Tag: gospel

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Recovering the beautiful simplicity of church

Let’s make our faith communities beautiful again using the unsexy, ordinary tools that have always worked: truth, confession, humility and prayer. They are surely not fancy, but they save and heal.

Jen Hatmaker

SerlioChurchFacade

The Washington Post features an article by Jen Hatmaker on the terrible cost of a consumer church model for the staff and people of a congregation. She describes a sort of dysfunctional spiral where the people expect results from the pastors/staff and, in turn, the pastors/staff feel like they’re forced to make committed volunteers’ lives busier and busier.

Each group feels resentful; pastors wonder, What more do these people want from us? and the church folks wonder, What more do these pastors want from us? This approach is not making disciples but is creating a lose-lose situation where no one feels they can deliver.

 It sets leaders and followers up for failure, creating a church-centric paradigm in which discipleship is staff-led and program-driven.

The truth is that, ultimately, none of us can deliver.

That’s the message of the gospel–Jesus has done what none of us can do, and he is making happen those things that we cannot make happen.

Only Jesus can ransom us and free us from the penalty of sin and deliver us from the wrath of God. Only Jesus can transform our lives from the inside out so that we are holier people–reflecting him in our character and our actions.

Your pastor can’t do that for you.

If you expect that from your pastor, and he or she buys into that message, then here’s the likely outcome:

Maybe we start here: 90 percent of you [pastors] believe you inadequately manage the demands of your job, and half of you are so discouraged, you would abandon ministry if you had another job option. Any career in which 90 percent of the laborers feel insufficient indicates a fundamental problem. When your nearly unanimous cry is “I cannot do it all,” maybe the answer is simple: You actually cannot do it all and should quit trying. [Emphasis mine]

In my own reflection on ministry, I’ve come to see the beautiful simplicity of the Christian life when viewed through the prism of the classical reformed faith. What I’m talking about is a way of life that places the ordinary means of grace as central to the life of the individual and of the congregation. You can read my post on this topic, here.

What does this look like?

This is a start:

Q: What are the outward means whereby Christ communicates to us the benefits of redemption?

A: The outward and ordinary means whereby Christ communicates to us the benefits of redemption are his ordinances, especially the word, sacraments, and prayer; all of which are made effectual to the elect for salvation.

The church needs to recover ordinary means ministry. That is, before we start talking about missional practice or the five-fold model of ministry, we need to establish that the foundation of Christian faithfulness is no less than following the pattern established by the apostles—gathering for word, sacrament, and prayer.

Our congregational gathering for common prayer, for the proclamation of Scripture, and for the celebration of the sacraments provides the corporate foundation for our private and family lives of devotion. It also provides the base from which we are sent into the world as part of God’s mission to the world.

The one thing that ties together the great works of God across the centuries is the resurgence of the means of grace as the heart of life in Christ. For the church to stand firm in its new cultural exile, we must once more embrace word, sacrament, and prayer. The reality of the Christian life is that a thousand whispered prayers while hanging laundry on the line is of more value than a handful of celebrity pastor conferences.

Additional resources: Ligon Duncan on the Ordinary Means of Grace [link]

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Making sense of suffering

One of the privileges and burdens of pastoral ministry is sharing in the deep suffering of so many of God’s sons and daughters. It’s all around–mind-boggling suffering, interminable pain. It can be overwhelming.

41wy7jCz-bL._SY344_PJlook-inside-v2,TopRight,1,0_SH20_BO1,204,203,200_It’s hard to know precisely how to minister in times of deep pain, but Michael Horton offers some intriguing thoughts on the theology of suffering that I want to share with you:

[I]t is not by imitating Christ’s vicarious and atoning death, but by being incorporated into it as members organically attached to their dying and living head, that his conquest of sin and death becomes ours…

A Place for Weakness, 47.

When we suffer it can be tempting to believe that somehow we can be redemptive agents. If we work hard we can start a foundation, launch a ministry, build helping relationships with the vulnerable, all in a hope of mitigating or quashing sin and death.

Friends, the world is not ours to save. If we begin any of these good works with the intent of quashing sin and death, our noble errand will quickly become a ball and chain that pulls us into the darkness of bitterness and depression.

If, on the other hand, we begin with our union with Christ–our being united into his death–this makes all the difference. We become agents of God’s redemptive mission in the world. We are increasingly freed of the need to prove ourselves by changing the world. Instead, we find ourselves able to join in with those things God is already doing.

 

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The Gay Spring

2013 saw incredible change in the legislative landscape of the United States with respect to marriage–a gay spring, if you will–that sharply divided the country along regional lines. Across the South and Central United States voters protected the traditional understanding of marriage as between a man and a woman and refused to extend that the definition to include same-sex couples. In the West and Northeast the definition was–sometimes against voter intent–expanded to allow for same sex marriages (as in California and Utah).

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This spring and summer–the time when Kings go off to war and denominations do too–Presbyterians will likely redefine marriage to allow for same sex weddings where civil law provides for it. And even where state law doesn’t permit it the option of sanctioning, blessing, consecrating, or otherwise attaching the churches endorsement to same sex unions will likely become an option for teaching elders in the Presbyterian Church (USA).

Since I live in North Carolina, this change will have little impact on me personally. Assuming, and it’s far from likely this would happen, that two men wanted me to marry them I could demur to state law without having to cite my own theological understanding of the issue. That’s a convenient position in which to find oneself. Of course, when ministers of the gospel look to the state for theological guidance it’s possible that the battle has already been lost.

Yet, there are many ministers across the country who will have lost the comfortable protection both of the state and the church in this regard. It is, however conceivable that with a change in marriage definition ministers will now be forced to be open about their views on marriage, even if they are not being asked to perform something that the state understands to be a wedding. This is difficult at the best of times, but in the face of opposition from both the state and the church it is onerous.

Mass culture has swung to affirm the GLBTQ community. Many Americans maintain traditional views with regard to sexuality, but it is now unacceptable to voice these in a public forum. I’m not talking about Duck Dynasty or some other pop culture person expressing views that are out of the “mainstream culture” as that culture constructed and communicated across media. I’m talking about a more general and diffuse pressure to join in with the chorus of affirmations of the sovereign right of the individual to discover (or construct?) his or her sexual identity.

I disagree with expanding the Equal Protection clause of the U.S. Constitution to encompass the right of same sex couples to marry. I disagree with it for a variety of reasons most of which are rooted in my theological understanding of God, humanity, creation, and the nature of marriage.

Since we don’t live in a Christian state, since what little moral consensus that once existed around this issue has evaporated, and since the line of precedent around this and other issues like it have unalterably led us to this place, I understand why many states are embracing this new reality of marriage.

I respect same sex people who choose to enter into legally-recognized partnerships. All things being equal–which of course they’re not–it’s better for a gay couple to enter into to some form of monogamous partnership or marriage than the alternative.

In the eyes of some states these are marriages, but in reality they are really only approximately equal to marriage. Those elements that are essential to marriage are missing from same sex relationships. As a result, to the church, these are really no marriage at all. On one level I’d prefer to not have to write this, but to do so would betray the Holy Scriptures that were handed to me as well as the churches theological reflection on Christ and the Scriptures for the last millennium.

To my mind, gay marriages are marriages in the same way that a corporation is a person–as a result of a legal fiction. A corporation may have rights like a person–political speech for example–but at the end of the day I think we can all agree that Goldman Sachs isn’t a person in the same way that Aunt Betty is.

So what of those whose views are popularly portrayed as slinking to occupy the hazy background of our current cultural snapshot? It simply remains for us to live peaceably with gentleness and respect.

My Augustinian view of history makes an awful lot of room for our culture to choose poorly, to favor error over truth. It happens in my own denomination and certainly within my country. In the end any law that violates God Law will be proven to be false and in the age that is to come will melt away. That is, of course, an eschatological statement, and we’re not in the eschaton yet. What remains is for those of us who are called and ordained to the work of preaching the Gospel to remain faithful to respect the civil authority while protecting the purity of the church’s teaching, worship, and sacraments. If I have to break civil or ecclesial law to do that, so be it.

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Making a life or making a living?

News reports regularly give statistics about the rise or decline in new applications for unemployment benefits. Each of us probably knows at least one person who has been unemployed for more than a year. We likely know many more who have been without work for a shorter period of time. Our society has generally embraced the model of work for wages–we exchange our knowledge and/or manpower for cash. Most of us can’t think of any other way in which to order our lives. The question is, however, does this arrangement really work all that well? Does making a living require us to sacrifice our lives?

make-a-difference

Frederick Buechner has written:

We must be careful with our lives, because it would seem that they are the only lives we are going to have in this puzzling and perilous world, and so they are very precious and what we do with them matters enormously.

Given the premium our culture puts on comfort (the ‘good life’), it’s ironic how little we intentionally our lives to see if we are treating them as precious or as simply a means to an end. Are we simply doing more and more meaningless things with ever greater efficiency?

What does making a life really look like? In a recent post Scott Martin notes:

Those focusing on making a living see wealth solely in the context of the cash nexus: the opportunities, possessions, luxuries and leisure that money affords. Those focusing on making a life see wealth in terms of the depth and quality of their relationships, the strength of their home, the memories they make, the moments they share, the lives they touch. In fact, the people I most respect who have made lives worth emulating rarely focus on money at all. There have been times when they have had plenty and times when they have struggled, but the constant is in how deeply they have loved.

Imagine sitting down with a financial planner and in addition to totaling your bank accounts and mapping your investments, you also mapped your significant relationships and explored your relationship to your home.

Martin continues quoting Buechner:

Buechner writes that the world is full of people who “seem to have listened to the wrong voice” and are doing work that “seems simply irrelevant not only to the great human needs and issues of our time but also to their own need to grow and develop as humans.”

It’s ironic that some of the vocations that directly seek to meet the greatest human needs are the least esteemed (and rewarded) in our culture: teacher, care-giver, social worker, priest. Could it be that our value system is inverted?

Ask yourself: am I making a living or making a life? What two things could I most easily change in order to improve the quality of my life (in terms of relationships)? Resolve to start making those changes.

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Five things I learned at Global Leadership Summit

Leadership development isn’t a luxury; it’s a necessity. The art of leading has to be practiced, but it also has to be developed and deepened through training and education. When we neglect training, our leadership will eventually slide toward what is comfortable to us, rather than what is required by our context. When that happens, we can get lazy and eventually will become ineffective. This is especially true for ministry leaders.

Last week I took two days away from the office to attend the Willow Creek Association Global Leadership Summit. It’s the first time I’ve been and it was incredible. Sure, stepping away from the computer for a couple of days has a price attached to it. I can tell you emphatically, the Summit was worth the cost (which was a bargain since I attended locally) and the time. I left the Summit feeling more deeply connected with Christ and energized to face the reality of ministry leadership, it’s toughness.

In reflecting on the experience, I had five take aways:

  1. I’m glad to work with a ministry that values leadership development. InterVarsity has made significant investment in developing leadership programs for its staff. The leadership development experiences I have had in InterVarsity–especially over the last two years–have been phenomenal.
  2. Leadership is like the tires on my bicycle–it has to be pumped up. Every time I get on my bicycle, I check the pressure and give them a couple of pumps. The activity of riding causes tires to lose air pressure over time. Likewise, the act of leading causes us to lose passion or to lose focus. Its critical that we invest in opportunities to recharge our batteries.
  3. Leading takes immense courage. Bill Hybels’ opening address was on the courage to lead. In it he said, “Too many leaders abort God’s vision secretly–out of fear that it is too risky.” Ouch.
  4. Leading isn’t just about vision. Joseph Grenny shared that casting a vision for something is only one of six ways in which influence happens. In fact, by itself vision is rarely enough to bring about lasting change. It needs to be supported by social structures and reinforcement.
  5. Stepping into leadership is an act of vulnerability. Brene Brown shared that stepping into leadership is stepping into vulnerability.

The Summit experience was so intense, so full, that I’ve blocked out time for the next week to work back through my notes and draw more lessons and actions that I need to take in light of it.

How do you prime your leadership pump?

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Are there really two marriages?

[This is part one of two discussing Tony Jones’s series of blog posts compiled as, There are Two Marriages: A Manifesto on Marriage (2011) and available on Kindle.]

In his brief anthology of blog posts entitled, There are Two Marriages: A Manifesto on Marriage (2011), Tony Jones argues that the church ought to seek the strict separation of what he calls “legal marriage” and “sacramental marriage.” A result of this change would be the removal of much of the church’s resistance to same sex marriage. The church would conduct a rite that refers exclusively to the religious or sacramental nature of marriage, and the state would ratify a legal agreement between two people, known as civil marriage.

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Jones builds his case on the basis of what might be a called a strict separationist—even Anabaptist—view of the relationship of the church to the state. Jones’s argument is plausible, but is relies in places on a view of both the church and of the state that is problematic.

A central pillar in Jones’s argument is his discomfort at clergy acting as agents of the state in the case of marriage. This is an objection I am hearing with increased frequency, even outside anabaptist churches. He writes, “…almost all of them [pastors and priests] express extreme discomfort at this situation, for it actually requires the clergyperson to act as an extension of the state.”  Further, “…that conflicts with the theology held by many pastors, Calvinist and Arminian, Protestant and Catholic.”

At first glance, Jones’s argument seems compelling. On further examination, we’re forced to ask whether Jones has, in fact, gotten it backwards. Is the cleric really an agent of the state or is it the other way round? Is the state an agent of the church or at least offering sanction for a rite of the church that the state finds beneficial? In reality, neither is fully the case and perhaps that’s why marriage is often something of a mystery to modern and postmodern people—it presupposes that the spheres of religious belief and law can peacefully coexist and together accomplish a societal good.

Moderns and post-moderns—really, hyper-moderns—presuppose what Richard John Neuhaus referred to as the “naked public square.” That is to say, they presuppose a sharp division between religion and public life. Religious considerations ought not to shape public policy since religious knowledge is not universal and is questionable as a legitimate type of knowledge. Public policy is empirical and verifiable, religious knowledge is simply internal and subjective.

In arguing for the separation of religious and civil marriage, Jones appeals to the “two kingdom” view: “Jesus said his kingdom was not of this world. And the Apostle Paul expands this idea in the book of Ephesians, writing about the spiritual realm as opposed to the physical.” Jones’s reading of Jesus and Paul is, perhaps, a bit over the top. That the kingdom of God is not something currently apprehensible to the senses is not the same thing as saying that God is unconcerned with this world. It is surprising that Jones reaches this conclusion since later in the book he reveals himself as a panentheist. That is, Jones believes that “God indwells all of creation.”

Jones further claims that Augustine, Luther, Calvin, and Locke all follow in the steps of Jesus and Paul by making a distinction between the church and the civil magistrate. Clearly blog posts are not the best context for discussing precisely what this differentiation means, but suffice it to say that Jones is clearly here unable to give a cogent rationale for his sharp division of the two. He fails to realize that marriage is necessarily the union of religious belief with the physical world.

…To be continued…

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Don’t be like Jesus…

Every so often I a well-meaning soul will write something along the lines of, “Don’t be a Christian. Be Christ-like.” Their intent is probably good–trying to create distance from the cultural caricature of Christians–but the statement is fundamentally flawed.

 

The message of Christianity is so much more than, “be like Jesus.” Being like Jesus is, after all, something that we can probably manage. It’s a moral statement. It means be kind, be sacrificial, be justice-seeking, etc.

There’s something of a cottage industry of scholars and popular writers who have baptized their own prior beliefs by appealing to Jesus.

The message of Christianity is more than be like Jesus. Instead, the message of Christianity is that we are to be in Christ:

I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me…

So writes Paul in his letter to the Galatians (2:20). He further concludes his letter to the Romans (16:7) with the greetings:

Greet Andronicus and Junia, my kinsmen and fellow prisoners. They are well known [among] the apostles, and they were in Christ before me.

Simply being like Jesus is not enough. In fact, being like Jesus is impossible. Instead, being united to Christ is the essence of Christianity. Indeed, only those united to Christ will be able to live in the kingdom of heaven. 

 

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How to train key leaders as disciples and leaders

Last week I joined staff and area directors from sixteen campuses, along with our executive coaches, for training in ministry building. It was the best training of my ministry career. One of the things that made it powerful was the synergy that emerged from sharing the experience with one of my direct reports and our coach. All told, we spent more than 40 hours together face to face, which is more than we’d normally get in an academic year.

Key to the training is a tool—we received more than thirty tools over the week—called the “discipleship cycle.” It’s illustrated below. The discipleship cycle is the most effective way to both guide Christians in maturing as followers of Christ, but at the same to move them along a continuum of leadership development as well.

CP_Cycle_Diagram_450

 

“Hear the Word” – Through prayer, scripture, and in shared discernment, we come to agreement on what God is asking us to do. It may be agreeing to reach out to three people whom God has brought to mind. It may be taking the risk to approach another graduate student and encourage him in his faith. It could be any number of things.

“Respond actively” – When God leads us to do something—regardless of what it is—we respond actively. Hopefully out active response is also a full response rather than a marginal effort.

“Debrief and interpret” – This is critical to growth both as a leader and as a disciple. In community with another, we consider what God asked us to do and how we responded to his invitation. How did we feel? What was the outcome? What did we like about the experience? What was uncomfortable? What held us back from full obedience? You get the idea.

 

Asking questions is an incredibly fruitful way of coming to understand another. Answering questions is also an incredibly rich way to come to understand ourselves. Put these together with a trusted guide or coach who can, in reliance on God, attempt to bring some degree of interpretation to the experience and the combination is dynamite.

What’s so beautiful about this approach is that it can be deployed quite easily and naturally throughout the day and even a brief five minute encounter can become a micro-seminar with a very concrete, very particular lesson.

During the week, we used this tool and I found that it forced me to stop, consider the action or goal I had undertaken, evaluate my response to it, and then connect the two in the company of a coach who could help by clarifying, observing, and interpreting.

What tools do you use to help train followers of Christ as leaders?

 

 

 

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A letter to my American friends

Hi friends,

I’m writing from a bookshop in Oxford, UK. Looking out of my window I can see the Sheldonian Theatre and the Divinity School of the University of Oxford (inspiration for the infirmary in The Harry Potter movies).

News from the US has been (thankfully) slow in getting to me and initially has (alas) come through Facebook. It’s often a wonderful thing to be somewhat removed from the news so that what is received by others as jarring and urgent is somehow blunted by the passage of time. In today’s world, a day or two seems as significant as a month or two years ago.

Would you allow me to make some observations about our collective discourse around issues such as race and sexuality?

A word of caveat, some will note that my observations come on the basis of Facebook exchanges and media coverage. While this may be seen as a weakness or limitation of this post, I think it’s true to say that our first person interactions rarely go much deeper than our social media interactions.

All sides to the common conversation around these topics (largely) have these things in common:

  • We’re fragmented.

    • Society is diverse in terms both of belief and of practice.

  • We hang out with people like us.

    • In this diversity, we choose others who are like us.

  • Our convictions are often unwarranted.

    • The appeal to “justice” is meaningless apart from some notion of what justice is and from where it is derived. Likewise, appeals to natural law or revelation or tradition are often insufficiently supported.

  • We demonize those who aren’t like us.

    • Both sides do this. Are those who disagree with gay marriage really homophobes? Are those who support it really sexual libertines? This is way too convenient.

  • We tend to find it difficult to love those who are different.

    • In the end, Jesus asks us to love those with whom we disagree quite fundamentally. Are we really willing to do this?

    This moment offers a unique opportunity for Christian people to lovingly, cogently, and consistently both argue and demonstrate the coherence of their views. At least for that reason, if none else, it is an exciting time.

    See many of you soon,

    Jeff