever Bible experts, perhaps we had better pay attention and see what a proper Christian response should be to this crisis, especially for the sake of being a good witness.

Ummm.  Am I playing my hand too strongly?  I realize that a Southern Baptist hammering those words out on a keyboard for all to see is a bit like going all-in in Texas hold ‘em with a 2-3 off-suit  [What you don’t know is that I’ve seen the flop and I get three more deuces].

At any rate, I take a fairly strong preterist view, particularly of Matthew 24 (Mark 13, Luke 21).  I was somewhat surprised to see that Craig Blomberg does as well, though he sneaks a little millenarianism in the back door.  And just when he was starting to sound like a good amillennialist, too.

I’m wondering, though….how do you see it?  Do you have any exegetical insights you might share with me before Sunday?  I’ll specifically be looking at verses 15-28.  Here’s your chance to set me straight.

Unity

Five or six years ago I contacted our state denominational offices to get more information on planting a new church.  I’ve been interested in church planting since my seminary days but seldom thought of myself as being the church planter - more the pastor of a church involved in church planting.  But those days were frustrating times.

Our little country church was going in the wrong direction.  Attendance was falling off a bit and we weren’t large to start with.  It was also the beginning days of some small sense of disillusionment with the traditional church.  I could see where we were and I could see where I wanted us to be, but in between was a fog too thick to be penetrated.  In addition, if mega-churches like Bellvue Baptist in Memphis, or FBC, Daytona in Florida who had thousands of members were going to one day find the waters of change to be terribly choppy, then magnify the effect ten times, maybe a hundred, for a church of 65 in rural America.

I don’t want to undersell our folks.  They were and are good people.  Sincere.  Kind.  And because we were situated in a small community some of the things I could see would actually be easier than in those large churches in the impersonal concrete jungles of the city.  One thing I wanted to build there, and want to see where I am now, is a real sense of biblical community.  Most churches don’t have that.  What we have are loose affinity-based relations.  Some of that is built on foundations similar, or exactly like, that Ed Stetzer quote from last week - a nostalgia for days past, an affinity to a certain style of music or whatnot.

One of the reasons I didn’t pursue church planting is because of what I see in much of modern church planting in America.  It all appears very homogeneous.  It’s the "Gen-X" church, the "Gen-Y" church, the "Millennial" church, the "Boomer" church.  And I just don’t think that naturally grows out of the New Testament teaching about the nature of the reconciliation that is ours in Christ - not only the reconciliation with God, but the reconciliation with others.  I think that reconciliation with others means that the barriers between age groups is demolished.  Same with economic barriers, social barriers, and ethnic barriers.  But when you get to those categories you’re not just talking about new church plants, but nearly every church in America.

Very few churches are truly ethnically diverse. Very few are economically diverse, though we may do a little better job there.  Very few are socially diverse.  Each tends to have its "niche."  But as I read Romans 11 where Paul instructs the Gentiles in the church not to look down on the Jews who had been cut off from the natural root - because God could graft them back in -, and when I read Ephesians 2 where he tells that church that the walls of distinction that used to separate them have now been broken down in Christ, it appears to me he assumes that there is a grand diversity within the body of Christ - even at the level of the local body.  And his solution to the natural conflicts that arise from such a diverse group is not to tell one group to break off and start a new affinity-based church.  In Romans 14 he didn’t instruct them to break into a Jewish church and a Gentile church so that they wouldn’t have these problems over what was proper to eat and drink and what wasn’t.  Instead he instructed them in how to get along.  Unity in the midst of their diversity.

That is what I want to see as a reality in the local church.  A place where folks can have personal differences in a great number of things yet still love one another and be committed to one another in the local family of God despite their differences.  I believe this is something the New Testament writers not only assume will happen, but write in order to foster that very thing.

David Rogers is a missionary to Spain and is the son of the late Adrian Rogers.  He’s blogged quite a bit about Christian unity.  I encourage you to check him out, and I want to give him a hat tip for the link to this article on unity that is well worth your time.  Here’s a teaser:

And when it [unity] isn’t happening, this is why the elderly lady doesn’t stay around for long in your group of mostly young family types. Why do most gatherings only seem to see any sense of lasting unity within the constraints of similar demographics? If Christ, the well-spring of endless life here-and-now really was the meat and substance of our unity, it would transcend all. The focus would be on That, and ALL would be drawn. The fact that our gatherings have such a narrow appeal reveals that we are majoring our unity maybe not Christ. Jesus, too often, is an add-on.

This isn’t about marketability. Its about transcendence.

Who Is A Christian?

I like Scot McKnight’s answer to that question.  He writes:

A Christian is someone whose identity is being transformed because of
relationship with Jesus. I think Jesus, Paul, John, are all saying this
very thing: the one who is a Christian is the one whose very being and
identity are shaped by Jesus.

Check out his post on the subject here.

Kickin’ To The Oldies

I heard this week that there is a local church advertising in the local paper and the thrust of their ad is this: "We still sing the good old songs!"  I immediately thought of that when I read this quote from Ed Stetzer in a post at the Resurgence blog titled Why is cultural relevance a big deal?  Here’s the quote:

Those who preach against culture are often unaware that they live in one. But the dynamic culture around them is often not the culture of their church. What they yearn for is typically not a scriptural culture, but rather a nostalgic religious culture of days past. The irony of this is that every church is culturally relevant. It is simply a matter of whether the culture of the church is in any way similar to the culture of its community or only meaningful to itself.

Hmm.

Read the whole article.  It’s really good.

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