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The Future Church

The Christian movement was founded around an empty tomb, and now everywhere you look there are churches like empty tombs dotting the American landscape.  They are buildings that were once great centers of worship that are now simply museums.  Any pastor who ignores this will be a curator one day himself.  But there are a few of us who won’t put up with that trajectory.

If the Church in America is going to survive into the next generation, it’s going to have to be a few things that it isn’t and a few things that it doesn’t want to be.  To survive, the Church is going to have to be pushy, stubborn, crass, hyper, and bloody.

Pushy – We’ve been weaned on the message that Christians are judgmental and overbearing.  Youth pastors in the 80’s were telling their students, “Just try to be normal and try to be a good friend.” The results of witness-by-assimilation have not been stellar.  In the next generation, Christians are going to have to be clear, articulate, and persistent about their proclamation of the gospel.  A secular culture won’t pick it up by osmosis.  A friend of mine tried hard to be a good witness at his workplace through kindness and exemplary living.  Finally someone asked him, “You seem different.  Are you a vegetarian?” The coming Church is going to have to be rigorously evangelistic if it intends to keep its doors open.

Stubborn – I’ve been told over and over again that people don’t like how narrow-minded Christians are.  Nonsense.  The only movements which have proven to have staying power in world history are those which are stubbornly dogmatic.  Clarity, not complexity, propagates a movement.  The next generation of Christians living in a secular culture are actually going to have to know what the Bible says and why they won’t compromise it.

Crass – For some time now, Millennials have been branded as valuing authenticity more so than previous generations.  A friend of mine, who is a Boomer-at-heart born in the X Generation, says that no generation has ever valued inauthenticity.  But the opposite of authenticity isn’t inauthenticity, it’s performance, and there are lots of churches that are into performance.  The next generations of Christians will not be able to mount elevated pulpits to distribute biblical truth from the perspective of an unaffected, objective third-party.  The preacher is going to have to rise from the pews (which will be theater chairs) and do less “Thus sayeth the Lord!” and more “…and he’s saying it to me too, and we’re going to have to figure out how to obey this together.” And that’s going to make for some pretty raw preaching, in which congregations actually stop committing the docetic heresy when it comes to their pastors.

Hyper – The rising generation is not only increasingly secular, it is also increasingly entitled.  It will spend a lot of time pouting about the fact that no one handed it a job when it finished its degree.  In that era, the Church is going to have to return to the passion of a God-ordained work ethic in which productivity is valued and providing for a family is honored.  Christians are actually going to have to work hard to have a church, rather than resting on a Christianized culture which will just hand it to them on Sunday mornings.

Bloody – There are going to be a few martyrs in the next generation of American Christendom.  It won’t be so dramatic as a crucifixion.  It will be much more bureaucratic.  They will be stretched across unfriendly laws which make it harder to carry out a belief system which actually shapes the world instead of just comforting the psyche.  They will be sued into submission while liberality shrugs.

The Church in America is about to go through a reworking.  I don’t fear that it will erode quite the way it has in Europe and Canada, because American evangelicalism got such a firm hold here where it did not elsewhere in the West.  And a lot of churches, instead of closing, will just hand their keys over to the immigrant population which had previously been renting.  Through either means, the Church in America so much as it remains viable will be a more clear, wiry, hungry animal than it was in the last era.

ECO’s National Synod, January 2013

I’m just returning from the national gathering of The Covenant Order of Evangelical Presbyterians (ECO), a new Reformed denomination.  ECO has been in formal existence for a year, has taken in 28 churches, is in the process of receiving another 48 churches, and has over 75 more churches in conversation with them. The Synod met over three days in Orlando, Florida.  There were around 1,200 people in attendance.

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There seemed to be three key themes of the conference: leadership, church planting, and mission.  There is a palpable energy to the group.  They are entrepreneurs looking to promote the gospel and replicate their ministries, particularly in a culture where the number of people who call Jesus “Lord” is declining.  They wanted to talk about Syria and human trafficking.  They wanted to talk about collegial ministries with a flexible infrastructure that allows the local church to powerfully impact its community.  Notably absent was discussion of human sexuality, which doesn’t seem to be a defining issue for ECO.

Though ECO has had a number of conferences and formal presbytery meetings, this was the test drive for their performance as a national body.  The infrastructure had all been put into place some time ago: a core statement of theology, a polity, a medical plan, a retirement plan, a governing board, moderators, stated clerks, PJCs, committees to oversee ministers, committees to oversee ordination, and the like.  But this was the test to see if it would function as a working assembly.  Among other things, the Synod gathered to affirm an ordination process and its Ordination Manual and to make plans for church planting.  It discussed minor revisions to its polity.  The Presbytery of the West interviewed and passed its first candidate for ordination.  It was a careful blend of church administration and ministry training.  ECO successfully executed its business as a national body.

Two things were, I think, notable.  First, it wasn’t primarily a business meeting.  The meetings at which business was conducted had the feel of necessity punctuated with moments of enthusiasm.  But the conference itself hosted a powerful and dynamic worship team alongside notable speakers like Jim Mellado of the Willow Creek Association, Gary Haugen of International Justice Mission, and Leighton and Kevin Ford.  There was more celebration than deliberation.  There were several dozen breakout seminars to equip and train leaders in a number of areas, including strategic planning and change management, issues concerning missions outside the US, discussions of Reformed confessions, effective use of technology, Korean church ministries, and more.  Secondly, there wasn’t a spirit of debate in the room.  I asked someone on staff with the PCUSA how this compared to General Assembly.  He said, “There’s no politicking.”

Earlier in the week, the day before I left for the conference, I listened to a retired PCUSA seminary professor compare the leaders of ECO to racists and sexists, saying something to the effect that Jesus was bleeding because people were leaving the denomination.  What I saw at the Synod gathering was Jesus in action.  This is a movement that is going to lead lost people to Jesus, plant churches, and bring justice to a lost world.  In a word, I think I just went to my first mission conference.  And if Jesus was doing anything, he was dancing.

Cultural Scripts

The reason this debate is at the center of culture is because Christians have not acted like Jesus.  Don’t try to demonize gays and lesbians on this.  If Christians had shown a shred of decency (or even of humanity) over this issue over two thousand years, they might not be suffering the backlash that they are just beginning to suffer.  That’s because Christians have addressed this issue with pronouncements and position papers rather than love.  It never crossed the minds of the bulk of Christians to identify with the woman caught in adultery and facing death by bludgeoning.  We just stood back and said, “The law says no.”

Picture a fifteen year old boy.  He’s lost in a world of confusion as he tries to establish his identity, find friends, individuate from his parents, dream of the future, and fall in love.  He is a mess of ego and hormones.  No one who has been fifteen would ever do it again.

Now imagine that he finds himself attracted to other boys, with whom he identifies.  Girls just don’t hold the same interest.  But between the things he hears from the bullies on the playground and the things he hears from the bullies in Sunday School, he kind of knows that this is off script.  So he keeps it to himself.  It starts to make him nervous, because he wants to be normal.  He wants to be accepted.  He starts to pray that his desires would change or go away.  But they don’t.  He dabbles in gay pornography and then feels ashamed of himself.  He still doesn’t tell anyone.  He doubts himself.  He doubts prayer.  He doubts God.  He doubts life.

Now he is presented with two cultural scripts.  A cultural script is sort of a storyline for your life.  They’re all around us.  It tells us how you are to generally behave if you want to fit into any one particular group, culture, or relationship.  There’s a brutish, truck-driving, military man script.  There’s a demure, responsible housewife script.  There’s a driven, type-A, businessman script.  This fifteen year old is offered two scripts.

One is a growing culture of love and acceptance.  It teaches that he should be free to develop into his full potential as a responsible, thoughtful adult.  It teaches that he should be able to express his opinions without persecution, silence, and shame.  It allows him to fall in love and to seek companionship.

The second script tells him that he is broken.  It says so with a sense of sympathy.  The solution to the brokenness is suppress his desires and manage his behavior.  This can be done with a lot of work, prayer, and support.  However, by and large, there are not people around who know how to support him.  He’s referred to a specialized group that has quiet meetings in the back room of a church.  There’s not a sense that he is supposed to talk about it.  He’s ok, but questionable.  To be fair, his closest friends know his deepest secrets and love him.  They walk with him.  It’s only because of them that he doesn’t feel completely alone.

The first script is being offered by the gay community.  The second script is being offered by the Christian Church.  One is confident, growing, and seems to be arising out of persecution with force and popular appeal.  The other still seems to be limping along without a clear message.  Which one is this fifteen year old likely to take?  Which one would you take?  Which one sounds more like Jesus?

Dear Christian Church – as you suffer the consequences of the mess you’ve made, pray that the secular culture around you does a better job following Jesus’ teaching to love your neighbor than you have.

In my next post on the subject, I’d like to talk about what the Bible does and doesn’t say.

Ritual and Wonder

The fifth and sixth things I’m teaching my kids for Christmas this year go together.  The fifth is something that’s only appealing to grandparents.  The sixth will make sense to grandchildren.

I remember visiting a Greek Orthodox church for a wedding.  The service was two hours long.  We stood for most of it.  The couple processed in and circled the room three times, signifying the Trinity.  The priest came in carrying the Bible over his head, representing its authority over us.  The couple wore crowns made of flowers, symbolizing the return to the innocence of Eden, as I recall.  Everything was bound by timeless and meaning-rich rituals.  Everything had purpose.

This Christmas, we set up a tree; we pull out an ornament dated for each year your mother and I have been married, some of which have younger pictures of you; we have dinner with the family; we attend Christmas eve services at church; we tell stories of a mysterious saint who leaves presents.  All of this can be written off as frivolity, but in fact, it’s something very different.  Ritual enshrines the value of family in memory and in culture.  Ritual has deep meaning.  Ritual is the museum in which great truths are kept on display.

Conversely, ritual can become the yellowed notes behind which a tenured professor hides.  Ritual can be the keeping of traditions that no longer engage the cultural imagination, like a stained glass window outside of which a new brick wall has been built.  Ritual has cobwebs.  It only gains life when its outward expression is no longer separated from its original emotional content.  It only has content when someone is there to translate the meaning of the symbols.  It only serves its purpose when it can be seen through the eyes of a child.

So remember these two great truths: ritual is deeply meaningful, and wonder is better than ritual.

Family

The fourth thing I want my kids to know this Christmas is actually one they will not consciously notice, though it undergirds everything they do.

A psychologist friend once told me that the way your family shapes your identity is like a potter shaping a ball of clay and then leaving it in the sun to dry.  Before it is completely dry, you can still leave fingerprints on it, but it’s hard to do much with the original shape.  Our families are that early potter that do most of the shaping of personality, habits, and drive.

As we gather for dinner at my in-laws house this year on Christmas day, I will go with my usual reservations.  They are a family that has a lot to say, and I generally hide quietly in the corner through most of our gatherings.  I will have had a couple of aspirin in advance.  I love my extended family, but you’re talking about dropping someone with the personality of a librarian into a fiesta.

But I wouldn’t miss it for the world.

And I want my kids to know that the nuclear family: dad, mom, and the kids, is an essential building block of all society that must be preserved.  I want them invested in the idea of family universally and the experience of their family particularly.  We continue to cheapen family in America by making marriage inessential and child-bearing optional.  First we assimilated divorce and then cohabitation.  Now there are flippant voices calling for the mainstreaming of adultery and serious voices reshaping marriage altogether.  Deconstructionists are trying to tell us that this is inevitable and only fair.

What we’re doing is messing up the best chance the potter has.

So kids, pay attention to how your grandparents act and what your aunties say and how the cousins are the same and different from one another.  They are some of the most sure access you will have to self-understanding.  And be sure when the day comes that you are making Christmas plans of your own with family members we have not yet met – family is essential.

Jesus, et. al.

This is the third thing I want my kids to know for Christmas.  As you grow up, you’re going to hear that out there in the world there is a pantheon of gods.  There is the god who revealed himself to Joseph Smith on some strangely misplaced golden tablets.  Another god whispered in Muhammed’s ear and led him to be a king.  There was a string of god who ruled the sea, the sky, and the elements in the ancient world, and many of the same kind by different names that still dominate the landscape of worship in India.

We are a race of polytheists.  Christmas is just the birth of another god.

But here’s the thing.  Christianity is not like other religions.  Religions historically come of certain stripes.  There are those that help humanity escape from reality, and those that help humanity define the forces that move reality.  Most of them empowered someone to be in charge of things.  Christianity is not like other religions.  In the story of this god, he becomes man in the name of love for a lost humanity.  He endures the indignity of humility so as to restore us to a relationship that we called off.

As a result, no one gets put in charge.  The forces that move reality are just a mystery and wonder as they always were.  And Christians are called to do anything but escape reality – we worship the God who joined the real world.

Rather than writing Christianity off as just another religious fiction, realize that all of these religions are attempted guesses that play on the human hardwiring that makes us go looking for our Creator.

Rather than writing Christianity off as an undeservedly elitist belief system that aims to dominate other worldviews, realize that it’s claim to authority only comes from the action of a humble God who spoke into history.

And rather than giving up on God in a world where specters and shadows of God abound, don’t give up your pursuit of him until you’ve found the real thing.  I suspect you’ll find it in a manger.

God and Tragedy

ImageIn the wake of the massacre of children in Newtown, CT, today, one might wonder how people believe in a good God.  Faith lives in the midst of tragedy only if we have accepted them in the right order.

We carry around a sort of mental “God box,” a collection of theological ideas that we pick up along the course of life’s way.  When we are young, we may hear, “Jesus loves me.” We embrace that idea, and that idea goes into our God box.  We hear, “God is strong,” and that makes us feel safe, so in it goes.  We hear, “God is good,” which only makes sense.  Then somewhere along the way we pick up, “Bad things happen,” “Good people suffer,” and “I’m mortal.” Those reluctantly go in too.

Then somewhere along the way we look into our God box and realize we have a disconnected mess of ideas.  Some people lose their faith at that moment.  My sense is that those who accepted a good, safe, powerful, loving God before they had really suffered are the first to give up.

We may successfully insulate ourselves from a broken world for a season, but eventually we have to face it.  And perhaps we should face it first.  The world is horribly, terribly broken.  God didn’t break it.  We broke it in our collective humanity (Gen. 3:6).  We break it individually, every one of us (Rom 3:23).  We break it daily.  And all of the world manifests signs of its brokenness.  We are born with signs of the world’s brokenness, down to the level of genetic tendencies towards self-destruction and bio-chemical disorders.  We are born into broken and dysfunctional families.  And we are subject to the random, hateful brokenness of others.

In the midst of tragedy, God has not abandoned us.  God has given us the deepest sign of dignity: the freedom to act out our will, even in horrible ways.  He loved us enough to do that.  Then God our Father longs to restore us to health.  He loved us enough to show us who he was, in Jesus, so that we wouldn’t have to guess at who he is.  He loves us enough to work on our hearts when we place them before him.  And he loves us enough to hold us when we cry.

Tragedy does not nullify the existence of a good God.  It is only a reprise of the crucifixion.  And even crucifixion can be subsumed into the story of God.

The Mystery of the Missing Mystery

shellIt occurs to me that the secular culture can only succeed in triumphing over the Church when it misplaces mystery.  The secular culture must lead us through some back-bending mental gymnastics to convince us that there is no mystery where it obviously is, and that there is mystery shrouding all kinds of things that are patently obvious to a clear-headed ten year old.

 

First, it must extract mystery from experience like taking color out of a painting.  Atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel has made a name for himself recently by suggesting that blind Darwinian evolution is simply an inadequate explanation for the complexity of life.  He writes, “Physico-chemical reductionism in biology is the orthodox view, and any resistance to it is regarded as not only scientifically but politically incorrect.  But for a long time I have found the materialist account of how we and our fellow organisms came to exist hard to believe, including the standard version of how the evolutionary process works” (Mind and Cosmos, p5).  This position is not unique; rather, what is unique is that the well-respected atheist got picked by the same team captain who chose the Kansas Board of Education, the President of Southern Baptist Seminary, and the Pope.  Secular society must convince us that wonder is a physiological reaction no more meaningful than indigestion.  In fact, wonder is sonar.

 

A child walking down a beach can consider the vastness of the ocean without being aware of the uncharted world within her own brain.  She can run her fingers over the smooth, ivory underbelly of a spiraled shell without understanding the Fibonacci sequence.  She is cascading with sensations and emotions and imagination, and everything inside her tells her that the world is magic.  A good education will cure her of that.  Science will do its darndest to reduce her to overconfident explanations, and, should she go that way, seminary will do worse.  The fact is that she right now has a better sense for the way the world is than the person who can analyze its particulars.  Her wonder is a compass pointing her in the direction of a wonderful counselor.

 

Second, secular society must put mystery where it’s not.  It must convince us that our intuitions for morality, which seem, on their face, straightforward, are forever awash in grayness.  Derrida would claim to stand at the place where forms are stamped into particulars, where, if one were sufficiently adept, one could see that every clear and distinct idea is simply the manipulation of whomever is in power.  Clear and distinct ideas are not.  Truth, said Foucault, is the error that has been hardened by the long baking process of history.  If we had the time and patience to trace every idea back through its genealogy to its origin, we would find that none of them have any more authority than if they had been announced by the Wizard of Oz.  Thus, secular society would have us believe, those things that seem most obvious to us actually shouldn’t be.  The moral goal of secular society is that morality would be reduced to, “Seems like I shouldn’t, but it’s not hurting anyone.”

 

C.S. Lewis quips in the Screwtape Letters that the tempter’s ultimate goal for humanity is the materialist-magician: he who believes in the supernatural which can ultimately be explained naturally.  Secular society will be able to put the Church aside when it has finally turned particles into little, tiny gods.

Out of Print

ImageThe irony of Newsweek going out of print is that you would think a news agency would see it coming.  With the realities of a 1991 sales peak, declining revenue, and all cultural signs pointing towards the digital media replacing print, you’d think that…I don’t know…someone who was used to reporting on current trends would catch on.  I guess no one got assigned to that story.  Instead, the editor is tearfully promising layoffs and the staff are nervously giving anonymous interviews.

In churchland, we’re doing the same thing.  The realities are plain to the naked eye: declining attendance for 45 years in Protestant denominations, worship styles that no longer appeal to the modern ear, theological conversations that address questions no one is asking, congregations from which young adults have evacuated.  So what kind of reporter do we have to assign to this to get us to see it?

I wonder if the staff of Newsweek didn’t sit contentedly at the breakfast table flipping through paper journals while their kids sat at the same table tapping screens with their thumbs.  Kind of like heading off to church and failing to notice that you left the kids at home, which is in fact what is statistically happening to church attendance in America.

So I have a four steps that might help Christians attend to present realities rather than waiting for it all to come crashing down.  This is how to be your own reporter at church.

1.  If you haven’t invited anyone to church in a year, stop going to church.  Jesus put you in the world on a mission, and you’re not doing it.  You’ve become a consumer of religious goods and services.  If you miss church enough, it might actually motivate you to do what he’s told you to do.

2.  When you come back, walk to church very, very slowly.  Starting from the time you can see the church down the street, take time to note everything you see, hear, and feel.  Think about what those sights, sounds and feelings would do to someone who was nervously coming to church for the first time.  If you have the sense that it would be like waking up on an episode of Survivor, it might be time to rebuild your entrance way with better hospitality, clearer signs, and intentional welcome.

3.  Take note of everything in your church that is counter-cultural, and then decide why it’s counter-cultural.  If it’s counter-cultural because the gospel is counter-cultural, keep it.  If it’s counter-cultural because fifty years ago the culture changed and you didn’t, pitch it.

4.  Stop making excuses.

The bottom line is the value of one lost sheep over and against ninety-nine safe ones.  Of course, this is not the path of least resistance.  This one involves change, misunderstanding, and rejection.  But then it’s better than having to tearfully explain failure to your people for something that you could have seen coming.

A Final Word

ImageThere is an odd linguistic curiosity of history that I believe has gone unnoticed.

The historian Suetonius tells us that in his day, Julius Caesar used to brand his belongings with the logo “Veni, vidi, vici.” You may not recognize it in its original form, but you know its translation: I came, I saw, I conquered.  You recognize it, of course, because it’s what we all say when we leave Farrell’s.

Here’s the odd coincidence, unplanned anywhere except perhaps in the mind of God.  When Jesus came on the scene, he said, “I am the way and the truth and the life.” When that phrase made it into Latin, the language of Caesar, the three key words translated: via, veritas, vita.  It stands as a stark rival alliteration.

I ponder these two men, both hailed as gods after their deaths, both leaving behind epitaphs of a sort.  The similarity between the two claims is enough to catch the eye, and the weight of their difference is enough to pressure the conscience.  We can choose to live lives in which we conquer, in which we prove ourselves, in which we triumph.  Or we can follow in the way of the one who taught us that life is what you get when you follow the way to the truth.  One lay down roads to conquer an empire.  The other became a road for tired travelers in search of a peaceful kingdom.  It strikes me that we must choose one or the other epitaph for ourselves.  We are either conquerors, or we are followers on the Way (Acts 9:2). 

Between those two men, one of them now has over 2 billion living followers, and countless more from throughout history.  The other has a nice plaque on the ground in Rome.