Homecoming--Sort Of. . . .

I had an unusual experience last Sunday, and here's the background: As I said before, my family has left the church we'd attended for lo, these many years, and where I was a deacon, elder, teacher and associate pastor. Friends had asked us to start a house church. That's been a bit of a fizzle, so we decided to visit some churches in our town.

Last Sunday, we went to my boyhood church. I was a bit anxious; I'm not looking for a "church home." Though it had been over 20 years since I was last a member there, I have great respect for the pastor (who has served there about 25 or 30 years). And showing up for a hit-and-run visit--well, that can hurt a pastor. I know; I've been on the other side of that one.

What I saw was a church of mostly elderly people--a congregation of 24, not including their five visitors that morning. They were sweet, kind people who were clearly glad to see us; but I thought of the days when an attendance of fifty or less meant it was the evening service. The pews had been re-arranged; about a third of them had been removed. I saw a few people I recognized and more whom I did not. I wondered where the folks I'd known had gone.

This church had never been packed; at its best it had run just under 80, but the members I'd known had been faithful. They'd come to this church for years and over half were 3-time-a-weekers, meaning that they came Sunday a.m., p.m., and midweek. But those folks are mostly gone; and their kids aren't here either, except for one whom I saw, one of four sisters. None of her sisters are out of the area; and none of them were there. Nor were her parents, who still live in this town.

After church, this woman talked with me--just chit-chat--while my wife talked with the pastor's wife. I really wanted to ask: "What's happened to this church? Where did all the people go?" I missed the way the place had been when I was a boy. I missed the faces. I missed the fire.

As I said, I have great respect for the pastor. His wife is also a thoughtful, caring woman. The people who are there now seem to be sincere, caring. . . but their church is declining. I felt a pang of regret over a body that gave me a foundation and my first training in Christ.

When I talked of this to my wife, she reminded me of something I'd read this last year, that a pastor's most influential and effective years in a church were usually between his fifth and tenth years; ministry effectiveness wanes noticeably after fifteen years. The average pastor, at that point, has become stale not so much in his relationship with God as in his style of ministry. And pastors become concerned more with maintaining than with leading.

How many churches in the nation are in decline because their leaders can't, or won't, see the need for a fresh approach to ministry--for fresh goals, fresh stories and fresh ways of talking? This isn't a question I can ask without turning it on myself. I hope to be one of those leaders some day. Will I recognize a stale style in myself?

Pastors are taught that a fresh relationship with God will solve all the problems; a pastor with a fresh walk with God will be refreshed and refined in vision by the Spirit. But is there a role for the local assembly to play in this? Does a pastor have an obligation to let himself be evaluated by the body he serves, or at least by trustworthy and known leaders in the body? If a pastor relies on the Spirit of God, but not on the body God provides, for refinement and refreshing, is he really leaning on the Spirit of God? If we close ourselves off from God's people, how open are we really to God?

We tell the folks in the pews that they need each other. Jesus left a community of faith. Yet many pastors ignore the same need in themselves. Is this right? Does the command to "submit to one another" extend in some way to leaders, or only to the led?

You Gotta Read This Book!

The best books, like the best movies, are the ones that get you thinking for yourself. They tell you something about yourself, and the insights become keys that unlock doors to places you've never gone before. They take you beyond where you are.

Here's a book I've just finished reading, one that I highly recommend to one and all: Understanding Who You Are: What Your Relationships Tell You About Yourself. It's a short book by Dr. Larry Crabb, and you can find it at Christian Book Distributors here. A friend gave me his copy, and it was more than I bargained for. In less than 80 pages, Dr. Crabb gives his basic framework for understanding who we are. It's a framework that's in line with Scripture and with real life. Read it, and you'll come to some unsettling truths about yourself.

What is it that really drives us? At heart, what are we really wanting from God? "Depravity" is a word theologians use to describe the effect of Adam's sin on us, and it means a fallenness that has touched every nook and corner of our souls. Dr. Crabb defines "depravity" as selfishness that rules our relationships with people and with God. We want God to make our lives comfortable, not Christlike. In America we can see it clearly when we look at Christian culture. I can see it clearly when I look at myself, too.

Much of what we teach as Scripture, Dr. Crabb contends, bears little resemblance to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. We take the Bible and work it into this framework of selfishness. We want to control what happens to us in life and we use the Bible as a tool to give us security. One example: "Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old. . . ." You know the rest of it. God's promise guarantees the outcome, and your kids will be safe because you've done the right thing. (Has anyone besides me noticed this irony: Solomon, the man who wrote that, was trained as a child in the way he should go and, when he was old, he departed from it?)

Here's Dr. Crabb's take: "The principles [God] reveals are given to guide us in our commitment to reflect His character, not to comfortably organize our lives. We are intended to trust the goodness of God, not the reliability of principles" (italics his). And the aim of God is to bring forth Jesus Christ in me. His goodness is about making me like Jesus, and what does not make me like Jesus is not good.

This got me thinking, at some length, about "the goodness of God" and what that really means. I'll blog about that in my next post, sometime in the coming week. But here's a question: What do you make of this? Is Dr. Crabb right to think that depravity is, or at least shows itself most clearly through, selfishness? How much has that selfishness invaded your life? And what do you do to try to avoid the issue?

Once again, I strongly recommend you read this book. It just might change the way you see who you are, and what you were made for. If you are serious about discipling others, you may want to pass this book on to them as well.

In The Bleak Midwinter

Very, very soon, Christmas will be here. Tonight, as I left work, I wished most folks I saw a merry Christmas because many will be taking a four-day weekend this year, and I'll not see them until Dec. 26. We'll be celebrating like everyone else. Family all together, kids opening gifts, and outside the Midwestern midwinter gloom hemming us in. But we'll have a fire going, lights twinkling, and the gloom won't get into the house. Or into our hearts.

Long ago I read one of those "what the first Christmas was really like" articles. The writer pointed out that no one knows for sure the month of Jesus' birth, and that many scholars were (as I think he put it) sure that it was any month but December. For a long time, I was convinced it was August (my own birth month). In fact, I felt quite superior to all those folks who believed December 25 was the birthday of Jesus. I even thought about celebrating Christmas another day, in another season, just to show that I was more "informed" and "authentic" than they (translate: "snobbish").

I feel differently now. Maybe the date of Christmas was first chosen to Christianize a pagan holiday; maybe Jesus was born some other time of the year; and, yes, the most important thing is not when He was born but that He has indeed been born. But I'm glad we celebrate Christmas when we do, "in the bleak midwinter," as one song puts it, when "earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone." Now, at the darkest time of the year, and the most bitter so far as nature is concerned, we celebrate the invasion of the world by Light.

It's all too easy, in midwinter, to fall into the gloom that falls upon the earth. Outside my window, I see grey everywhere, not just in the skies but on the streets of my town and in the windows of the houses I drive past. It is cold, upper Midwestern cold--not southern cold that bites at you but the kind that can devour you if you let it. The world is a place to retreat from--not the earth only, but the whole of life. The bleakness of the earth sometimes serves only to turn our thoughts to what has been bleak and bitter in our own lives.

Yet God has overturned all that. Through the coming of His Son into the world He has drawn us to the Light that commands our worship. God the Son has come; and God the Son overturns darkness and bleakness and bitterness. Darkness has not overcome the Light. Not the death of the earth in winter nor the death inherent in all created things can stop the Life that is in the Son and in the Spirit of God Who dwells in all who believe in Jesus Christ.

Behind The Curtain

We've started something new. Since my last post, so very long ago, we left the church we'd attended for 14 or so years and have begun a home fellowship. Whether this informal gathering ever turns into more than a few folks singing, talking and praying is more than I can say; but I hope and intend that it will become a new body doing church in a new and yet old way. Our reasons for leaving are varied, but we knew beyond a doubt that it was time for us to leave. The nest was uncomfortable, and it's time for us to learn to fly.

Last week, reading the story of Job in the Message Bible, three things struck me as if for the first time. I know I'd known them before, but I guess you can say they were handed to me in a fresh way, getting my attention again. Each of them applies to us as Christians now.

1. God let Job be put through the wringer for one reason, and only one reason: God wanted to show off Job's single-hearted love for God rather than for the things God gave Job. Job was a very blessed man, but God bragged on one thing: that Job loved God more than the gifts God gave. Here's a challenge to everyone who says s/he is a Christian: Do I love God for His sake alone, or for the sake of what He gives me?
2. Job, with his life ripped apart--children dead, flocks (and wealth) stolen, his own body rotten with disease--still knew that, in the sight of God, he was a righteous man. His friends argued the point, and almost led him into unrighteousness; but Job was convinced of his righteousness before God. He was bold in proclaiming his righteousness. If this man in the Old Testament could (rightly, in the judgment of God) say that he was righteous, then why do Christians hesitate to call ourselves righteous now? Why do we call ourselves "sinners saved by grace" and not "saints"? When did Paul, or Peter, or John, write to "the sinners in Rome" (or wherever)? It's true that we are saved by grace, but this grace makes us no longer sinners but men and women who have been given the nature of God.
3. In the end, after facing Job down and humbling (almost humiliating) him, God still called Job His servant. He showed that He was on Job's side. Job, face-to-face with God, put his face in the dust and said: "I had heard of You, but now I see for myself." Job had all but accused God of unfairness, had spoken out of turn--but God still called Job His servant and held him up as an example of righteousness before Job's friends. Though Job had been a fool, God was still on his side. And God is on our side as well, not because we have done all things wisely and perfectly but because we are His possession.
   

Job never got to look behind the beginning of the story; he never saw the first act. But he looked behind the curtain in the end, seeing God in power. That glimpse of God as God, the fearsome whirlwind, the One Who poses riddles we can't even begin to answer, made Job a true believer. That's the way it is: when we see God for what He is, not for what people tell us He is, He puts us on our faces in the dirt before Him. The God behind the curtain is "not a tame lion." That was all Job really learned from seeing God; but it's enough.

Servants' Quarters

For those who've read and been intrigued by the insights of our dear friend Julie S., I have great news: You can get to know about her, Brian (her witty and Mac-addicted husband), their family, and their creative vision at their new Olivia Rose blog. I encourage you to visit the blog, e-mail the link to everyone on your contacts list, and just generally make some noise about them. Brian and Julie Swegle are truly two of the most gifted, loving and downright original people you'll ever get the chance to meet. Check out the photos they took from their extended China visit a couple years ago. The pictures will whet your appetite for their promised book. And note the "made on a Mac" logo at the bottom of the page.

And back in February I mentioned the theologian Simon Chan, author of Liturgical Theology (one of my Valentine's presents, and an intriguing and challenging read). ChristianityToday Online posted an interview here, and I thought others might find it worth reading. Chan is Ernest Lau Professor of Systematic Theology at Trinity Theological Seminary in Singapore, and CT says he "may be the world's most liturgically minded Pentecostal." Now there is an interesting combination.

This is a busy week in my family, and a challenging one as well. Along with all the normal business of life--work, family, home fellowship--we are volunteering time to care for a widow whose son is out of town. To be honest, I have learned a few important things about myself through this. I was more or less put in charge of this project against my will, and I thought that our small church wouldn't be able to pull it off. I worried, plain and simple. I nursed a bad attitude. You know how it goes; you're the one in charge, reluctantly, and you know that if someone doesn't show up you are going to have to pull the load longer and farther than you had counted on. So you grumble.

Along the way, I cracked open my second Valentine's present, Side by Side, A Handbook: Disciple-making for a New Century. In the book was an extended quote by Roy Hession from his classic, The Calvary Road. I've only read excerpts from Hession's book. Here's one I'm sharing with you:

In Luke 17, Jesus compares the person who would be his disciple to a bond-servant. The five marks of a bond-servant are as follows.
First of all, he must be willing to have one thing on top of another put upon him, without any consideration being given him. On top of a hard day in the field, the servant in the parable had immediately to prepare his master's meal, and on top of that he had to wait on him at table--and that before he had any food himself. . . .
Secondly, in doing this he must be willing not to be thanked for it. How often we serve others, but what self-pity we have in our hearts and how bitterly we complain that they take it as a matter of course and do not thank us for it. . . .
Thirdly, having done all this, he must not charge the other with selfishness. . . . He exists to serve his master, and the selfishness or otherwise of his master does not enter into it with him. . . .
Fourth, having done all that, there is no ground for pride or self-congratulation, but we must confess that we are unworthy servants--we are of no real use to God or man in ourselves. . . . [I]f we have acted as willing servants, it is no thanks to us, whose hearts are naturally proud and stubborn, but only to the Lord Jesus, who dwells in us and who has made us willing.
The fifth and last step is the admission that doing and bearing what we have in the way of meekness and humility, we have not done one stitch more than it was our duty to do. God made man in the first place simply that he might be God's bond-servant. Man's sin has simply consisted in his refusal to be God's bond-servant. His restoration can only be, then, a restoration to the position of a bond-servant. A man has not done anything specially meritorious when he has consented to take that position, for he was created and redeemed for that very thing" (quoted from Side by Side: A Handbook, copyright 2000, Cook Communications and NavPress Publishing Group; Steve and Lois Rabey, General Editors).

The truth of this hit me hard, so that I felt like crying. I had made a big issue of what was really a very simple job: comforting a widow in her affliction. I had made the issue about me. First, I had judged the ones who (to my way of thinking) had ducked the task and lengthened my time pulling the load. Then I had made it an issue of proving myself: "All right, then; I'll show them who really cares about Mrs. M! No, sir, I won't let God down!" In all of this, serving God was not the crux of the issue, nor was serving Mrs. M. She had become a proving-grounds of, firstly, my authority and, secondly, my righteousness.

There is a difference between proving yourself faithful and serving. I see this as I hadn't before. If the goal of a servant is to prove how well he can serve, he is turning the focus from his master to himself. He isn't a true bond-servant if he has something to prove. To others it isn't obvious; but in the servant's heart it is, though he hides it well. I know it was to me.

I could try to relate this to major evangelical scandals, of course; but then that would be too easy. I think God would rather have me stand in the harsh burning light myself than have me push someone else into its glare while I hunker down in the shadows. How many sermons, then, have really been not about God but about me? How much of what I did as if for God was really done in the hope of His rewarding glance of recognition?

In the Old Testament, there were sacrifices known simply as "burnt offerings--an aroma pleasing to the Lord." The sacrifice was wholly burnt, the giver (and the priest) eating none of it. It was burnt only to honor God, not to gain His favor, not to win something from Him or to pay Him something. Its message was simply: "You are God. You deserve this. Others might think it a waste, but You are worthy of this." It was the same sort of giving done by the woman who poured out spikenard on Jesus' feet. It was pure, unmixed devotion and service. It was the devotion of the bond-servant.

It's a lesson I hope to learn yet.

Mine, Yours, His

So here's a thought I'm thinking, as I'm reading a newsletter. The sincere and respected pastor tells me that, in order to follow Jesus' model for ministry, I must practice delegation, i.e., "involve other people in your ministry." And while I agree with the idea, it's at this point that something clicks. Three little words:

Delegation.

Your.

Ministry.

Is something wrong here?

When I think of delegation, I think of giving qualified people a piece of my action. Those people are in place to work out my plan of action. Their positions exist for my sake. I give some of my own authority to them so that they can do what I want but can't (because I haven't the time or the expertise, perhaps).

And then there's the word "your." Delegation is, at heart, about what's mine. You can have some of it, but remember: It's mine. God gave it to me. My car (I can drive it wherever I want); my house (I can let you in or keep you out as I please); my. . . .

Ministry.

Is something wrong here? Because suddenly the concepts of "mine," and of "delegation" as we use it, don't apply. They just don't seem to go with the idea of creating a body in which Christ is the Head and people take up functions based on giftings. And possession doesn't go with the idea of serving; and that, of course, is what "ministry" means.

I don't mean to say or even imply that there is no such thing as authority in the local fellowship of believers. The Bible's clear about it. At times, Paul stood forcefully on his apostolic authority when he corrected believers. But there are two points to be clear about. First, he never called any ministry his in the sense of owning it. What he had was a trust, not a possession. Second, ministry didn't matter to him anyway; people did. They were his crown, his joy, and his gift to God.

Right, so this is straining at gnats. We know that pastors don't really believe ministry matters more than people. Nor that they really possess "their" ministries. Nor that delegating means letting folks in on "my" action. So why bother pointing these things out?

Right.

Form follows function, and words describe concepts. If we use the wrong words, this might show that we have the wrong concepts. Is it possible for us to use more "body" terms and fewer "ownership" terms? Would doing so return the Church to the form Jesus Christ left behind Him, the form the Holy Spirit gave life to?

If this sound angry, I want to make it plain that most pastors I know care very deeply about their people. They try hard to shepherd their flocks in the knowledge that God will hold them to account for their work as overseers. But there are many, many well-meaning pastors who simply lose perspective--in part, I think, because they are taught to think of ministry as "theirs." And those they "delegate" are seen less as God's appointees than as the pastor's appointees. There is a difference between helping gifted people grow into their gifts and picking folks to implement my vision. It's easier for us to confuse the two than we would like to think.

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Trusted With A Gift

I'm surprised by the reaction to the May 5 post and a bit disappointed at the reaction to the May 15 post. One-man shows apparently touch a nerve; but many of the comments there could just as well have been left in response to the last post. What should be the shape of the church, both the local body and the church around the world, for it to effectively be God's instrument for the release of His power in the world today?

My friend Mrs. S, who has seen church in a variety of situations (semi-communal, Third World, and megachurch), has lots of experience to draw on. My friend Mr. B and I have a shared church history up to about 12 years ago. We've all seen leadership done wrong. Sometimes we've felt that leadership is a necessary evil. I think Julie's reluctance to use the word "office" likely stems from that, at least in part (correct me if I'm wrong). We see pretenders (TBN's full of 'em) and we see people claim incontestable authority and we rightly want nothing to do with that. And since so many of those folks have assumed for themselves these NT titles, we're reluctant to use the titles, though we acknowledge the gifts.

A question, though: Don't gifts show function? If you have a spiritual gift, doesn't that indicate your function in the Body? If you were a body part with the gift of sight, then don't you have the function of seeing? And if you have the function of seeing, should I refrain from calling you an eye? Does it hurt or help me to refrain from admitting that you are, indeed, an eye?

I think Julie's getting at the point when she writes: "Servants don't seek leadership roles, nor do prophets, spiritual teachers, or evangelists. . . ." We have a biblical right to "sincerely desire the greater gifts" but also a reprimand to serve one another, for the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve. We have seen many who have insincerely desired the greater gifts and have not served. We ourselves (and many of our friends) have been taken in by some of them; we've been wounded. But what if we could learn to sincerely, humbly desire those greater gifts? If God withholds them, then He is always right; but could we perhaps become the kind of people who could be trusted with these gifts?

What if, tonight, Jesus appeared to you and said: "I will give you the gift of prophecy," or of teaching, or the calling of an apostle--could you handle it? If we can't, then shouldn't we get on our faces and ask God to make us into people who could respond to that call, who could take up that gift and be faithful with it?

I want to see a real Book of Acts outpouring of the Holy Spirit, and I have been seeking a specific gift. Even looking at that last sentence, I think: These folks are gonna think I'm arrogant! But I want to be the kind of person who can be trusted with the gift. I see the need in my assembly. I want to step up and fill the need. But being the kind of person who can fill that need, who handles that gift trustworthily. . . that's the kicker. That puts me on the hook.

I don't think I'm the only one God wants on the hook. If we say we want an outpouring of the Spirit but can't be trusted with His gifts, then we are fooling ourselves and had best come clean about it. We either change or accept that what we have now is all we're gonna get, because by not changing we're saying that what we have now is all we really want.