The Cross After Easter

"The fact that fidelity involves a cross, as also the fact that Christ was crucified just because He was righteous, are well understood by Christians when they are a suffering minority, as in primitive ages. But these truths are much lost sight of in peaceful, prosperous times. Then you shall find many holding most sound views of the cross Christ bore for them, but sadly ignorant concerning the cross they themselves have to bear in fellowship with Christ. Of this cross they are determined to know nothing."

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- A.B. Bruce, The Training of the Twelve, p. 185.

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For too many, "discipleship" is something you do in a group once a week. It is not a lifestyle, worldview, or guiding paradigm. Nor a relationship with a Master, for that matter.

Good & Useful? Or Useful, but not Good?

[D]oubtless Judas took part in this Galilean mission, and, for aught we know to the contrary, was as successful as his fellow-disciples in casting out devils. Graceless men may for a season be employed as agents in promoting the work of grace in the hearts of others. Usefulness does not necessarily imply goodness, according to the teaching of Christ Himself.

- A.B. Bruce, The Training of the Twelve, p. 108

Start Small, Grow Big

A.B. Bruce was a Scottish pastor and professor in the 19th Century. He wrote a classic about how Jesus trained his disciples, called, appropriately enough, The Training of the Twelve. In this book Bruce takes a chronological/ episodic approach, rather than a systematic or topical one, which may help to explain why the book is 550 pages long.

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Bruce treats the disciples as real people, not as caricatures or buffoons. Throughout this work, he shows himself as one who clearly has soaked himself in the Word and meditated on it deeply.

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In the following passage, he talks about the difference between apparent church growth and lasting Church growth. "Rousing the masses" can never replace training the few:

Where there is no obvious excitement, the church in [the view of some] is dead, and her ministry inefficient. Such [people] need to be reminded that there were two religious movements going on in the days of the Lord Jesus. One consisted in rousing the mass out of the stupor of indifference; the other consisted in the careful, exact training of men already in earnest, in the principles and truths of the divine kingdom. Of the one movement the disciples, that is, both the twelve and the seventy, were the agents; of the other movement they were the subjects. And the latter movement, though less noticeable, and much more limited in extent, was by far more important than the former; for it was destined to bring forth fruit that should remain—to tell not merely on the present time, but on the whole history of the world. The deep truths which the great Teacher was now quietly and unobservedly, as in the dark, instilling into the minds of a select band, the recipients of His confidential teaching were to speak in the broad daylight ere long ; and the sound of their voice would not stop till it had gone through all the earth. There would have been a poor outlook for the kingdom of heaven if Christ had neglected this work, and given Himself up entirely to vague evangelism among the masses.

- A.B. Bruce (1831-1899), The Training of the Twelve, p. 107

The entire book can be read or even downloaded at Google books.

Heard in a Certain Discipleship Group Tonight

After a fair bit of preliminary discussion...

"Can we get started on the study now?"

"Since when do you care about keeping on schedule!?"

"Since I started doing the homework."

Overheard Last Night in a Certain Discipleship Group

"When I use the Bible to dismantle my own bullshit, it works really well. When I use it to demolish others', it doesn't work well at all."

A New Community

My friend Garrett and I are starting a new discipleship group tomorrow evening. It will be smaller than the one pictured above, and I'm praying for a few other differences, as well . . . community and missionality for a start. Everybody staying awake would be good, too, though we'll let the dog sleep if she wants to.

I recently read Henri Nouwen's book, Can You Drink the Cup?, and found his description of community to represent one of the things I greatly desire for this new group:

Nothing is sweet or easy about community. Community is a fellowship of people who do not hide their joys and sorrows but make them visible to each other in a gesture of hope. In community we say: “Life is full of gains and losses, joys and sorrows, ups and downs – but we do not have to live it alone. We want to drink our cup together and thus celebrate the truth that the wounds of our individual lives, which seem intolerable when lived alone, become sources of healing when we live them as part of a fellowship of mutual care.”
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[Community is] a fellowship of little people who together make God visible in the world.
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So often we are inclined to keep our lives hidden. Shame and guilt prevent us from letting others know what we are living. We think: “If my family and friends knew the dark cravings of my heart and my strange mental wanderings, they would push me away and exclude me from their company.” But the opposite is true. When we dare to lift our cup and let our friends know what is in it, they will be encouraged to lift their cups and share with us their own anxiously hidden secrets. The greatest healing often takes place when we no longer feel isolated by our shame and guilt and discover that others often feel what we feel and think what we think and have the fears, apprehensions, and preoccupations we have.
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The important question is, “Do we have a circle of trustworthy friends where we feel safe enough to be intimately known and called to an always greater maturity?

Vulnerability, growth, and mission. May they all be true of our new group as we seek to follow Jesus and be transformed into His image.

Holy, Strong, Loving, . . . Smart?

Today many evangelicals are trying to reexamine this issue [of the role of reason in faith], and they must do so in order to capture Christ as Teacher and begin to think of him as an intelligent person - which is now almost impossible for many people, evangelical or not. If you ask evangelicals to pick the smartest man in the world, very few of them will list Jesus Christ. And surely that is sad. It is a modern-day form of Docetism. But if he is divine, would he be dumb? And how can you be a disciple of someone you don't think of as really bright?

- Dallas Willard, "The Great Omission," p. 168

Where to Go? What to Do? And I Don't Have a Thing to Wear!

"I tell you the truth, when you were younger you dressed yourself and went where you wanted; but when you are old you will stretch out your hands and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go."

- Jesus, speaking to Peter, John 21.19



The world says, "When you were young you were dependent and could not go where you wanted, but when you grow old you will be able to make your own decisions, go your own way, and control your own desitny." But Jesus has a different vision of maturity: It is the ability and willngness to be led where you would rather not go.

- Henri Nouwen, "In the Name of Jesus," p.81

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In a recent post, I quoted Thomas Hopko, who said, "The freer a person is, the less they choose. Thus a person who would be perfectly free by God's grace would never 'choose' anything at all. They would see, know, and will what is good, true, and beautiful, and do it." But in the Nouwen quote above, the suggestion is that we need to be willing to be led where we do not prefer to go. Do these paradoxical thoughts go together? I think they do.

It seems to me that a fully Christlike person will automatically do what pleases God, and will want to do it. But we are not yet fully Christlike. Therefore, there will still be times - many times, I fear - when we must force ourselves to do what is right simply because we know it is right. As we continue to develop Godly character through the disciplines of grace, we will increasingly desire to do what pleases Him.

I believe the Orthodox Hopko's statement, but I still often inhabit the Catholic Nouwen's reality. As a Protestant prayer book suggests, if I only do what I feel like doing, I will regularly "leave undone those things which I ought to have done, and do those things which I ought not to have done." I will "follow too much the devices and desires of my own heart." (After the Episcopal/Anglican Book of Common Prayer)

The Gospel of Personal Happiness

I was drinking coffee with my friend Jeff last night, and we ended up talking about one of my "favorite" authors, who was in town last week. Unfortunately, I didn't get to see John Eldredge, because his event was sold out.

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Our discussion, though, was really about discipleship, how we are called to deny ourselves and give up our preferences and desires to follow Jesus. I didn't say that, Jesus did (Luke 14.25-33) - though I wish He hadn't. The issue, then, is not, "What is my passion?" or "What do I really want to do?". Rather, the demand of Christ is that we follow Him. Too often, we try to lead, deciding where we want to go and then asking God to bless us in our endeavor. "In Jesus' name," no less. It seems to me that Eldredge (and many others, including myself all too often) gets this exactly backwards.

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Of course, I do believe that God gifts us and prepares us for particular places of ministry. But the command in Matthew 28 to carry the Gospel to those who don't know Christ and to make disciples of them is not negotiable. The only question is how God intends for us to do that.

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On my drive home, I was listening to an interview and heard the following. I think it's a good descriptor of much of American Christianity, where Jesus becomes all about meeting my needs and helping me live a better life. He's my friend, and even my Savior, and boy does He add a lot to my life, but I'm not his disciple.

“We embrace the gospel of personal happiness, defined as the unbridled pursuit of impulse, yet we remain profoundly unhappy.”

Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, in her introduction to Philip Rieff’s "The Triumph of the Therapeutic"

Hopko, Part 3

The final excerpt from Thomas Hopko's commencement address, with some excellent thoughts about discipleship and community:

And so, once again, if we have learned anything at all in our theological education, spiritual formation and pastoral service, we have learned to beware, and to be wary, of all contentment, consolation and comfort before our co-crucifixion in love with Christ. We have learned that though we can know about God through formal theological education, we can only come to know God by taking up our daily crosses with patient endurance in love with Jesus. And we can only do this by faith and grace through the Holy Spirit's abiding power.

When we speak about "taking up our crosses" and "bearing our burdens" in imitation of Christ, by the power of God's Holy Spirit, we also learn by painful experience that the crosses we take up and the burdens we bear must be those that God gives us, and not those that we ourselves choose and desire. Thus we become convinced that when our burdens are unbearable and our crosses crush us in joyless misery -- and we become dark, depressed, despondent and desperate -- the reasons are evident. Either we are choosing our own crosses and burdens, and rejecting those sent to us by our merciful God whose thoughts and ways are not ours; or we are attempting to carry our crosses and bear our burdens by our own powers, and not by God's grace and strength given to us by Christ and the Holy Spirit in the Church.

And so we come to another conviction: The Church -- the communion of faith and love (as St. Ignatius of Antioch defined it: henosis agapis kai pisteos), the community of saints who are Christ's own very "members" as his body and bride - is essential to our human being and life. We cannot be human beings - still less, Christians and saints - by ourselves.

Read the entire commencement address here.

The C.S. Lewis You Never Knew

Earlier this month, I attended an exceptional seminar entitled, "Spiritual Formation in the Life of C.S. Lewis." Those of us who love Lewis know his writings and his bio and how he came to faith, but what we don't know much about is how Lewis went about growing in his faith after his conversion.

Lyle Dorsett is one of the leading living Lewis scholars, and in four talks, he took us through the key elements in Lewis's spiritual formation. Dorsett traveled extensively throughout the U.K. and the U.S. and spoke with many who knew Lewis personally or corresponded with him. Through the study of Lewis's letters - published and not - and the accumulation of anecdotes, Dorsett was able to piece together how Lewis cared for his own soul. The entire seminar was an amazing combination of scholarship and devotion. I thought I knew a lot about Lewis - even took a one-week course at Oxford University a couple years ago - but I heard lots of things from Dorsett that I had never heard before.

The sessions were recorded, and this link may take you to them. If you find it's password protected, e-mail me and I'll slip you the password (shhh!). If you take the time to listen to these talks, and even take notes, you won't regret it.

If you go to Perimeter Church, you can get the talks in the bookstore on CD (or you can call them at 678-405-2205 and place an order). And if all else fails, just go buy Dorsett's book on the same subject.

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A Night of Worship

Last night, my church had a "Night of Worship." "Night" was a bit of a misnomer, as it only lasted about 90 minutes. But "Worship" was spot on. It was probably the most worshipful time I've had in an evangelical church.

I'm thankful to Randy S. [check out his blog] and his team for all the effort and prayer they put into this special evening. As I looked around our large auditorium, I felt blessed to be in a church where so many of those I know - on stage and in the congregation - are actually actively seeking a life of discipleship to Jesus. I'm privileged to know these people who know Christ.

Does Jesus Read "The Economist"?

One of the churches in our metropolitan area is rapidly becoming the "flavor of the month" in American evangelical Christendom. The pastor is a great preacher, the church is growing rapidly, and they attract lots of beautiful young singles and rich young marrieds. Consequently, they also attract a lot of press.

Recently, a web interview with this pastor was posted, and it's illuminating. Here's part of the interview, edited to avoid naming names (if you don't already know, then good search skills will get you the answer in about 3 seconds - but I'm trying to focus on the thought and not the person, per se):

Question: What is distinctly spiritual about the kind of leadership you do?
Answer: There's nothing distinctly spiritual. I think a big problem in the church has been the dichotomy between spirituality and leadership. One of the criticisms I get is "Your church is so corporate." I read blogs all the time. Bloggers complain, "The pastor's like a CEO." And I say, "OK, you're right. Now, why is that a bad model?" A principle is a principle, and God created all the principles.

Question: So what's the principle behind the CEO model?
Answer: "Follow me." Follow we never works. Ever. It's "follow me." God gives a man or a woman the gift of leadership. And any organization that has a point leader with accountability and freedom to use their gift will do well. Unfortunately in the church world, we're afraid of that. Has it been abused? Of course. But to abandon the model is silly. Churches should quit saying, "Oh, that's what business does." That whole attitude is so wrong, and it hurts the church.

Ouch.

I'm a businessman. I work in a very large "name brand" corporation. And I agree that there are areas where business people can help church people be more effective. I even serve on committees at my church where I suggest we learn from approaches that are taken in business.

But I take strong objection to this pastor's sentiments. Is there really no difference between spiritual leadership and business leadership? Do we just slide all the principles and practices over on a one-for-one basis? Is a church really a corporation, to be led by a CEO whose primary directive is, "Follow me"?

I wonder if the "company handbook" has anything to say about this?

"You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be your slave - just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many." President and CEO Jesus. Matthew 20.25-28.

Servanthood must be the mark of a spiritual leader. Some businesses understand that a serving leader usually gets better results in the workplace, but not many of them do. My company certainly doesn't teach that the higher I go, the more I get to sacrifice for the benefit of my people.

Which leads to my second passage from the Christian company handbook:

"[Jesus] gave some to be apostles, some to be prophets, some to be evangelists, and some to be pastors and teachers, to prepare God's people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ." Marketing Manager Paul of Tarsus. Ephesians 4.11-13.

I may step on some toes here, but I argue that the primary job of the pastor is NOT to compel people to follow the CEO pastor. Rather, it is to serve his people by contributing to their spiritual maturity, to help them connect to Christ and become Jesus's disciples, not the pastor's. It is to train and prepare the laymen for the call which God has placed on each believer's lives: namely, to love God, to love others, and to lead others to discipleship to Jesus.

We do violence to Jesus and the Kingdom of God when we say that there is no such thing as spiritual leadership. May God protect us from churchmen and pastors who say there's nothing distinctly spiritual about how they lead!

And to those who will respond, "But look at how God is blessing that pastor's church and making it grow," I can only respond: Look at the fruit. Are lives being changed, disciples being made, laborers being sent into the harvest? Numbers are good. Numbers plus depth and maturity is even better. The point is not to add numbers to the church, but disciples to the Kingdom. Over time, we will see whether the fruit is good.

More "Lite" on the Subject

Rather than move on to something new, I'd like to continue yesterday's theme. Yesterday's post resulted in excellent comments from Gene and Ron. Please take a look at them - anything you'd like to add?

I'm especially interested in your thoughts about why evangelicals don't seem to do any better on divorce stats and the like than the rest of the population.

And finally, here's a link from yesterday's Leadership Journal blog that has a pastor discussing issues related to this discussion - in particular, "consumer Christianity."

"You Are The 'Lite' Of The World" - The Church As 98-Pound Weakling

I don't put all that much original content on this blog, because others often express my thoughts better than I can, myself. Here's a good example from a book critical of American evangelicalism. I haven't read the book, and I don't know what "solutions" the author (Dick Staub) offers, but his diagnosis in this excerpt is pretty good, don't you think?

You can read a longer excerpt here.

The sobering contrast between historic Christianity and Christianity-Lite is illustrated by my recent experience in China. There, I heard the testimony of an underground church leader who had spent eighteen grueling years in prison, where he was beaten, chained, and subjected to physical torture and psychological torment, all because of his profession of faith in Jesus Christ. His captors lied to him, fabricated stories about infidelity on the part of his wife and a suicide attempt on the part of his son, offering to release him if he would just denounce Jesus Christ as Lord. He showed us the purple grooves in his wrist where the chains had penetrated his rotting, infected flesh, rubbing it down to the bones.

He wept as he told us of how close he had come to denying his faith so that he could avoid the escalating torture and be reunited with his family. Yet he resisted betraying his faith by concentrating on the example of Jesus, who, as the Apostle Paul said, "emptied himself, took upon himself the form of a servant and made himself obedient even to his own death" (Philippians 2:7-8). Though severely tempted, the Chinese Christian could not turn his back on Jesus, who had suffered so much for him. In China, the house church movement has grown, despite persecution, because of the deep faith of Christians like this man, who view their suffering for their faith as normative, not heroic.

The day I returned to the United States, I found at the top of my stack of mail a postcard from a new seeker-sensitive church. It pictured a convict in black and white striped prison garb, a ball and chain attached to his ankle. I flipped the card over to read the message on the back: "Does going to church feel like going to prison? Not anymore!" The card went on to offer the seeker comfortable, stadium-style seating at a local cineplex, complete with popcorn, face painting and other fun and games for the kids, and, best of all, no preaching—just multimedia presentations and an inspirational talk designed to lead to greater success in life!

Is the gospel offered by this seeker-sensitive church the same as the gospel preached in China but adapted to our very different cultural milieu, or is this a completely different gospel? Is this simply a strategic accommodation that will produce a vibrant local church with the same kind of spiritual depth and maturity that I witnessed among Christians in China? The answer seems obvious. Christians are called to be light of the world, not the lite of the world.

What kind of culture is today's popularized Christianity producing? Again, the answer seems obvious. Instead of creating a robust, authentic culture, Christianity-Lite simply imitates the broader popular culture's aesthetic in form and content. A friend of mine who was departing the pastorate after twenty years told me, "I embrace evangelical doctrine; I just can't stomach its culture." My friend Ralph Mattson once put it this way to me: "If Christians were going to create a subculture, why did they have to create one that is so boring, imitative, and uninspiring?"

Vibrant faith involves understanding Scripture, employing reason, benefiting from the lessons of tradition, and engaging in a profound personal experience of God. From this kind of spiritual intensity flows cultural transformation. I once heard a seminary professor summarize historian T. R. Glover's explanation about the influence of early Christians on culture this way: the early Christians out-thought, outlived, and out-died their pagan counterparts. This certainly cannot be said of pop Christians.

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Within evangelicalism, many thoughtful people are troubled about the price we have paid for our "success." Some believe that in our quest for numeric growth, we have grown big but are shallow, producing an American Christianity three thousand miles wide but two inches deep. Others observe that our apparent success has been accomplished by conforming to American culture rather than transforming it, pointing out, as Alan Wolfe observed, that instead of theological, it is therapeutic; instead of intellectual, it is emotional and revivalist; instead of emphasizing a serving community, it is consumeristic and individualistic; instead of producing spiritual growth and depth, it is satisfied with entrepreneurialism and numeric growth. Instead of being a moral and spiritual beacon, evangelicalism is viewed as an important political and economic niche.

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Dallas Willard reminds us of something anyone who reads the New Testament knows, Jesus never called anyone to be a Christian; he only called people to be disciples, individuals who would learn from him and obey all that he commanded. In place of Jesus' call to self-denial and promise of persecution and sacrifice, today's consumer-oriented, commoditized Christianity offers heaven in the future and fulfillment of the American dream now.

Male:Female Imbalance

I chuckled this morning while reading the latest entry from Friendly Atheist. Although he and I are polar opposites in many of our beliefs, I enjoy hearing a bit about how the "other side" thinks.

At my church, where I help out with the young adults group, we have an imbalance in the ratio of men to women. For some reason, we do a great job of attracting women, but the men are a little more reluctant to attend, to commit, and to get into discipleship groups. Of course, we have some great guys who do all of the above, but numerically we're out of balance by a ratio of maybe 2:1.

So I was intrigued by Friendly Atheist's comments about his own groups, which are overwhelmingly male. What does it all mean? Is religion for women, and atheism for men? Is there something in our constitution that inclines us that way? Or does it have something to do with the "personality" of these groups and how they operate?

And how do we Christians, who believe that the Gospel of Jesus is for all persons - even males - get more guys to show up and to commit to follow Him? Maybe we should start raiding the atheist conventions?

Here's Friendly Atheist's blog entry, lightly edited (by me) for clarity:

At the AmericanAtheists convention, there were more women (at least ratio-wise) than I’ve seen at just about any other atheist/skeptic event. It was nice to have them there, but this convention, like all others, was short-lived.

It raisesthe question of why there are relatively few women in the secular movement. Why is it when I go to any atheist gathering (a convention, a local group, or a campus group), there are an overwhelming number of men?

It’s a strange question to ask, considering the presidents of American Atheists (Ellen Johnson), Atheist Alliance International (Margaret Downey), and the Freedom From Religion Foundation (co-president Annie Laurie Gaylor) are all women.

What’s more, even the previous presidents for each organization (Madalyn Murray O’Hair, Bobbie Kirkhart, and Anne Nicol Gaylor, respectively) were women. O’Hair and Gaylor were also their groups’ founders.

(How many major Christian organizations can say all that?)

Plus, we have the always-awesome Skepchicks.

So where are the other secular women?

Here are some possible theories that were brainstormed at a bar with a group of guys over the weekend:

• The men scare them off


• Girls don’t enjoy philosophical discussions


• There are too many gay men at atheist events… why should women bother coming?

That’s a short list that needs to be expanded.

I’d argue for the first one. Imagine an Atheist Meetup event (or any situation, really) with 9834823 men and one woman. She will be hit on by damn near everyone. It’s frightening. And it changes the whole dynamic of how the guys act. If there was a more even split between the sexes, this wouldn’t be so bad, but we’re nowhere close to that. And if the girl is cute, we’re all in trouble.

What are the solutions to this problem? Besides trying to tell men to stop being so damn creepy, I’m not sure…

One suggestion that was mentioned was that we should ban women from attending the conferences altogether. They’ll get mad, organized, and show up to the events to boycott. And that way, we’ll have some more women at the conferences.

There must be a better way, though.