Tuesday, November 28, 2017

The Case Against Strategic Thinking

A friend of mine, a retired army colonel, once told me that in this world there were four kinds of people, but the army could use only three kinds.  First, they needed smart, creative people, who knew their field and could think strategically. These became generals and admirals, who planned campaigns.  Second, they needed smart, non-creative people. They knew how to carry out orders and get things done with efficiency. These became sergeants, corporals, and chief petty officers.   Next came the dumb,  non-creative people, who did what they were told. They made ideal privates and enlistees.  They just followed orders and did what they were told. The fourth kind of person, which the army could not use,  was dumb but creative people.  They were always wanting to do things their way, even when they had no idea what they were doing.  These people have no place in the army, according to my friend.  
Evidently not, because there are so many of them in the church!
The Bible gives us a pattern of command in the Kingdom of God, which is much simpler than the military.  Christ is the head, and no one else. We are His body.  We don't have to be creative--we just listen and follow orders. 
Nevertheless, most of us are not really fond of that arrangement.  We don't like listening to God. We prefer doing things our own way.  We church leaders think of ourselves as field commanders with God as the distant general back at headquarters.  He has left it to us to order the troops for battle, and he doesn't seem to care how we do it. 
Underneath our supposed faith in God, we don't really trust our Commander to make the plans for the battle. We are practical deists. We know that God gave us orders and instructions, but we presume He has no interest in the day-to-day running of the church--that he had delegated day-to-day decision making to poor fools like ourselves, and that He is incapable of giving us ongoing guidance.  For the most part, we understand the goals we are supposed to be pursuing, but we blindly stumble around with our eyes closed to his daily commands, failing regularly.We don't think of Christ as the living head of the church,  but a symbolic head, like the queen of England.   All the queen does is just show up and receive her subjects' accolades.  For the ambitious and self-important leader, we prefer it that way.  God might interfere with our plans.  Stephen Vincent Benet once wrote, "We're surer of God when we know He's dead." 
If God had really left the world alone, it would be up to us to plan the strategy.  But God is not dead, He is alive, and he hasn't left the earth. Jesus body may have ascended into heaven, but the Holy Spirit is still here and communicating with us on a daily basis, not only through the written Word but also through His presence within. So why are we concerning ourselves with strategic thinking?  That's His job.
The church on earth views itself far too often as a non-profit religious corporation, modeling its leadership strategy after business, politics, and sports. We are obsessed with developing strategic thinkers. Just look in the Christian bookstore and you will find title after title about church leadership training and church growth. Many of the writers are trained or even teach corporate executives and businessmen in secular business.  Yet rarely do we find books on being faithful servants good followers, or on learning to follow the Master's voice and direction.  There are many books on how to be generals, but few books for privates. 
God is not someone to whom we give titular obeisance while we plan how to run His earthly empire. does not tell us just exactly how He plans to win the world.  All he asks is that we be faithful in doing our job where we are.  Instead of worrying about the big plans,  He asks us to attend to small things--being loving towards those around us and faithful in our private behavior and attitudes. 
Military campaigns look different whether you are a general or a private. If you are a general, you see the overall picture like pawns on a chess board. But to the private, they look like confusion. In every army,  soldiers say to one another that if they were running things they would have done it differently.  Ordinary soldiers do not know the overall strategy.  That's OK, they only know how to sit down, be quiet, and wait for orders.
So if we do away with strategic thinking, what do we put in its place?
In place of strategy, pursue discernment. It is the job of every Christian leader to accurately discern what God is saying. 
Discernment isn't easy, and it isn't an afterthought. We cannot discern the will of God by having an opening prayer at meetings. It takes time and effort to quiet our inner, willful voices within and hear the voice of the Spirit.  This is not because God isn't talking, but because we are not naturally inclined to hear.  We must listen with humility--real humility, not the playacting that passes for humility among most of us leaders. We must set aside our business, cleverness, and egos long enough to let Him lead. We must join in the prayer Jesus prayed at Gethsemane--"Not my will, but yours be done."
When we do hear God, the first thing we hear Him calling us to is nothing. Hearing and following God is not about what we do but who we are.  Before God calls us not to evangelize the world, transform society, reform worship or to rescue the poor,  He calls us to be like Him. Before a soldier gets an assignment, he must first learn to be a soldier. Before an officer graduates officer training school, he must first be a better soldier than the other.  In the church, no one should be a leader who is not more loving to others, more devout in prayer, more enthusiastic about the Word, more forgiving or his enemies and more at peace with himself than the average member of the church.  If we accomplish all the good things in the world, but we are not this,  we are sounding brass or clanging symbols.  We must learn to be still and listen
We say "Someone has to lead--it may be me." If we were merely presidents or CEO's this might be true. But the real problems of this world are too complex for our puny minds to imagine.  We think that having the Bible has prepared us to be strategic thinkers, but that isn't true.  We also need the life-giving Spirit.  It is best to keep our focus on small matters, things we can understand than to presume to have knowledge that is beyond our human capacity.
The first command that we teach a dog is "Sit."  Once we learn to sit in stillness before God and be content with letting Him control the big things,  we can follow His lead. The first command God teaches us--indeed the only command that matters--is to sit until ordered and obey.  Just listen to God in the daily moves and let Him lead us.   Thinking strategically is not our job. Our job is just to follow where He leads.
The church doesn't need any more generals. We already have an excellent one!  But if we are content to be privates in the army of God, He can still use us.

Friday, November 17, 2017

The Elephant in the Room

This is the second in a series of "rants" about the state of the evangelical church today.

The “the elephant in the room” of the evangelical church is this--In spite of sincere efforts to convert the culture to our side, we have managed to alienate most of it.  This group includes a sizable number of our own children, friends, and neighbors. We are focused on converting the culture, but at the moment the culture seems to be doing a far better job of converting us. 
I’ve been an evangelical for roughly half a century. My experience has encompassed Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, Lutheran, and Salvation Army churches. I cannot tell you how many sermons and articles I have read about the need to tell others about the Gospel. Even so, there is far less practice of Christian virtues among evangelical Christians than there were fifty years ago.  The moral, ethical and spiritual teachings of the church have much less impact on the way people live today, in and out of the church. It does not take a prophet to foretell a future of evangelical churches if these trends continue. Millennials are the least religious generation in American history, and the ones coming after them will be even less interested, if this trend continues. 
The elephant in the room is this—that modern evangelicalism is still about five miles wide, but it is only about an inch deep.  Most people in church leadership acknowledge this, but there is great debate as to what to do about it.
Speaking of elephants, do you remember the old story about the four blind men who stumble across an elephant on the road?  Each one touches a different part of the beast and comes to a different conclusion.  One blind man touches the ear and thinks it is a banana leaf; another touches the leg, and thinks it is a palm tree; a third touches the tail and thinks it’s a rope, and the fourth, touches the side and thinks it is a house.   Each one, seeing part of the beast comes to a logical conclusion it’s nature, but none of them see the whole.
Let me suggest that when it comes to the shallowness of modern evangelical Christianity, we fall into the same kind of trap. Each of us, coming at the problem with our preconceptions and perceptual biases, recognize the need for change in the church, but none of us see the whole picture.  We see a part of the elephant, but not the whole.
One tradition within the modern evangelical church examines the head of the elephant and concludes that there isn’t much there.  They perceive the problem to be the modern Christian mind.   They look at the theology of the modern evangelical church and see it as woefully inadequate.  In appealing to the broadest possible common denominator of people, we have dumbed down Christianity to the point where it loses all appeal to people above junior high school level. 
Mark Noll once writes that the problem with the evangelical mind is that there isn’t much of an evangelical mind.  For more than a hundred years, evangelicals have not been known for the depth of their intellectual thought.  Most evangelicals know very little about the faith or history of the church beyond the basics. Many hunger for the greater intellectual depth. This I believe is the reason for the growth in interest in Calvinism, Puritanism, the early church Fathers, and even Thomas Aquinas. There is a growing hunger for a deeper grounding in the rigorous thinking of older generations.
Another tradition touches the heart of the elephant and finds it barely beating. These are the pietists, Pentecostals, and charismatics. They aren’t worried much worried about the mind as they are the passion of the church. The evangelical church concerns itself with doctrinal conversion and skips heart conversion.  The Holy Spirit has been replaced by business-school planning techniques.  The church talks endlessly about developing leaders but hardly at all about following the leadership of the Spirit.  Modern evangelicalism has bought into a practical deism that says God gave us commandments but left us alone for us to come up with our own practical plans on a daily basis.  We have no faith in a real, living Christ who can lead us day by day by the power of the Spirit. We would rather trust in our own planning an cleverness than to rely on a daily leadership and power of the Spirit.
We know God through His word. But His Word was given two thousand years ago. We fail to recognize the living presence of God in our lives right now. 
A third tradition stumbles upon the trunk of our elephant—the practical, working part of the animal—and realized it is weak.  They conclude that there is too much talk and not enough action. They conclude that evangelicalism has concentrated more on souls the souls of people, but neglected the poor and needy.  Our outward lack of human concern seems to be the problem.  Not only that, but evangelicals have failed to recognize that their own lifestyles are heavy on consumerism and consumption and short on simplicity and sacrifice. If we are not willing to live like Jesus, we will never be able to attract people to Jesus.
The fourth tradition stumbles on the elephant and notices that its feet are not rooted in the ground. If our desire to be contemporary and new,  we have lost sight of the importance of history and tradition.
One valid criticism of the modern megachurch movement is that megachurches frequently do not last for more than one generation. That is because they are usually based on the personality and initial vision of their founders. Once the church leadership passes, there is nothing to sustain it.
Traditional churches are no nearly so personality-driven. They are rooted and grounded in the past, freeing them from the tyranny of the present.  They are like oak trees instead of flowers. Flowers are prettier, more attractive and fast-growing, but they don’t usually last for more than a season. Oak trees last for a long, long time.
I once asked a class of students to trace their church historically back to Christ and the apostles.  One student wrote that Christ founded the church and passed it on to the apostles.  Then the true church was lost for nineteen hundred years until her pastor came along and rediscovered it.  I wanted to ask her if that meant that Luther, Calvin, Francis of Assisi,  Mother Theresa and Billy Graham were all going to Hell.  I fear would be.
People seek connections with something larger than themselves, that will last for more than a generation. That is why a growing stream of believers are leaving evangelical for Orthodox, Catholic, Anglican. Traditional Reformed and Messianic Jewish groups.  There is a longing in many evangelicals to connect with something classic and timeless, that was not invented yesterday.
Regarding these four traditions, it is not my intention to condemn or criticize them, any more than it is to criticize those who are not part of any of them.   But the elephant in the room remains, and each of these four traditions has correctly discerned a part of the problem. I am just not convinced though that any of them see the whole picture, any more than I claim I do myself.  The shallowness of modern evangelicalism is not in one area of life but affects the head, heart, actions, and traditions.
Maybe it’s time to stop thinking about evangelicalism as a culture that is complete in itself, but as a piece of a larger mosaic called the Body of Christ, which includes many perspectives and approaches. In our day,  it is not one part of the church that is threatened by secularism but all of it.
The elephant in the room is this—that we have forsaken the imitation of Christ, and made Christ into an imitation of ourselves.  We have not focused upon the totality of life built around Him and made our own interests primary in our lives.
The process of sanctification or theosis is the process of becoming like Christ in every way, in our head, heart, hands, and habits.  It isn’t a question of where we have failed be like Jesus, but whether we are seeking to succeed. We will never be perfect, nor should we expect to be. But that doesn’t mean we should stop seeking to be like Him in all ways. If we lose sight of Jesus and just focus on our own failings, we will continue to do them over and over again. But if we keep our eyes on the totality of Christ, we are in a better place to become more like Him in every way. 
This blog, the Faith Matrix, has been making the case that we need a balanced approach to the Christian life cannot just grow in one place--we must grow at all.  We need to study pray, work, and seek the wisdom of the past. Instead of emphasizing our distinctive, it is time to start learning from one another, if we ever see the whole of what it means to follow Christ. 

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Tuesday, November 7, 2017

Breaking Out of the Evangelical "Three-Step"


(Note:  this is the first of a series of 'rants' regarding the state of the church today. My intention is not to be critical of all the good Christians and churches who are working hard to present the Kingdom, but to express some heartfelt concerns about the direction of American Christianity in general.  I claim no infallibility--in fact I am sure I am wrong somewhere.  Neither do I claim these 'rants' to be balanced.  I merely offer my perspective.  Others may see things differently,  and they may very well be right as well.  I only merely offer my thoughts to provoke conversation.)

Ever since I was a teenager, I have self-identified as an “evangelical” Christian.  While people use the word “evangelical” in different ways, for me it means taking the Bible seriously as God’s Word and taking seriously the task of telling the world about Jesus.

Evangelicalism is more than just a statement of belief--it’s a culture in which I feel at home.  I’ve lived in that culture for a half century. It’s my spiritual home town and I’m comfortable here. 

Living inside a culture makes it hard to view it objectively because so much of what we think and feel comes from our environment.  We are unaware of our perceptual bias.  We cannot imagine other ways of looking at being Christian besides that of our own experience. But if we take seriously the Biblical teaching that we are all sinners, then we must believe that our evangelical world isn’t perfect. The world around us certainly sees our faults, even if we don’t.  If we wish to present the Gospel creditably, we must believe that even the evangelical tradition has its problems.

George Marsden’s book Fundamentalism and American Culture makes an astute observation about the fundamentalist/evangelical culture. He points out that it is a religion based on a never-ending campaign. We are good at crusading for salvation and various social causes.  But we have been historically unsuccessful holding ground. There have been tremendous revivals which have brought thousands to faith in Jesus, yet many of those converts disappear when the fires of revival die down.

But if we look at the two-thousand-year history of Christianity, short-lived revivals were not the norm.  People who were converted stayed converted. In the first three hundred years of the faith. The Roman Empire was converted to Christ despite fierce persecution.  Puritans and the Lutherans transformed the face of Europe.

Even so, American evangelicals are rapidly losing ground.  We are seeing a whole generation  turning against us rapidly—not because they have not heard the Gospel, but because they have not seen its benefits. Maybe it’s time we asked ourselves why.

The problem isn’t Jesus—it’s us. There’s something missing in our interpretation of the Gospel. 

One of the most quoted verses in evangelicalism is the Great Commission--Matthew 28;18-20, “Go into the world and make disciples of all people, baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded.”  We are good at keeping part of this commandment, but not the rest.   We have gone into all the world.  There’s still more to be done here, of course, but there are now Bible-believing churches on every continent and in nearly every country.  Now, much of our effort is aimed not at spreading the Gospel where it has never gone, but trying to reclaim parts of the world where the Gospel was once widely known but has been waning for years. Places like South Korea, Latin America, and Africa are now sending missionaries to us. We are still good about bringing people to the edge of discipleship. We still teach people to pray, read the Bible, share the Gospel and give to Christian causes.  Christian churches talk incessantly about the need to bring their friends and neighbors to church.

We enfold them into the organizational church. We sell them Christian T shirts, bumper stickers, music, and a wide variety of simple “Bible” studies which tell them how to be better fathers, mothers, workers, etc.  Most of what these “Bible” studies give is advice that is not very different from what they would could get from non-Christian experts, but with illustrative material from the Good Book.

We still stress the need to “witness” to others.  Witnessing is usually defined as being a nice person, inviting friends to church and telling them about Jesus. When we are successful in our efforts those people are then enfolded back into our churches. 

Over and over we dance the evangelical three-step—1) win them to Jesus, 2) give them basic training, and 3) send them out to win others.  “Discipleship” is defined as a short-term process or rudimentary training, culminating in training in stewardship and evangelism. Winning others to Jesus is seen at the sole work and purpose of our belief, and getting people into the church is our goal.  Then, if our churches are attractive and entertaining enough to keep people coming back, and if the cost of discipleship is not presented as being too high, they may keep coming back, and the three-stage process can be repeated many times before people start to tire of it.

Eventually though, people do get tired of it, and start to fall away.  We hardly notice at first, since new people keep coming. One by one, the old converts drop out, and we hardly see them.  People come in but are not permanently changed. They still do not forgive their enemies, love their neighbors, or turn the other cheek. They are what they always were, but now they are doing it with a Christian label.  The longer the dance keeps up the more they tire of dancing, and the harder it is to get others to join in.  Christianity, which is supposed to be lifechanging, becomes a multilevel marketing scheme guaranteeing salvation for the next life without bringing about lasting change in this one.  Eventually, society gets wise to it and stops responding.

The Great Commission is true, but we never finish it.  The last part of the Great Commission says, “Teach them to observe everything I have commanded you.”  The Great Commission doesn’t end with conversion and baptism--it begins there. After that, we begin the process of learning to do what Jesus commanded in every area of life.

Winning the world to Jesus isn’t all the Great Commission says—it’s not even the main point. The Great Commission is about establishing God’s Kingdom on earth by living like Jesus told us and having an ongoing day by day walk with Jesus. If everyone found out how to go to heaven but did not change on earth, the Great Commission would still not be fulfilled.  Letting people think it’s okay to hate others, ignore the hurting, stay unforgiving and live basically selfish lives because God forgives us is not the purpose of discipleship. 

The kingdom of God is wherever God rules. When we pray the Lord’s Prayer, we pray for His kingdom to come on earth.  Whenever we in our lives submit to the rulership of God, the kingdom has come to us individually.  When we commit to being under God’s tutelage and seek to live like Him, we are in His Kingdom of God today. 

The problem with the way we are presenting the Gospel, is that we’re selling condos in an unfinished building.  We invite people to dine on meals of undercooked food. We are inviting people to join us in living a life we’ve barely tried ourselves.  It’s good to invite people to know Jesus, but all the while we should be seeking to know Him better ourselves. The Kingdom of God needs to be completed in us by learning to obey all that He commanded. We must complete the Great Commission in ourselves by learning to obey what He commands, if we are to produce lasting fruit.

Discipleship isn’t something we do for a few weeks or even years, but it is a lifetime pursuit. It isn’t just something we do to prepare people for membership and service, but for a lifetime of being formed into Christ’s image.

 The process of discipleship is first laying aside our past ways of thinking and feeling, as well as our sins and habits.   The second part of the process is becoming one with Christ in our wills, thoughts, feelings, and behavior—imitating Him in all things.   We evangelicals tend to measure progress by how much we have laid aside of our old life, instead of how much we have put on of our new life in Christ.  We focus on transforming everyone and everything else around us while the one mission field over which we have absolute control—our own inner lives—goes unevangelized. We win the world—we just don’t win ourselves. To help others, we must complete the Kingdom in ourselves.

Being a witness is not something we do, but something we are. When we are like Jesus, then we are a witness.  People who look at us, see our sins more than they see Jesus. We are not world changers or conquerors, but empty vessels unless we are transformed by the Spirit. 



Here are some questions we need to ask ourselves and our church.

Ø  Do we really “take no thought for tomorrow” or do we worry about the future?

Ø  Do we love our enemies, and pray for the welfare of those who don’t like us?

Ø  Are we committed to being like Jesus, or comfortable in our own hidden sins and hypocrisies?

Ø  Do “abide in His love”, knowing that God likes and knows us personally?

Ø  Do we have empathy for our neighbors, or do we ignore them?

Ø  Can we trust in God when we don’t have all the answers?

Ø  If we don’t experience God’s unconditional love in our souls, how do we expect to give it to our non-Christian neighbors?



What do you think?  Are evangelical churches strong enough in teaching us to observe what Jesus commanded?  Are churches too shallow in what they teach?  Let me know what you think, and join us here for the follow-up blog in a few days.

If you like this blog, please share it and subscribe to this blog.  There are more “rants” on the way.