THE MAGAZINE FOR LEADERS SHAPING THE FUTURE OF THE CHURCH From the makers of RELEVANT | April/May 2011
CHURCH
WHAT DOES YOUR CHURCH BRAND ACTUALLY SAY? p. 46
GLOBAL
THE IRAQI CHURCH UNDER FIRE p. 50
CREATIVE
5 WAYS TO CULTIVATE (& KEEP) CREATIVITY p. 44
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CONTENTS DEPARTMENTS
8 Neues
FEATURES
30 Predictable Church Syndrome | by Steve and Cheri Saccone
18 Neue Info
32 True Love Isn’t Waiting | by Tyler Charles
22 Neue Church
38 Andy Stanley: Why You Should Preach Grace | by Josh Lujan Loveless
Apartment Life
40 How Long Will Sunday Stay Segregated? | by Dr. Tony Evans
24 Neue Thought
44 5 Ways to Cultivate (and Keep) Creativity | by Jason Fried and David
One Day’s Wages
Service as Lifestyle, Not Obligation by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove The Numbers That Matter by Jo Saxton
28 Neue Voices
Heinemeier Hansson
46 Church as Brand | by Chris Haw
Jon Tyson
50 The Iraqi Church Under Fire | by Rev’d Canon Andrew P B White
62 Neue Recommends
64 Last Word
58 Refocusing on the Family | by Alan and Debra Hirsch
Sprinting a Marathon by Josh Lujan Loveless
p. 58
54 Do You Want a Revival? | by Collin Hansen
p. 32
p. 46
p. 28 p. 30
ACT. THINK. DISCUSS. In the following pages, we invite you to interact with the content we’ve assembled by acting, thinking and discussing. The prompts we offer at the bottom of each page are meant for both you and your team as you wrestle with the ideas shaping the future of the Church.
JOIN US IN AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND IDEAS SHAPING THE FUTURE OF THE CHURCH From the makers of RELEVANT | April/May 2011 | Issue 06
EDITOR & PUBLISHER
Cameron Strang > cameron@relevantmediagroup.com
Editorial Director | Roxanne Wieman > roxanne@relevantmediagroup.com Senior Editor | Josh Lujan Loveless > joshl@relevantmediagroup.com Associate Editor | Ashley Emert > ashley@relevantmediagroup.com Associate Editor | Ryan Hamm > ryan@relevantmediagroup.com Editorial Assistant | Alyce Gilligan > alyce@relevantmediagroup.com CONTRIBUTING WRITERS: Tyler Charles, Dr. Tony Evans, Jason Fried, Collin Hansen, David Heinemeier Hansson, Chris Haw, Alan and Debra Hirsch, Steve and Cheri Saccone, Jo Saxton, Rev’d Canon Dr. Andrew P B White, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove Design Director | Amy Duty > amy@relevantmediagroup.com Senior Designer | Chaz Russo > chaz@relevantmediagroup.com Senior Marketing Designer | Jesse Penico > jesse@relevantmediagroup.com CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS: Rickey Kraemer, Gage Young Chief Marketing & Finance Officer | Josh Babyar > josh@relevantmediagroup.com Account Director | Philip Self > philip@relevantmediagroup.com Account Director | Michael Romero > michael@relevantmediagroup.com Promotions and Campaigns Manager | Sarahbeth Wesley > sarahbeth@relevantmediagroup.com Circulation Coordinator | Rachel Gittens > rachel@relevantmediagroup.com Marketing Assistant | Richard Butcher > richard@relevantmediagroup.com Chief Innovation Officer | Chris Miyata > chris@relevantmediagroup.com Audio/Video Producer | Chad Michael Snavely > chad@relevantmediagroup.com Systems Administrator | Josh Strohm > joshs@relevantmediagroup.com Web Developer | David Barratt > david@relevantmediagroup.com Web Production Assistant | Lin Jackson > lin@relevantmediagroup.com
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IS IT
TO O L AT E ? Charles Kimball addresses the urgent global problem of the interplay between Abrahamic religions and politics to answer the question, “Is it too late to change course?�
NEUES WHAT IS A CHURCH WORTH?
New research attempts to give an economic value to local houses of worship How do you measure the worth of a church? There’s certainly more to a church than dollars and cents, buildings and budgets. But how do you measure all the intangibles a church brings to the community? Ram Cnaan, a professor of social policy at University of Pennsylvania, with the research group Partners for Sacred Places, set out to determine just that. Cnaan proposed the true, monetary value of a church lies beyond their buildings and their budgets—it’s in their economic “halo effect.” The group assessed 54 areas, including counseling, weddings, funerals, childcare, education, outreach programs and community activities. They assigned financial values for each, even such seemingly immeasurable services as a church’s role in cultivating social responsibility, preventing divorces, averting suicides and healing addictions. The total annual economic benefits of the churches analyzed came in at $50,577,098. And that shocking number represents only 10 Protestant congregations, a Catholic parish and a synagogue, all within the Philadelphia area. The only house of worship with less-thanstellar numbers was marred by plummeting neighborhood real estate values. Though Cnaan stands by the as-yet unpublished report, he acknowledges that it may warrant some wide eyes. “It’s quite possible someone will say we calculated all wrong,” he says. Some numbers came from existing scholarly research. For example, pastoral counseling that 8
The Value of Church The economic “halo effect” of 12 Philadelphia congregations: prevents divorce is worth $18,000, and diverting someone from suicide is $19,600.* But other vague sums were arrived at within this research, such as $375 for instructing children in “pro-social values.” Cnaan and Partners for Sacred Places expect those outside of the Church may challenge these specifics. Ultimately, they believe their conclusions could prompt positive change, stating in their report, “Equipped with such measurements, a congregation could produce hard numbers to show community organizations, policy makers and potential funders the value of its local presence.” It wouldn’t be the first time Cnaan and Partners for Sacred Places opened eyes to the value of churches: George W. Bush was inspired to create the White House Office of Faith-based and Community Initiatives after seeing their research on the impact of urban congregations in poor communities.
*THINK: Probably not the number you’d actually want to share with someone considering suicide.
Blessed Virgin Mary, Kensington $22,440,382 Rodeph Shalom, N Philadelphia $7,969,884 First Baptist, Center City
$6,090,032
Mother Bethel A.M.E., Center City $3,188,685 Calvary Methodist, W Philadelphia $2,597,359 Arch Street United Methodist, Center City $1,871,621 Shiloh Baptist, Center City
$1,656,456
Gloria Dei Episcopal, Queen Village $1,646,469 Summit Presbyterian, Mount Airy $1,465,327 Jones Tabernacle A.M.E., N Philadelphia $1,126,231 St. Mary’s Episcopal, University City $750,244 St. Luke’s and the Epiphany, Center City $225,595
i f o n ly h e l p i n g t h e p o o r w e r e t h at e a s y. . . B u t i t ’ s n o t.
visit WhenHelpingHurts.org to learn more about a new paradigm of ministry to the poor
ava i l a b l e at y o u r fav o r i t e l o c a l o r o n l i n e bookstore or call 1-800-678-6928
NEUES
Ricky Gervais Loves Good, Not God
SMILE! YOU’RE ON ... YOUR COMPUTER
Emotion measurement technology tracks responses to web videos
By all accounts, YouTube is one of the biggest timewasters on the Internet. But a new company is trying to change that. Affectiva measures emotional response to web videos for the purposes of product testing, market research, clinical studies and psychological experiments.
How? By seeing what makes you smile. Facial recognition software creates a smile track for users who opt-in and view a specific trailer, product or commercial. The National Science Foundation-funded program will likely expand from a website to a cloud network, and will be able to
monitor a variety of other facial expressions. From the science of shopping, to the emotional engagement of those with autism, Affectiva could bring clarity to a number of fields—and it also could mean your excessive views of that Volkswagen Star Wars commercial are actually quite productive.
British comedian and actor Ricky Gervais (The Office, Extras) has never been afraid to step on a few toes, whether he’s being a little rude or outright blasphemous. He raised eyebrows at this year’s Golden Globe awards, where he hosted and yelled, “Thank God for making me an atheist!” But surprisingly, Gervais recently told CNN’s Piers Morgan that the intent of his religious statements is never to offend. “When someone thanks God, I don’t get offended,” Gervais points out. “Unlike religious people, I look at all religions equally.” Though he’s long left the Christian values of his working-class upbringing, Gervais claims he still strives for kindness, saying, “I’m good to people because it’s the way I want to be treated.” Presumably, this means he doesn’t consider Tom Cruise a “person.”
“I get a funny feeling when I see a friend, or a mountain or an animal. It fills me with joy. My first love is science and nature.” —Ricky Gervais
Pocket Priest | Pope approves new confession app Turns out there wasn’t an app for quite everything yet. Little iApps recently took the sacrament of confession and created a mobile counterpart. The Roman Catholic Church has given the app their blessing, perhaps due to Pope Benedict XVI’s admonition that the denomination embrace the digital world. IPhone users can purchase the Confession app, which tracks admitted sins and also allows 10
DISCUSS: Is there a level of relationship more vulnerable than confession?
*
users to examine a customized conscience, for just $2. (Users must still go to a priest for absolution.) But while Confession has the approval of faith leaders, confession booths are by no means being phased out. As Pope Benedict XVI said, “It is important always to remember that virtual contact cannot and must not take the place of direct human contact with people at every level of our lives.”*
224 pages, paperback, 978-0-8308-3618-5, $17.00
redeeming cynicism
faith without illusions Andrew Byers identifies the primary factors in the church that inspire disillusionment rather than faith and proceeds to help cynics channel their frustrations into the redemptive vocations found in the Bible: the prophet, the sage, the tragic poet. These all find their fulfillment in Jesus, who inspires cynics in every age to the high calling of hopeful realism. Andrew J. Byers (M.Div., Beeson Divinity School at Samford University) leads University Christian Fellowship the college ministry at Mountain Brook Community Church in Birmingham, Alabama. He is currently working on his Ph.D. in New Testament wtih Durham University (England) and blogs regularly at Galadriel’s Miror.
“An important and timely book of hopeful realism.” —Timothy George, founding dean, Beeson Divinity School
likewisebooks.com
800.843.9487
NEUES
BE NICE, FEEL GOOD
Study shows that personal well-being is closely related to social good People with higher well-being are usually those who give back, says a recent Gallup poll. Individuals rated their personal well-being, then were given a Civic Engagement Index based on how often they helped a stranger, gave money or volunteered. Those who said religion is important had an index nine points higher than those who didn’t.
53%
Well-Being By Numbers
45%
41%
Survey respondents rated their personal well-being and were then given a Civic Engagement Index (CEI). Here’s how they measured up.
b Microvolunteering 101
32% 27% 25% 17%
16%
THRIVING CEI: 40
STRUGGLING CEI: 30
SUFFERING CEI: 20
OK, Ready? “God Is Dead” on Three ... | High school and college students rally for atheism While atheists don’t believe in organized religion, they certainly don’t mind forming their own organized non-religion. The Secular Student Alliance, a movement of campus groups for atheist students, now boasts 250 affiliates around the world. This includes 16 groups for high school students alone. Two years ago, the SSA could only claim 100 campus chapters. This rapid rise coincided with findings from the American Religious Identification Survey, which 12
*THINK: Does this number surprise you? How is it reflected in your church?
Volunteered time
Donated money
Helped a stranger
Volunteered time
Donated money
Helped a stranger
Volunteered time
Donated money
10% Helped a stranger
This probably sounds familiar: You want to use your career and job skills for your community, but the only time you have to give is spare time ... which is hard to come by. So how can you serve, even when you know how busy you are? Sparked is a microvolunteering web resource that matches users to challenges by their skills and causes. First, users identify their passion, whether it be for education, animals, poverty, religion, health or other issues. Next, they offer whatever their specialty or service may be. And they vary wildly—you name it, someone needs it. Sparked then creates a profile, filled with challenges from nonprofits around the world. These projects could range from simply asking for feedback, to writing proposals for grants, to optimizing website navigation—for free. Maybe you can’t always meet the mouths being fed face-to-face. This is just one way to use your time and talents to make sure someone else can.
shows young people as America’s least religious. While 15 percent of the general population claim no faith, that number spikes by 14 percent for 18- to 29-year-olds.* Why has this generation so quickly lost faith—or failed to find it in the first place? That answer is unclear, but the SSA is confident they’ll continue growing. SSA Executive Director August Brunsman stated, “The question is not whether we can get a group on every campus—but when it will happen.”
GET NEW BEARINGS
FALLING UPWARD:
A SPIRITUALITY FOR THE TWO HALVES OF LIFE In Falling Upward, Fr. Richard Rohr helps you see opportunity and hope in the midst of life’s chaos. It’s essential reading for anyone at a crossroads or asking, “What now?”
NEUES
WHY SO SELF-CENTERED? Though this generation has been marked by movements of compassion, a study from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor found that 75 percent of students are less empathetic than students 30 years ago. One reason for this decline may be that the past few decades have created a tendency toward independence and isolation. And as if the public needed yet another incentive to pick up a book now and then, research also suggests this inability to understand and share the emotions of others could be the result of a general decline in reading. Less than 50 percent of adults say they read for pleasure, while studies say exposure to fiction often contributes to the growth of empathy.* Which explains why LeVar Burton was always so nice ...
TEDx Brings TED Conference to Communities Each year, TED conferences draw the greatest minds from a variety of fields to eloquently remind you of what we humans can accomplish. Until now, it took thousands of dollars to sit under such inspiration, or a hefty amount to watch via webcast. But TEDx is taking the TED experience and packaging it for communities. Individuals and organizations can customize a oneday TEDx event for their local purposes, featuring a hybrid of TED Talks screenings and live original presentations and performances. One bonus: If you cry over a particularly stirring speech, at least you’ll be among familiar faces.
FROM THE NEUE PO DCAS T Nancy Sleeth
The Neue Podcast is a weekly conversation with ministers and thinkers shaping the future of the Church.
“Our challenge is to help people to not see this as a liberal or a conservative issue, but as a scriptural issue. It’s one of the first commandments [God] gave to humanity, to tend and protect the garden. It’s not a choice we have—it’s just a commandment.”
“The fact that empathy is declining means there’s more fluidity to it than previously thought. It means empathy can change. It can go up.” —Sara H. Konrath, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor
Steve Taylor “We are assuming that people know that [Blue Like Jazz] is not going to be a family movie. ... I have a daughter. We all love things that are good for the whole family. But the thought that faith-friendly and familyfriendly are the same thing is absurd, and is a really bad idea.”
Shauna Niequist Mike Foster “You want to have an impact in culture? You want to connect with people? You want a deep relationship with people? You want people to follow your values and your beliefs? Just show grace. Be accepting. Invite them. Love them. Have mercy and compassion on people. That is an incredibly attractive thing.”
“I think there is tremendous pressure on pastors to live with a certain amount of dishonesty in order to preserve a myth about them. ... There have to be appropriate ways for pastors to tell stories about their lives that include both the bitter and the sweet in their lives without it feeling like they’re not fit to lead their congregation.“
Subscribe at iTunes. Search keyword “Neue.”
14
*ACT: When was the last time you read a novel? Go to the library or bookstore in the next few days and pick up a fiction book. Sure to grow some empathy: anything by Jhumpa Lahiri, Toni Morrison or Graham Greene.
Chai Ling “For some of the families who have taken matters into their own hands—to abort the baby girls, abandon baby girls, some selling their own children— they need some kind of reconciliation and [to] know there’s a God who will forgive them, and their baby will be safe with God.”
What does it look like to grow to full maturity in Christ? Is it even possible? Throughout Scripture, the picture couldn’t be clearer that a loving God designed our faith to flourish when we live out the principles of philanthropy. In The Whole Life Offering:
Christianity as Philanthropy, Rev. Eric Foley reveals how philanthropy conveys the profound breadth and depth of God’s love. At its core, it’s what propels us to be doers of the Word and not just passive trustees if we are to fully experience the Holy Spirit-empowered growth toward full maturity in Christ. It’s one-part discipleship manual, one part sourcebook of Scripture and readings spanning Christian history, and one part impressively researched treatise on how philanthropy and Christianity can and must be reunited to cultivate a fruitful faith expression.
Visit thewholelifeoffering.com/neue today to read an excerpt and purchase your copy.
W
DOERS OF THE WORD
Doers of the worD Publishing
NEUES Is greater interaction between Muslim and Western worlds a threat or a benefit? What the world thinks about contact and communication between the two largest religions:
UNITED STATES
EGYPT
76% Benefit 21% Threat 3% Don’t Know
72% Benefit 15% Threat 13% Don’t Know
IRAN
UNITED KINGDOM
63% Benefit 19% Threat 18% Don’t Know
72% Benefit 20% Threat 8% Don’t Know
ISRAEL
PALESTINIAN TERRITORIES
55% Benefit 33% Threat 12% Don’t Know
IRAQ
PAKISTAN 39% Benefit 32% Threat 29% Don’t Know
30% 17%
2008 “The West Respects the Muslim World”
16
Sub-Saharan Africa
44%
35%
Middle East - North Africa
60%
Asia
Sub-Saharan Africa
40%
Middle East - North Africa
57%
Asia
71%
64%
32%
The conflict between the cultures of the West and the Middle East is as much about perceptions as it is about people and their politics. Is the relationship between these cultures a positive or negative? Are our differences real or perceived? Depends on who you ask. Gallup conducted an extensive report on Middle East issues and perceptions, surveying several people groups to determine how individuals really feel about “the other side.”
56% Benefit 32% Threat 12% Don’t Know
56% Benefit 18% Threat 26% Don’t Know
46%
Muslim-West Relations
26%
2009 “The Muslim World Respects the West”
*DISCUSS: Why the disconnect, do you think? How could your church work to better Muslim-West relations in your community?
While the state of Muslim-West relations was important to many Muslims, most did not believe the West shared this concern. However, in 2008, majorities across Europe and North America said the relationship was important.*
INFO
[HOW TO…] … Spring Clean Your Office Whether you regularly tidy up or need a full overhaul, here are some ideas for a staff-wide spring cleaning day:
1 . MAKE IT OFFICIAL
The only way any cleaning will get done is if you make it an official work task. Set a block of time aside and set the tone by cleaning your space, too.
2. MAKE IT FUN
Relax the dress code (shorts aren’t going to kill anyone for one day). Turn on music. Make awards for cleaning, like “most germaphobe friendly,” “most organized” and “most creative.”
3. CLEAN YOUR COMPUTER (SOFTWARE)
Everyone has files and emails they can delete—and there’s probably a lot of files and folders on your shared server you can get rid of.
4. CLEAN YOUR COMPUTER (HARDWARE)
Fact: your monitor, mouse and keyboard are disgusting. Purchase the correct cleaning products for each component and make them available to your whole staff.
... ACTUALLY MAKE NEW PEOPLE FEEL WELCOME Think about the last time you visited a church as someone looking for a new church community (guest preaching doesn’t count). How did you feel? If you’re like most people, it was probably really awkward. It’s always hard to come into a new situation with a crowd of people, but it’s even stranger to enter a place where everyone else is comfortable ... except you. Now think about the fact that every new person who enters your church probably feels the same way. So, how can you make visitors feel more welcome? The first step is to find people who are good at meeting new people. Every church has them—they’re the ones hosting and inviting people over (whether they know them or not). Ask those people to consider being on an official welcome team responsible for both pre-
and post-service greeting and meeting any new people. Emphasize hospitality to your congregation, and explain practical ways to be welcoming in your church context. Next, welcome guests in a non-awkward way. Explain that you want to personally welcome them and someone will be in the back after the service to answer questions. It’s OK to offer a gift to newcomers, but don’t go over the top or super cheesy. Whatever you decide to do, make sure you have people they can talk to and literature with information about your church. Finally, have a good website. Include real information on there: your statement of faith, any denomination affiliation, some sample sermons and examples of your worship band or choir. It’ll help people know a bit about the church before they visit.
… Help People Who Have Lost Their Jobs | Tips to help the unemployed in your church and city
18
Benevolence Fund
Career Counseling
Resume/Cover Letter Workshop
Job Fair
Whatever you call it, you likely have some kind of special offering or fund to help people in your congregation who are going through financial hardship. Get to know people who have lost their jobs, and keep in mind how your church can financially help those who have a sudden need.
Ask professionals in your church from every industry or job sector to come for an hour a week to help people in their job search. They can offer practice interviews, tips on what to say (and not to say) to prospective employers and how to make that first, all-important connection.
Have a day-long workshop where people can learn the most effective way to put together a good resume and cover letter. If there isn’t anyone in your church who knows how to best instruct people, consider hiring a professional.
Invite local businesses to set up a job fair at your church, and make it free for anyone in your community to come and see what jobs are available in the area. It will help people practice all the skills they’ve learned in previous workshops.
… Encourage Fitness May is Physical Fitness Month, and just because your church isn’t a gym doesn’t mean you should completely ignore it. This May, use these tips to encourage fitness for both your staff and your congregation: Do Something Together
... Do a Maundy Thursday Service Maundy Thursday is observed the Thursday before Easter Sunday. It’s the first service leading up to Easter weekend, commemorating the Last Supper. The service is geared around Christ’s servanthood and generosity, even as He faced the grim reality of suffering and the Cross. The reading for this service is traditionally John 13. Consider how best to apply this chapter’s lessons and suggestions in your context. The passage includes Jesus washing the disciples’ feet and Jesus’ predictions of betrayal (from both Judas and Peter); it also includes Jesus’ famous command to “love one another” (13:34). If you decide to do a sermon, consider preaching on Jesus’ love and pursuit of community with both Judas and Peter, even though He knew they would betray Him. Or use the “love one another”
admonition to consider how that is best lived in your community. Many churches observe Maundy Thursday with a foot-washing ceremony, bringing to mind Christ’s selflessness and His call for us to love and serve one another similarly. Finally, at the conclusion of the service, prepare your church and congregation for the somber reflection of Good Friday. If your church has an altar, strip it bare and either cover or drape black cloth around the cross at the front of the sanctuary. Maundy Thursday is meant to be observed in the context of Holy Week—that is, it’s the first part of a series of observances that culminate in Easter Sunday. By giving each day its proper due, you commemorate and honor each part of Christ’s life, death and resurrection.
... SET UP A CHURCH CRAIGSLIST Church garage sales may not be your thing, but how about a church Craigslist? Make community tangible by setting up an online resource for people to sell, give and loan stuff they don’t need to people who do. Many churches have developed a sort of church-specific Craigslist clone. You’ll probably need someone who knows what they’re doing with web design and development, but you could also amend a church message board or forum if you already have one. Let people have a place to post what they’re looking for, and then another place for
people to post things they have to sell, give away or loan. People can charge what they want, but try to emphasize the community aspect of it over a mode to make a profit. Additionally, you’ll want to have a careful end user agreement to solve disputes or conflicts between parties if there’s ever a disagreement about a loan or a price. If you can design it to be user-friendly, your site could be a great resource for people in your community—whether they are looking to simplify or to add.
If you live in an urban setting, there are almost always corporate 5Ks in May. Sign up and invite your entire staff and church to sign up with you as members of the same team. Host a couple of light training runs as a lead-up to the actual event.
Have a Competition
If it’s appropriate for your church and context, hold a fitness contest among your staff with a prize awarded to the winner. It could be a weight-loss challenge, a distance challenge or a “work out four days a week” challenge. The specifics are up to you.
Run/Bike/Walk for Something
There will likely be an opportunity for your congregation to run for a cause. If there isn’t, set something up. The point is, regardless if you’re hosting or if you’re joining, find a cause your church can get behind and use physical fitness to raise funds/awareness for it.
Make Your Church More Exercise Friendly
Take small steps to make your grounds and building more exercise friendly. Make sure you have bike racks. If you have the space, put in a small exercise room and a shower room for staff. Have some equipment for your youth to use for soccer or Ultimate Frisbee goals. Small additions can go a long way.
neuemagazine.com 19
INFO
[HOW TO…] ... Get Familiar with Terrence Malick Director Terrence Malick has only released four films, but each is a compelling look at nature, life, death, faith and the soul. His newest, Tree of Life, comes out on May 27 and stars Sean Penn and Brad Pitt. Here’s why you should get caught up on the filmography of this vital auteur:
Badlands
This 1973 film tells the tale of a young girl (played by Sissy Spacek) who runs away with her lover, a violent robber and murderer. As Spacek’s voiceover describes their relationship in stereotypical terms, the man becomes more and more violent. Themes of love, existence and violence are interwoven with the barren landscape, and the voiceover creates a strange intimacy with Spacek’s naive character.
Days of Heaven
Perhaps Malick’s most acclaimed film, Heaven stars Richard Gere as a steel worker who flees Chicago with his girlfriend and sister after killing his boss. The three become seasonal workers for a farmer in Texas. There’s a love triangle, a murder and a lot of beautiful imagery amidst themes of jealousy, desire and humanity’s propensity for violence.
The Thin Red Line
Malick’s 1998 war epic was his first film in almost 20 years, and it didn’t disappoint. Matching stunning visuals with spare ruminations (provided in voiceover and monologues) about humankind’s obsession with killing, what it means to live a worthy life and the madness of war. Plus, it has a ridiculous ensemble cast.
The New World
Sort of about Pocahontas and John Smith, this movie is really about clashing relationships: between people, nature and foreign cultures. Come for Christian Bale, but stay for the vital questions about community and the profoundly moving classical score. 20
... PREACH ON EASTER SUNDAY Preaching an Easter sermon comes with many challenges, not the least of which is the emotional and spiritual weight pastors feel to “deliver” their best message of the year. Because Easter is the highest attended worship gathering in most churches, and also because of the diversity of spiritual worldviews in the people who come together for that weekend, the pressure can be a lot for leaders. This year consider approaching Easter through the questions different people might be asking. Typical Easter messages often preach Jesus as the answer without ever addressing the questions He is the answer to. Give yourself
permission to acknowledge the oddity of atonement. Pastors are notorious for skipping past how bizarre the Christian story sounds to those who are unfamiliar with it. Easter sermons are filled with references to blood sacrifice, crucifixion death and resurrection as if those are common characteristics of 21st century conversation. The truth is most people (including Christians) are still very confused about the mystery of Jesus’ physical death and resurrection, and how all of that translates to life after death for us. Be careful not to minimize the mystery for the sake of wanting people to embrace the truth.
“DON’T JUST DEVELOP FOLLOWERS. DEVELOP LEADERS. TO DO SO, YOU HAVE TO GIVE AWAY MORE THAN RESPONSIBILITIES. GIVE AWAY THE AUTHORITY TO LEAD.” —Craig Groeschel
CHURCH
A LOOK AT UNIQUE TYPES OF COMMUNITY
APARTMENT LIFE EULESS, TX
BY ALYCE GILLIGAN
“We like to say that we simply people until they ask us why.” —Stan Dobbs
ONE DAY’S WAGES SEATTLE, WA
BY ASHLEY EMERT Eugene Cho has a simple idea to combat a complex issue: What would happen if everyone in the world donated one day of their pay to fight extreme poverty? The idea came about several years ago, when Cho, the founding and lead pastor at Quest Church in Seattle, traveled to Burma. He met some villagers there who were living in the jungle in an attempt to flee from the government and military. While speaking to one of the leaders in the village about the makeshift school they had built, Cho was shocked to discover the teachers were paid $40—a year. “Forty dollars is not a lot of money,” he says. “My one day’s wages is about $175. [It was] just the concept of, what would happen if I were to give up a day’s wages, and then start a 22
movement, if you will, based upon that?” Several years later, in 2009, his idea came to fruition in the co-founding—with his wife, Minhee—of One Day’s Wages. Their organization asks, simply enough, that people donate one day of their wages. The money is then either given to the ODW board—who awards grants to small non-governmental organizations and communitybased organizations—or to an ODW partner organization of the donor’s choice. ODW’s partner organizations include Not For Sale Campaign, which fights modern slavery, and charity: water, which seeks to bring clean water to the nearly 1 billion people without it. One of ODW’s recent projects involved raising $15,000 for Nuru, an organization fighting poverty. The money will provide loan capital for 70 families in Kenya, helping them enter Nuru’s agriculture program. Last year, ODW introduced Campaigns for a Cause, where people can donate their birthday (donors ask friends and family
to donate rather than give gifts), a day of work or an idea (where ODW tries to help donors make their fundraising idea a reality). Another element of ODW is Groups for a Cause, where churches, schools and other groups can set a donation goal and work toward raising money for their chosen cause. When they first started ODW, Cho and his wife committed their yearly salary to fighting global poverty. He thinks this commitment helps people relate to ODW. “In learning more about my wife and our story, [others] realize we’re not asking people to do something that we’re personally not willing to do.” Though extreme poverty is a huge issue, Cho believes it can be eradicated in his lifetime. “I do believe it’s possible,” he says. “I think we’re all in agreement that poverty in some form or another is always going to exist. “I choose to defer to many of the so-called experts and mentors who are in this sort of work that believe in our lifetime, in the next 40, 50 years, this can come to an end.”
Did you know 50 percent of people in America’s 10 largest cities live in apartment complexes? Apartment LIfe is acutely aware of this statistic. “What drew us to apartment communities was the number of people living in apartment communities, and how disconnected people were,” says Stan Dobbs, the founder and CEO of Apartment Life. “One study revealed that in 1980, 10 percent of the people in love America said they did not have a close friend they could confide in if they had a problem. By 2004, that number had risen to 24 percent.” The faith-based nonprofit partners with apartment complexes by having a member of their CARES team—couples, singles or families— live in the complex, intentionally cultivate a sense of community and, as a result, retain residents. Members provide a warm welcome for residents at their move-in, and continue to build a relationship until the end of their lease. The program connects residents with services, churches or activities within their region, hosts meals and social events, and periodically conducts surveys regarding life in the unit. The ministry aspect of Apartment Life is under the radar and primarily relational. They offer a support system for someone during a relocation, the loss of a job or the birth of a child. “They live out their faith by serving and loving people,” Dobbs says. “We like to say that we simply love people until they ask us why.” The impact of CARES teams is also quite tangible. “There is no doubt that creating a sense of community is pervasive in the lives of the residents. Building healthy relationships impacts all other areas of their lives,” Dobbs says, referring to the professional and personal progress that often occurs in the lives of their CARES neighbors. Furthermore, the hundreds of complexes that utilized the services of Apartment Life saw a $138,700 average increase of annual cash flow. While the environment of an apartment complex is temporary, Dobbs is confident that Apartment Life is having a lasting impact. “We know from almost 11 years of experience we can make a difference in the lives of those people, and in turn make the world a better place.”
After Shock In the wake of the historic earthquake in the fragile country of Haiti, Kent Annan considers suffering—from the epic to the everyday—as a problem for faith. Along the way he discovers that he is not alone, that from the psalmists of old to our neighbors today, people have followed life to the edge of meaning and have heard God even there, calling for honest faith. 137 pages, paperback, 978-0-8308-3617-8, $15.00
Kent Annan is codirector of Haiti Partners, a nonprofit focused on education in Haiti. He’s worked in Haiti since 2003 and is the author of Following Jesus Through the Eye of the Needle.
“This is a credible book for anyone who has ever wondered where God is in a world full of suffering.” —Jim Wallis, president, Sojourners
likewisebooks.com
800.843.9487
THOUGHT
SERVICE AS LIFESTYLE, NOT OBLIGATION JONATHAN WILSON-HARTGROVE After studying workers at two high-tech firms for more than 1,000 hours, Gloria Mark, an “interruption scientist,” reported that knowledge workers today spend an average of just 11 minutes on a project before switching to another. While focusing on a single project, they typically change tasks every three minutes. You probably know the feeling. We are living through an explosion of access to information and communication technologies. But Mark’s research suggests there’s a downside. Once distracted, workers take an average of 25 minutes to return to their interrupted task. In an eight-hour day, more than a fourth of their work time is consumed by interruptions. Business efficiency experts are beginning to pay attention to how this affects their bottom line. Pastors are noticing the shift, too. It’s harder to get people to commit to meetings than it was 10 years ago. What’s more, people who’ve committed are less likely to show up. While this can be terribly frustrating for all of us, there are deeper spiritual implications to our culture of distraction. If you pay attention to people who are wrestling with life-altering questions—the sort of hard but fertile soil where ministry usually happens—one of the biggest temptations they face is the voice of distraction. When there’s hard relational or soul work to be done, it can feel so
In the past decade, our churches have seen an increase in service ministries that allow people to put hands and feet on the Gospel. Ministries have flourished because they offer churches a concrete way to live out love of neighbor. If you’ve seen the joy that results from a project like that for everyone involved, you can’t help wanting to offer more opportunities like that. But if you’re a pastor who has emphasized service opportunities, you’ve also had the conversation with that big-hearted person who comes with a look of guilt to tell you they’re sorry they can’t make it to the mission blitz this weekend. Between work and the kids and church commitments and the homeless ministry they started with some friends on Saturdays, they’re not sure how they can fit anything else in. You can see in their eyes the adventure of service isn’t the exciting news it was a year ago. They’re desperate for some encouragement, and everything in you wants to give it to them. But how?
JESUS DOESN’T ASK US TO SQUEEZE SERVICE INTO OUR BUSY LIVES. [HE] INVITES US TO LEAVE EVERYTHING AND BECOME SERVANTS. soothing to just watch a YouTube clip or catch up on Facebook. One thing leads to another, and you’re likely to doze off before you log off. The only hope of calling people out of this trance is to call them to a life of true adventure. We often do that by challenging our congregations with the plight of the poor in Africa or the desperation of lost souls somewhere else. But if we’re to get at the root of our spiritual malaise, we need to call people to pay attention in the places where they are. This is not to discount the real needs that exist elsewhere, but most of us today need to learn how to cultivate our own places before we can be much help to anyone else. 24
We’ve heard enough of the Gospel to know we need to add some service into our lives—to experience the joy of what it means to live for others. But that service has been an add-on to an already busy life. We’ve tried to squeeze it in between our 50-hour-plus work week and our daily trip to the gym. But, truth be told, Jesus doesn’t ask us to squeeze some service into our busy lives. Jesus invites us to leave everything and become servants. Recently, a young woman I know who was serious about her faith started asking what it would really mean to live the Sermon on the Mount. When people on the street asked her for
money, she was haunted by Jesus’ call to give to whoever asks. But she knew it was more complicated than just tossing some spare change their way. “I should invite these guys home with me,” she thought. But how can a single young woman invite men off the street over for dinner at her apartment? About that time, she got to know a hospitality house where Christians had an open dinner with neighbors and friends each night. She started going every once in a while and enjoyed the company. Then it occurred to her: “If I lived like this, I could invite the guy on the street home with me.” What had seemed impossible before was now relatively easy. It just meant changing the way she was living her life. It meant changing everything to become a servant.* As we invite people to pay attention to their place and re-imagine their way of life, we are inviting them to find their rhythm in God’s eternal time. This rhythm is often out of step with the pace of the world system we live in, where everyone else is racing to get ahead and grab the next new thing. It is not easy to find this counter-rhythm. Even when we’re doing all the right things with all the right people, we can get caught up in the demonic urgency of systems that never sleep. Whether we’re working to eradicate poverty in our neighborhoods, save the schools in our city or fight AIDS in Africa, we can be tempted to work without rest because we know the work is never done. Sabbath, as a practice, has gone dormant in many of our communities. But the tradition of Sabbath offers a sustainable counter-rhythm in a culture of death. Because God rests after the work of creation is done, we know something about why we work: to enjoy the good fruit that is made possible by God’s creative grace in the world. Whatever service work we do, then, we do so we can enjoy the fruit of God’s grace in a given place when we till the earth and keep it as we’re called. As any gardener knows, our labor doesn’t guarantee a good harvest. The results are up to God. But God gives us a rhythm of work and Sabbath so we can enjoy the life we’re made for in the places where we are.
Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove
is the author of The Wisdom of Stability and co-compiler of Common Prayer (JonathanWilsonHartgove.com).
DISCUSS: How can you evolve your service ministries so they emphasize a lifestyle more than a one-time or occasional event?
*
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THOUGHT
THE NUMBERS THAT MATTER JO SAXTON The question of impact is one that never really goes away. Are our churches effective? Are our ministries making a difference? How does one measure such things? Attendance numbers? Offering dollars? While it’s natural to define success in numerical terms, we must also make sure we’re counting the right things. It’s challenging to observe that when Jesus commissioned His followers into the world, He didn’t prioritize finances or church buildings; He called them to make disciples of all nations. The obedient response of those first disciples would change the face of their communities, cities, region and, ultimately, the world. They actually accomplished the same things we’re praying for, serving for, laying down our lives for today. Knowing the Great Commission is our calling, too, means we need to ask ourselves some questions: Are we counting what counted most to Jesus: the number of disciple-making disciples engaged in the mission of God? How many people are we discipling? How many people in our churches/ministries are making disciples who make disciples? It’s crucial we understand how Jesus discipled people. As with all the rabbis of the time, discipleship was not a weekly study or didactic class. A disciple didn’t want to just know what the rabbi knew; he wanted to learn how to be like the
relationship with the Father, authentic relationships with believers and a relationship with the world around Him. They’d also learn to imitate His life: to speak as He spoke, to heal the sick, cast out demons, touch the broken, forgive the persecutor and even carry their cross. This discipleship transformed lives, producing missional disciples who in turn would make disciples. Soon an entire community were sharing and living the Good News, healing the sick and casting out demons, whether you were an apostle like Peter, or an administrator distributing resources like Stephen. In time this discipling culture produced the Church (when you set out to build the church first, you don’t always get disciples). A church planting pastor once said to me, “We don’t have a missional problem in the United States—we have a discipleship problem.” The Body of Christ today is innovative and creative, overflowing with talent, gifts, vision and missional strategies to impact our communities. Yet what my friend was driving at was that for
ARE WE COUNTING WHAT COUNTED MOST TO JESUS? rabbi. The rabbi had to be open and accessible enough for the disciple to imitate. Discipleship was not a seasonal program; it was a sacrificial, time-consuming, incarnational process. Jesus discipled people using an appropriate combination of invitation and challenge. He invited people into a close relationship with Him. They ate, traveled and adventured together; He affirmed and encouraged them, and reassured them in tough times. Alongside this, Jesus didn’t hesitate to challenge people to accept the responsibilities of discipleship, to take responsibility for their character, for their attitudes, their actions, to embrace their calling. Using invitation and challenge, Jesus created a discipling culture where people could learn to imitate His priorities: a close 26
all our resources, events and ideas, we struggle to produce (or, if we’re honest, to be) disciples with the kind of transformed lives and missional lifestyle we see in the men and women of the early church. What could it mean to get intentional with discipleship again? Perhaps, imitating the pattern of Jesus it would mean seeking God about discipling a group of people who want to live like Him. It would mean inviting them into a closer relationship with you, but also challenging them at times to take responsibility. We’d learn how to offer both invitation and challenge appropriately like Jesus did. It would include transparency and openness. The kind of transparency that offers an opportunity to practically learn how to follow
Jesus through imitating the example of an ordinary life—your ordinary life, just as Paul encouraged the Corinthians to do (1 Corinthians 11:1). People would see and learn how we spent our time, our money, how we handled our appetites, our stress. They would see and learn how we relate to our friends, spouses, children, enemies. It would mean less privacy, but it would produce transformed hearts and lives. It would produce disciples who are in turn transforming their homes, workplaces, communities. Disciples who are being the Church. Now that is worth counting. I first experienced this about 15 years ago, when I was on staff at St. Thomas Church, in Sheffield, England. Mike Breen, the senior leader at the time, developed “huddles”— groups of leaders who met together regularly for intentional discipleship and leadership development. In time they, too, would prayerfully gather and make disciples, who in turn would go on and do the same. The impact of intentional discipleship was incredible. There were generations of disciples—men and women, staff and lay leaders, young and not so young, every color and culture—with transformed lives. During the decade Mike led the church, there were more than 600 weddings and zero divorces.* Those are numbers worth counting. Those are numbers that show true transformation and lives changed. With a healthy discipling culture as its foundation, the missional leaders at St. Thomas continued to grow and the movement spread way beyond England’s shores. Years later it’s interesting to note that when it comes to counting the church now, St Thomas counts the people who are in discipling relationships. Today’s Western church faces incredible challenges, but also incredible opportunity. We’re passionate about the Gospel. We long to see our churches and our ministries make an impact in our communities. We’ll always need to do the administrative side of church, but let’s remember the numbers that matter the most. Let’s count disciples.
Jo Saxton
is a director of 3DM, a movement/organization helping hundreds of established churches and church planters move into this discipling and missional way of being the Church. WeAre3DM.com.
DISCUSS: Wow. Are there numbers like this to celebrate at your church? Numbers that reveal the transformational power of Jesus in your congregation? *
he looks to resolve a conflict that runs deep. The Christian Atheist small group DVD study is now available. Visit christianatheist.com today.
Are you of two minds? If you profess a belief in God, but live as though He doesn’t exist, you may be more divided than you think. Join pastor Craig Groeschel as
VOICES
JON TYSON ON WHAT HAPPENED
WHEN HE TRIED TO PLANT AN ORLANDO CHURCH IN NEW YORK CITY BYJOSH LUJAN LOVELESS Jon Tyson, lead pastor of Trinity Grace Church, and his team had a vision for planting a church in New York City. The only problem? They didn’t know New York. Their strategy was based on a model that worked in Orlando—and they soon found taking church out of context doesn’t work. After five years in NYC, their approach has changed considerably, and they’ve learned a lot about what it means to be a church with a sense of place.
Q A
What drew you and your team to plant a church in Manhattan? We were trying to look at the idea of cultural acupuncture. Are there places that are disproportionate in their influence to reaching the world, and how do we find a place we feel is a good fit for us? We felt New York was the place that gave us a platform to try and make disciples of all nations.
Q A
What was it like to transplant a dream born in Orlando to NYC? We started with an outsider’s perspective, so a lot of our thinking was really uninformed. Our very naive thinking was, “We did this in Orlando, we can do this in New York.” And that couldn’t have been further from the truth. So we went through a really difficult process that looked something like this: we planted with overconfidence, based on strong ministry success; then coming to terms with what the city is and our inability to be effective in reaching people in the city; a deep, existential crisis that we had no idea what we were doing and we were probably the wrong people to do it; a sense of humility and repentance, saying, “Dear God, who did we think we were that we could do anything like this in a city this big?”; a process of deep unlearning and relearning where we had to ask the question, what is a New Yorker? How can the Gospel challenge and comfort a New Yorker?; a process of rebuilding based on the things we had learned that cost us relationships, cost us people 28
RICKEY KRAEMER
who were part of our community who weren’t able to make those changes because they hadn’t fully settled into the city yet; a process of gaining some initial momentum; and then an obsession with being relevant (“Hey, pay attention, we’re like you”). We went from relevance to trying to reach people through contextualization. Contextualization says: “We are actually one of you. We’re not trying to reach you, we are you.” And then past the point of contextualization to having contextualized friends: “We want the Kingdom of God to have your allegiance. So now we actually don’t care what you think of us again, but it’s not based on arrogance, it’s based on confidence in Jesus and the Gospel.”
Q A
Was there a moment it hit you that the kind of church you were planting wasn’t what New York wanted? There were two moments. One was when a couple who helped to start the church, who had been in the city five years, said, “I could never bring any of my New York friends here.” And I said, “Why?” And they said, “‘Cause this is nothing like New York.” And that really freaked me out. Two weeks later we had a new girl visit our church from Alabama, and she came up to me and said: “I love your church. I never thought I’d find a church like this in New York—it’s exactly like my church back home.” I had this clutching moment that if my church is identical to her church in Alabama, then I’ve built the wrong church.
Q A
Were you and your team on the same page about that? Here’s one thing I did absolutely wrong. Everybody said, “You should plant in a team.” I still think that’s good advice, but I went to all of these church planting sessions before I got money from a bunch of churches—all of these battery of tests—but none of my team got those tests. I arrogantly assumed I was a strong enough leader to lead them through whatever change was coming. It was a wrong mentality. They should have been assessed for whether or not they had the same cultural agility to change and be effective. So they were with me, but then they’d have a crisis and be like: “Hey, Tyson, I know the kind of person you want. That’s not me and I can’t be that person. So where does that leave me?” And I was like: “I’m not sure. I have no idea where that leaves you. But I can’t let what God has called us to hinge upon your ability to change.” So a bunch of painful conversations happened from that.
Q A
When you’re planting a church, how much is wet cement, and how much is concrete? What is concrete is the Gospel, alright? What is concrete is God’s self-imposed
limits: your personality, the state of your marriage. There are real boundaries in place, and those things cannot be violated and your soul prosper. So there are personal things and core theological fundamental. Everything else has to be up for grabs. Our church to this day doesn’t do a style of worship I particularly like. But I know it is absolutely the worship that enables a New Yorker to encounter God in their heart and have the best possible time without freaking out a non-Christian. The best thing you can do is come in really humble and throw all your plans out the window and just learn. You have to distrust most of your instincts, and it is a very rare person who can not only distrust their instincts, but then build contrary to them if needed. So the way to avoid that pain is just move and live in the city and feel its pains in your soul so you can effectively speak to them, rather than coming in and trying to do something.
Q A
How long does it take for someone to become part of where they move to? In New York, seven years. New Yorkers will tell you, if you’ve been here seven years, you’re a New Yorker. If you’ve been here 10 years, you’ve got as much authority as anybody. I’ve been here five years, and I’ve been here longer than most people I meet, which blows my mind. It’s different in every city, and in some places it doesn’t even matter; people don’t care where you’re from. But when there’s places that have a strong identifying mark to them, longevity is simply the key. If you’re from Orlando and you come to New York and you’ve been there a year, what can you tell a New Yorker about how to live specifically within the context of the city and follow Jesus? The longer you’re there, the more skillful you get as a pastor because literally you’re preaching to yourself, where at first you’re just preaching ideas.
Q A
What did that unlearning look like? I’d only ever worked in megachurches. So I had all of these megachurch instincts and they were really unhelpful for church planting. I didn’t have a staff I could hide behind, I didn’t have great programs I could batch people through. I just had my wife and some lame Bible study in our apartment. So my mentality was, let’s get the programs up and running. And that sort of thing didn’t work—I didn’t have any of the New York particulars.* A lot of it was music, a lot of it was preaching—like, a lot of my sermons were sentimental in nature. A lot of my thought process wasn’t intellectual enough; it was literally sloppy thinking, and educated people would call me on it all the time. I didn’t have a robust theology of justice and the poor. So all of my stuff was not incarnational, it was just dramatic. Musically, we had to reconfigure what style works.
We finally joined the church calendar and became liturgical, because most people were coming out of a Catholic or Episcopal background. We could redeem it with something they were familiar with and yet give it new meaning, and they actually got a little joy out of it.
Q A
What is one of the biggest differences you’ve seen between New York and the suburbs? Here’s what I think is the biggest change. In the suburbs you’re trying to motivate people to do things because the typical person is not particularly driven. New Yorkers are really driven. They’re working two or three jobs to stay in the city if they’re young. If they’re making it in their career, they’re working 70 hours a week, sacrificing themselves to compete against all of the other brilliant kids. So in the suburbs all of the spiritual practices you’re trying to get people to do are primarily ones of engagement: serve, do, take initiative, act. Everyone in the city’s nature is doing and acting and working, so the paradigm of spiritual formation is about rest, disengagement, pace of life, ridding people of the idols of career and position. So I had to get a new pastoral set of disciplines and skills to help form people’s souls.
Q A
You now offer a very unique type of worship and community that seems to be thriving. How did you get from there to here? You can’t really love somebody if you don’t know them; you can’t know somebody if you don’t see them. If you live too far away from people, you never see them, so we have to live near one another in order to see people. That’s probably been one of the things that’s made our church function. We’ve got five churches in five neighborhoods, and they’re all small. The biggest one is probably 400 people, and that’s already way too big. We’re trying to plant out of it. We have no growth goals, we’ve got no grand plans; we’re just trying to see where the Spirit’s moving and mobilize people to respond, and really help people to love one another well. Stay and call people to stay. It’s really unsexy stuff—lots of prayer and heaps of proximity-based relationships is probably the key.
Q A
When will you know you are impacting New York? I don’t think anybody can ever know that. As long as we’re being faithful in what we feel called to do and we’re seeing people’s lives changed and we’re impacting how they live their lives in the city, that’s plenty for us. So we’re seeing tons of that and we love it. It’s incredibly motivating and it brings us great joy, so we try and focus on that.
*DISCUSS: Whether you’re in a new church plant or a legacy church, it’s worth asking whether your church is continuing to operate according to the particulars of your city.
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DATE NIGHT WITH WIFE
PRAYER MEETING
FRIDAY | 7:30 PM
10 EVENING SERVICE SUNDAY | 6 PM
TODAY | 9 AM
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BAPTISMS
OUTREACH PROJECT
SUNDAY | 9 AM
09 MARRIAGE COUNSELING WITH THE JOHNSONS
SATURDAY | 9 AM
05 STAFF MEETING FRIDAY | 2 PM
SUNDAY | 2 PM
03 PREPARE SERMON FOR SUNDAY WEDNESDAY | 8 AM
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02 PAY ELECTRIC BILL TODAY | 11 AM
FAMILY NIGHT THURSDAY | 7 PM
P R E D I C TA B L E C H U R C H S Y N D R O M E DISCOVERING YOUR ROLE IN A RAMPANT MALADY BY STEVE AND CHERI SACCONE
“W
HERE HAS THE MAGIC GONE?” When we heard these words come out of our friend’s mouth, we couldn’t help but wonder the same thing. He was referring to that intangible element of ministry that at one time not only enveloped us in wonderment, but also propelled us forward. We found ourselves in common territory: both with a good number of years in ministry behind us, both 30
with a continued sense of calling to the Church and both with a disheartened view of the future. How could we long for the future when our present was so void of anticipation or mystery? With our friend, we commiserated over the fact that we had fallen into the ministry rut: waking up with no great sense of joy for what lay ahead, and going to sleep with no deep fulfillment over what we had accomplished. I know we’re not alone.
There are countless pastors, teachers and leaders within the Church who carry the same heavy burdens of monotony and wonder-less tasks. What often begins as a fiery dream lined with endless possibilities in our 20s slowly settles into no more than an important job filled with what seem to be unimportant duties—endless emails, countless follow-ups, mundane meetings and disappointed people often fill the spaces of our days. GAGE YOUNG
Another more visible problem is how all of this affects our creativity. When there is barely time to spend with family and friends, let alone read a new book or take a walk outside, how can we expect to have fresh ideas? As a result, there is little creativity week-to-week in church, fueling a sense of predictability and a lack of inspiration. Of course there are rich and meaningful moments, and opportunities to work with some of the greatest people on earth. Plus, we can always take comfort in the knowledge that we’re in the service of God, and this comes with an inherent sense of fulfillment. But make no mistake. There are a thousand difficult moments and even more mundane ones that threaten to throw us off course, and to make us forget why we gave our lives to ministry in the first place.
Rock Stars ... or Worn Out? Church communities often expect pastors to be everything—a rock star, a brilliant communicator, an original thinker, a profound conversationalist, a studied theologian, a compassionate counselor, a creative genius, a visionary who is also downto-earth, encouraging yet challenging, humble yet confident, sure but unsure, interesting but not too flashy, open but discrete, together but broken. It’s a burden too big for anyone to carry. Nowhere in the Bible does it say: “Go and be a pastor who is all things to all people, master of everything and without weakness or limitations, full of wit, charm and inhuman capabilities. Now go, make the church more excited about Me.” It isn’t in the Scriptures, but this is often the silent commandment leaders hear swirling around their hearts and minds. The good news: This is not a burden pastors are meant to carry. The bad news: There is a much heavier one they are called to shoulder. The more time you put in, the more you realize the amount of problems that are knotted up within the Church—some that seem beyond the reach of unraveling. In other words, leaders feel disheartened on two counts. First, they often feel less and less impassioned as time goes on. Second, they feel inadequate to tackle the innumerable dysfunctions and challenges within the Church. A reality made more painful because church leaders are also aware of what church could be—of the endless possibilities and profound beauty that exist within God’s living body. It’s a difficult tension to live in. To know how it could be, how it should be, is incredibly difficult, and inspiring at the same time. To see how far the Church is from the ideal, yet feel called by God to be part of the change toward what He designed it to be.
It’s kind of like sitting in a brand new Porsche that doesn’t have an engine: You want to take this thing out and see what it can do, but all you’re left with is a beautiful shell of a car and your imagination. The challenges can be paralyzing.
Where Are You Going? While a lot of people who attend church might experience the dilemma of predictability and apathy, it’s perhaps a bigger concern when leaders don’t feel like anything is worth being excited about. There’s a saying that goes, “No leader can take people where they have not yet gone.” In other words, a leader cannot guide others toward a spiritual place of anticipation if he or she does not live there. Makes perfect sense, right? So much sense that it has frightening implications.
A LEADER CANNOT GUIDE OTHERS TOWARD A SPIRITUAL PLACE OF ANTICIPATION IF HE OR SHE DOES NOT LIVE THERE. If you have been in church for any time at all (and have been paying attention), you have likely met someone who finds church painfully predictable, monotonous and void of all mysticism or spirit. So, whose fault is that? Is it the person’s fault ... or is the church to blame? Are leaders somehow responsible for that church’s lack of passion and anticipatory spirit? Or is every follower of Jesus Christ the master of his or her own spiritual ship? In short, is it the church’s problem, or the person’s problem? Of course, it’s a bit of both. But how many leaders expect others to go where they are nowhere near? Do they experience anticipation in an ongoing way, or are they bored even with themselves? Are they excited about what God is doing, not just in the world around them, but in their own hearts? Are they in step with a divine leader who is completely unpredictable, or are they always a few steps behind, trying to figure out what God is doing and if they even want to be part of it? As a pastor and leader in a church community, you have to ask yourself these questions regularly. Is your God small and finite, or is He infinitely mysterious and powerful? When you pray, do you expect to hear the voice of God, or do you expect only silence? When you look at the Church, do you see obstinate Christians, or do you see the Bride of Christ? When you wake up every morning, do
you know exactly what your day is going to look like, or do you look forward to how God is going to challenge and surprise you? When you speak, do you do so as if you are speaking the very words of God; and when you serve, do you do so with the strength God provides (1 Peter 4:11)? When you imagine what God can do through the Church, do your eyes well up with tears at the possibilities, or do you shrink back with a sense of defeat? Is your faith alive, or is it dead? Are you in touch with your love from and for God, or are you burned out and lacking the experience of His love?* The truth is there are too many pastors leading churches who have lost themselves. And it’s not just for a season of exhaustion or discouragement, but for seasons that turn into months and years. This could be a difficult truth, but leaders may be the problem. If a leader is a glorified task horse for God, he or she is most definitely feeding the abyss of spiritual apathy running rampant in the Church. Leaders are often their own worst nightmare. Of course this does not work both ways. If a leader is in a wonderful place with God, this does not in any way guarantee his or her church will also be in a vibrant, magical place. However, if a leader is in a spiritual dead zone, it does guarantee the people in that church will go down, too. Every time those church members walk in and sit down, they are opening themselves up to spiritual leadership, and that pastor will be taking them somewhere. To be more specific, to the spiritual place where he or she lives. Is that a beautiful or a horrible thing? Only the leader can answer that question. So, how does one change the course of predictability and profound boredom within their church? It begins with the church leader. Leaders need to do some soul-searching. And if they find in the end they are currently serving a small God, incapable at this time of turning their lives upside down, then they have a heart-breaking choice—it might be time to step down and let someone who is currently serving a big God step in. There is no room for a small God behind the most important podium in the world—the pulpit. Change begins with leaders, even if it’s the kind of change leaders are mind-bendingly afraid of. Because it means stepping aside so the God they originally committed to serving can finally do His work: building the Church. STEVE AND CHERI SACCONE are the authors of Relational Intelligence (Jossey-Bass) and the forthcoming Protégé: How the Development of Emerging Leaders Will Change the Future of the Church.
*ACT: Set aside an hour this week to journal through each of these questions for yourself. Be honest. Pray through your answers—especially areas you know are draining you of your excitement.
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BY TYLER CHARLES
E
ighty percent of the unmarried young adults at your church have had sex. Sixty-four percent have done so within the last year. Don’t believe it? Perhaps your church is an anomaly, but according to a study done by The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, four out of five evangelical young adults (18-29) have had sex. Christians aren’t just having sex; they’re also getting pregnant, and at a rate higher than young adults who aren’t evangelicals. Thirty percent of unmarried evangelicals aged 18-29 have experienced a pregnancy, compared to 29 percent among individuals in the same age range who don’t claim to be an evangelical.
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Perhaps most shockingly, Christians are choosing to terminate those pregnancies. According to the Guttmacher Institute, 65 percent of the 1 million abortions performed in America each year are obtained by women identifying themselves as either Protestant or Catholic. That’s 650,000 abortions by Christians in the past year alone. How can that be, when the Church has been so outspoken in its opposition to sexual sins—to premarital sex, extramarital affairs, divorce and abortion, to name a few? Well, it isn’t that Christians don’t think those things are wrong. A recent Gallup poll reveals the majority of evangelicals still believe sex outside of marriage (76 percent), abortion (77 percent) and having a child outside of marriage (79 percent) are morally wrong. Where, then, is the disconnect between belief and practice?
NOT IN MY CHURCH “When I read statistics, I do a gut-check to see if [the statistics] square with my experiences,
and it usually serves me really well,” says Leith Anderson, pastor of Wooddale Church in Eden Prairie, Minn., and president of the National Association of Evangelicals. “[But] it’s been hard with these statistics that relate to sexual behavior and abortion because I don’t hear people talking about it very much. I want to think things are a lot better in the evangelical community than the statistics are reporting. I want to believe that, but I don’t have the evidence to support it.” Anderson admits the hidden nature of sex is one of the biggest obstacles facing the Church as it seeks to address these issues. Because of the shame associated with sexual sin, many Christians are reluctant to disclose their struggles to pastors or other church leaders— and almost never seek counsel if they are pregnant and considering an abortion. “When it comes to women in their 20s, oftentimes their friends and family have no idea they’ve had an abortion. Rarely do I hear a specific example of a woman having an abortion, but the research suggests they are.”
In the same Gallup poll where 77 percent of evangelicals said abortion was morally wrong, when asked how serious a problem abortion was in their church, 30 percent said “very little” and 29 percent said “not at all.” Respondents identify abortion as a problem, but seem to see it as clearly someone else’s problem—they are either unaware or in denial when it comes to recognizing these problems in their own church. Scot McKnight, author of One.Life and a professor in religious studies at North Park University in Chicago, says the pastors who believe sexual issues aren’t a problem in their church are choosing to ignore the obvious. “It should be as simple as saying: ‘Here’s a study saying 80 percent of Christians have had sex before marriage. Therefore, 80 percent of the young people in my church are having sex,’” McKnight says. “I think maybe they’re just not doing the ‘therefore.’”
“I THOUGHT I WAS THE ONLY ONE” Talitha Phillips is one woman who is willing to share her story. The daughter of missionary parents, Phillips was raised in a Christian home, went to a Christian school and attended church regularly. After attending high school in Oklahoma, a college scholarship took Phillips to California. “I had been dating a guy from Oklahoma—my first boyfriend—and I wasn’t a bad kid,” Phillips says. “But I ended up getting pregnant the summer after my freshman year.” Phillips says she knew how her parents and other members in the church talked about people who got pregnant outside of marriage—the shocked murmurs and judgmental asides. She admits she didn’t feel safe telling anyone.* “I had been the one in high school to encourage my friends who got pregnant to have the baby, and I knew it was a baby,” Phillips says. “I knew it was my baby—but I felt backed against the wall and didn’t know what to do.” Phillips made an anonymous call to her university to find out what would happen if a student were pregnant when she returned in the fall. She was told that the girl would be kicked off the campus. “I ended up choosing abortion—which I never, ever thought I would ever do—and as I was driving to the clinic, I vowed I would hate myself forever for what I was about to do,” Phillips says. “And I did. I spent years hating myself afterward.” After the abortion, Phillips’ boyfriend became abusive. But she stayed with him because she felt like she deserved it. “I was so ashamed and terrified that I didn’t tell anybody,” Phillips says. “I didn’t go to any churches in Oklahoma because I was terrified to
go to them, and in California [abortion] was never talked about. I went to a church for five years and they never mentioned anything about abortion from the pulpit. I assumed I was the only one who had ever [had one].” Eventually Phillips wrote a paper about her experiences for one of her college classes. “I was dying to get it out,” Phillips says. “The professor wasn’t a Christian, but he pointed me in the direction of finding a place that could help me.” Phillips began attending a post-abortion group in Los Angeles. “It was the beginning of my healing process and it was the first step into changing my life for the better,” Phillips says. “Then I started volunteering there.” Phillips is still working at that clinic (Westside Pregnancy Clinic in Los Angeles), only now
women who have had abortions that there’s hope and there’s healing, and it doesn’t define who they are.” One of the most frustrating experiences for Phillips is when church leaders insist these issues aren’t a problem for their community. “People have flat-out told us, ‘I’m glad you’re doing what you’re doing, but we don’t need that at our church,’” Phillips says. Phillips recalls a conversation with one pastor who informed her they were going to cut Westside from the list of ministries they support because he didn’t think they needed to focus on that particular ministry. “I told him about a girl from his church who came to us because she was pregnant and she didn’t know who the dad was, but she knew it was one of three guys who attend the young adults group with her,” Phillips says. “His jaw
SEXUAL ACTIVITY OF UNMARRIED YOUNG ADULTS Unmarried Young Evangelicals (18-29)
Non-Christian Unmarried Young Adults (18-29)
80% 88%
42% 53%
22% 23%
Have had sex
Are in a current sexual relationship
Are not in a current sexual relationship, but have had sex in the past year
10% 6%
20% 12%
Have had sex, but not in the past year
Have never had sex
Source: The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, December 2009
she’s the CEO. In her time there, Westside has expanded to a second location and increased its budget from $90,000 to $800,000 a year. In addition to offering support groups and counseling, Westside is now a licensed medical clinic as well. “My heart is for informing women they don’t have to have an abortion—that there are other options,” Phillips says. “But also informing
dropped. And I could have told him 10 other stories.” Phillips recalls another situation when a young man came to their clinic for STD testing. “He ended up testing positive for HIV. He goes to a prominent evangelical church, and the guy who gave him HIV goes to church with him,” Phillips says. “And [this situation] just made me want to send an email to every pastor, because
*THINK: Imagine if one of the unmarried women in a leadership position at your church came to you with the news that she was expecting a baby. How would you react? Be careful not to think, “That would never happen at my church.” The stats show otherwise.
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ABORTIONS IN AMERICA
More than 1,000,000 abortions are performed in America each year (22% of all pregnancies).
65%
650,000 (65%) are obtained by women identifying themselves as Christian (37% Protestant and 28% Catholic).
by Christians
350,000 are obtained by non-faith-oriented women. Source: Guttmacher Institute
35%
by non-Christians
they think it doesn’t apply to them. It’s really hard to find a congregation not impacted by this.” Phillips thinks churches are more impacted by sexual sins than the pastor will ever know, but just because pastors aren’t hearing about it doesn’t mean it’s not happening in their church. “That’s where the Church is failing the most: They’re not talking about it. Sexual brokenness affects so many people in the Church that I’m floored they want to keep their heads in the sand,” Phillips says. “It’s affecting everyone.”
PERMISSION TO TALK ABOUT IT It’s tempting to keep the focus on abortion. The Church has spent so much time, money and political energy fighting that battle. But, says Anderson, abortion is part of a deeper problem. “There’s fatigue in churches from talking about the issue, and a significant sense that it’s primarily a political issue. I would contend that it’s primarily a morality issue,” Anderson says. “Within the life of the church, we need to address the life issue—the moral issue. We need to have a conversation that goes beyond the political issues that we’ve engaged so far.” 34
Single, young Christian women are having abortions because they’ve gotten pregnant and they’re ashamed of it. They knew they weren’t supposed to have sex before they were married, yet it didn’t actually stop them. Like Phillips, shame overrode their pro-life beliefs. But why are single Christians having sex in the first place? Dharius Daniels is the founder and senior pastor of Kingdom Church in Ewing, N.J. His church has more than 4,000 members, and roughly 70 percent of those members are single adults between the ages of 18 and 45. “Most of them have already been discipled about sex by culture,” Daniels says. “Through television, through media, through commercials that try to sell products through sexuality. Through all these different cultural mediums, people are consciously or unconsciously being discipled about sex.” Daniels says sexual integrity has become an issue he’s been forced to address frequently. “The fact that I have so many single young adults makes it an issue I’ve had to address,” Daniels says. “It would be pastorally irresponsible—malpractice almost—for me not to. Most of my congregation is struggling with it. That doesn’t make it easy, but it makes it easier. My challenge has been: How do I address it?” Daniels offers what he calls “Ask Me Anything” forums, and just like the name suggests, Daniels is willing to take on any question. But even though any topic is fair game, Daniels says most questions are about sex.* “The questions have been shocking and eyeopening,” Daniels says. “There’s no way you’re
going to figure out what’s in your congregation’s head unless you ask. If I do a sermon series, I’m going to make assumptions about what they’re thinking, what they need to hear and what’s relevant for them. But if you give them a chance to ask questions, sometimes you learn there’s a huge disconnect between what you think is going on and what’s actually happening.” Daniels has been asked, among other things, about the appropriate time for a couple to move in together, and whether the 60-day rule is a valid rule or if it should be longer. Daniels says many of the people in his church didn’t grow up with any biblical teaching on sex—but, he says, that also means they didn’t grow up with the shame Christianity sometimes places on sexual failures. “People who are familiar with Christian community are aware of the moral expectations and the type of shame people encounter when they’re unwed and show up pregnant,” Daniels says. “When someone is planning whether or not to terminate a pregnancy, I don’t think it’s the determining factor, but it’s a determining factor. They see what happens when people show up at church pregnant when they’re unwed, and they don’t want to go through that. “When an [unwed mother] brings me a sonogram, they haven’t grown up in that type of shame and embarrassment. So it can be a positive in the sense that it’s not a factor that tips them over the scale to terminate a pregnancy. Yet, at the same time, although we don’t believe life is an accident, we don’t want to celebrate that there’s an unwed pregnancy. So the challenge for us is how to walk that fine line.” Because Daniels speaks about sex frequently, he’s met some resistance from his church members and others in the community. “Because the church has not spoken about it frequently, I think the assumption has become, ‘This is not the place to talk about it,’” Daniels says. “I don’t think leaders have said, ‘Let’s not talk about sex in church.’ It hasn’t been talked about, so people assume it’s not the place.” Daniels believes it’s possible to change that perception, but it has to happen one congregation at a time. “It begins with leaders realizing that culture is louder than us on this issue,” Daniels says. “We need to go through the Scriptures and point out that God has always had something to say on this matter, but because we’ve been silent, these are the consequences we’re seeing, not just in the culture, but throughout the Christian community.”
NOT JUST A TEEN PROBLEM Messages on abstinence, chastity and sexuality aren’t completely absent from church—they just primarily happen in youth group settings.
*DISCUSS: Talk about the logistics of planning a night like this at your church (or incorporating into a Sunday service). Consider using a text messaging system for write-in questions, to preserve anonymity.
But, while unplanned pregnancies and abortion have often been characterized as a teenage problem, the truth is they’re much more prevalent among twentysomethings than teenagers. In fact, only 18 percent of the women having abortions in the U.S. are teenagers, but women in their 20s account for more than half of all abortions. Women who are 20-24 obtain 33 percent of all abortions, while women 25-29 obtain 24 percent of all abortions. For teenagers, abstinence messages are often framed around the idea that it’s important to abstain because “it’s wrong” or because “you would want your future spouse to wait for you, so you should do the same.” In many youth group settings, sex is lumped in with several other devious activities to avoid, such as drinking, drugs and certain types of movies and music. As young Christians mature into their 20s, it’s natural for them to reevaluate their beliefs as they strive to figure out how faith fits into their expanding worldview. If they determine they can drink responsibly and watch movies and listen to music with a discerning spirit, is it possible the “don’t do it because it’s wrong” abstinence message gets tossed aside with the other warnings they heard in high school? That they start to believe they can also have sex “with discernment”? Such questions become even more significant as the average marrying age continues to climb, and the period of time young adults remain single now extends well beyond their high school graduation date. Shannon, 27, says she abstained from sex as a teenager because she was very involved in youth group and had Christian friends who weren’t having sex. Shannon says she never stopped believing in God and she still went to church, but she started having sex when she was 22. “I did not regret my decision until much later. I had been dating this guy and we were doing everything but having sex, so I was glad when it finally happened,” Shannon says. “When I was younger I was planning on staying a virgin because that’s just the way it’s supposed to go. I would be a virgin and my husband would be a virgin, and our wedding night would be magical. “As I got older I realized most people were having sex and my plan seemed a little farfetched. I figured whoever I married was already having sex, so what was I waiting for?” Shannon didn’t talk to a pastor or church leader after she started having sex because she didn’t feel guilty. “Plus, I felt like I already knew what they would say,” Shannon says. “And I’d been going to that church for many years, so I had an image to uphold.”
Shannon says she isn’t sure why her faith didn’t prevent her from having sex. “I guess I was immature, I didn’t feel great about myself, and I was drinking a lot and just being young and crazy—a combo that makes for self-destructive behavior,” Shannon says. “I figured God wouldn’t really hate me just because I was having sex. I guess my faith wasn’t strong enough that I could let God be enough for me.” David is a senior in college and, like Shannon, he grew up in the Church. David says he hasn’t
Shannon, now engaged, says she regrets her decision to have sex before marriage. She says she has had to reprogram her brain to see sex as something special to be shared with her future spouse instead of just “something to do for fun or because your hormones are running high.” “Plus, it was very hard to have to tell him there was a list of people who came before him,” Shannon says. “I look back and realize how selfdestructive and empty it all was. I went through a period of time where it really made me sad and
THE MORALITY OF ABORTION The majority of Americans still believe abortion is morally wrong.
EVANGELICALS
1%
3%
U.S. POPULATION
1%
16% 77
%
Morally wrong Morally acceptable Depends on situation Don’t know
56%
6% 36%
Morally wrong Morally acceptable Depends on situation Don’t know
Source: The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, December 2009
gone to church often during his college years, but he still believes in God and regularly talks to people about his faith. “I pray multiple times a day about pretty much everything,” David says. “It’s not that I have lost faith in God. I feel like I have a decent relationship with Him, and people around me know I am a Christian.” In spite of his faith, David says he “doesn’t have a problem with drinking, having sex or an occasional drug experiment.” “I think all of those things are part of learning about life,” David says. “I don’t know that all of those things are necessarily wrong. I think that anything in moderation is fine.”
caused me a lot of anxiety. Now that I’m engaged, I’m also thinking about how I wish I had the excitement and anticipation of the wedding night.”
HOW REALISTIC IS ABSTINENCE? McKnight says young adults see the abstinence message as unrealistic. “It’s absolutely not realistic, but it’s also not realistic not to do a lot of things, and that doesn’t mean the Bible doesn’t tell us that the ideal and design of God is to not have premarital sex,” McKnight says. “Sociologically speaking, the one big difference—and it’s monstrous—between the biblical teaching and our culture is the arranged marriages of very young people. If you
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get married when you’re 13, you don’t have 15 years of temptation.” McKnight isn’t advocating for the arranged marriages of 13-year-olds, but he says pastors have to recognize just how substantial that cultural shift has been for young adults who are striving to save sex for marriage. In turn, they have to mature their abstinence message into a holistic theology of chastity that will ring true as people get older. “We have to recognize the reality that young people are not married during the years when their hormones are the hardest to control,” McKnight says. “So we’re dealing with a very serious issue that needs to be treated from a variety of angles and not simply the moral angle that it’s wrong outside of marriage.”
A PROFOUND THEOLOGY OF THE BODY McKnight says he doesn’t necessarily understand the cultural prolongation of singleness, nor does he know the solution, but he’s certain it’s part of the problem. But what can the Church do to combat this reality? Instead of just reiterating the same message about saving sex for marriage, what else can be said? “We need to talk about how the body works and why they are tempted the way they are and why it seems so uncontrollable,” McKnight says. “We’re dealing with people having to say no to formative and powerful human passions and emotions and chemical responses when these things are operating at their healthiest and highest levels. It’s not easy.” McKnight says it has been helpful for his students to think about their sexual urges in terms of neurochemical explosions. “They shouldn’t be equating being turned on and having sexual excitement with love,” he says. “If they can view it as a neurochemical response, it allows them to deal with it easier.” When presenting a message on abstinence, McKnight also warns about the dangers of suggesting that sex is wrong. “We need to be careful about denying the obvious reality that sex is pleasurable,” he says. “To say it’s wrong is to say something so profoundly counterintuitive. [Sex] is designed to be pleasurable with the right person.” McKnight believes the Church should also embrace a profound theology of the body. “What we have oftentimes in theology is soul salvation instead of holistic salvation. If you focus on the spirit and the soul, you end up devaluing the body,” McKnight says. “The body is the location through which proper spirituality is expressed and experienced.” Because Christians have neglected the body as an important part of theology, McKnight says 36
it would take a decade of serious thinking for this idea to “work its way down into ordinary books for ordinary Christians.” So if it would take a decade of serious thinking before this “theology of the body” is readily accessible for the average Christian, what can we start doing now to present a more mature
BIRTHS AMONG UNWED MOTHERS AGE 20-29 Half of conservative Protestant mothers age 20-29 have had a non-marital birth.
50%
59%
White conservative Protestants
All women
Source: The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, December 2009
and relevant abstinence message to teens and twentysomethings? McKnight says part of it is that young Christians aren’t convinced marriage is a worthwhile endeavor—culture certainly isn’t telling them that, some of their family experiences aren’t telling them that and, in addition, they aren’t really hearing it at church.* “I think churches need to value marriage so highly that they teach the meaning of love and marriage on a regular basis,” McKnight says. “The church needs to encourage and prepare people for marriage, but they need to do this without offending people who choose to remain single and people who are single who don’t want to be single. I don’t think the reason to get married earlier is to avoid temptation for sex or to avoid abortions, but simply because it’s a good thing. If we valued marriage higher, I think we would have more people getting married earlier.”
EXTENDING A HAND OF HEALING The abstinence message, as it’s often presented, is essentially framed around a “one strike and you’re out” mentality. The goal is to save sex for marriage, and the margin for error is zero. Having sex once equals complete failure. Anderson says this message is probably more damaging than people realize. “Evangelicals who have grown up in the Church, have said, ‘I’m going to go into my wedding night as a virgin,’” Anderson says. “It’s a serious decision. And then if a young woman has intercourse, she thinks, ‘I’m no longer a virgin, so I can no longer achieve [this] goal—so what’s the point?’ And then the standard is totally abandoned. People who abandon their standards become even more vulnerable.” It’s critical, then, for the church to make an effort to extend grace to those who have succumbed to sexual sin—and to create a safe place for confession and healing. “A consistent message throughout the Bible is, ‘Don’t sin, but if you do, confess it,’” Anderson says. “What’s so wonderful about the Bible is that it simultaneously sets a high standard and recognizes the reality of human failure. Those messages aren’t contradictory. They’re complementary. That’s what we should be doing with sexual behavior. We should be saying, ‘No sex outside of marriage … but if you do, this is how we can address it and move on in Godly life.’” If we are also preaching the message that the church is a place to receive healing and find restoration in the wake of a sexual sin, then perhaps those who have made one mistake will turn to the church for accountability and support instead of concluding on their own that it doesn’t matter anymore since they’re no longer a virgin. “The fear is that treating people well will somehow give permission to other people to have illicit sex, and I think that is an unwarranted worry,” Anderson says. “I can’t imagine there are many young adults who are saying, ‘Oh well, I’ll get pregnant because they were really nice to Suzie when she got pregnant.’ The church needs to be saying, ‘We celebrate life, and we forgive.’ We do that all the time, when people have broken marriages, when people break the law—we forgive, we move on and we [pursue] restoration.” Anderson admits simply talking about sexual sin on a regular basis—from the pulpit, in small groups, etc.—isn’t going to prompt everyone to stand up and confess their personal struggles, but it’s certainly a start. “If we’re willing to grapple with these issues, the more we talk about it, the more likely they will be to do so,” Anderson says. “How a church deals with [these situations] when they become public is a powerful, powerful tool.”
*ACT: Plan a sermon or series on the importance of marriage: its sacredness, its impact on culture and its value as a symbol of our relationship to Christ.
INTELLECTUALLY RIGOROUS I CULTURALLY ENGAGED I SPIRITUALLY CULTIVATING
Fuller’s faculty includes renowned scholars and deeply committed practitioners devoted to preparing men and women for diverse ministries. Whether God is calling you to church work, service in cross-cultural settings, psychological practice, or simply a more informed lay ministry, our educational options can provide the foundation you need. In addition to non-degree certificates and a full range of doctoral degrees, the following master’s degree programs are available at Fuller: ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■
Master of Divinity (MDiv) Master of Arts in Theology (MAT) Master of Arts in Theology and Ministry (MATM) also available in Spanish Master of Arts in Christian Leadership (MACL) also available in Spanish Master of Arts in Intercultural Studies (MAICS) also available in Korean Master of Arts in Global Leadership (MAGL) available primarily online Master of Arts in Family Studies (MAFS) Master of Science in Marital and Family Therapy (MSMFT)
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ANDY STANLEY: WHY YOU SHOULD PREACH GRACE BY ROXANNE WIEMAN
Andy Stanley is the senior pastor of North Point Community Church, Browns Bridge Community Church, Buckhead Church and Watermarke Church in and around Atlanta. As separate campuses of the same church, they comprise the second largest church in America. Stanley is also the author of more than 20 books, including last fall’s The Grace of God. We sat down with him to discuss grace, legalism, holiness and why Christians can never figure out the balance. Why do you think we have a tendency to consider grace and law as opposites? I think in the church world we contrast grace and law because Paul did in the book of Romans, and he presents them as two different approaches to life. But I think his attempt to reconcile the two oftentimes gets confused and we see them as polar opposites
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when in fact there’s really not an actual tension between the two.* I think one of the most overlooked sequences of events is the order in which God gave the law to Israel. God delivered the nation of Israel from Egypt before they even knew God’s name and before they knew any of His requirements. In fact it was months later before they received the law. So that sequence of becoming God’s child followed by understanding His requirements, for some reason we get those two confused and we think we have to keep requirements in order to be redeemed. When there’s confusion there, there is a perceived tension between law and grace.
People talk about the pendulum swing from legalism to grace within the
Church. If legalism is one end of the pendulum, what is the opposite, and how does grace counteract it? Legalism is an assumption that I can work my way into God’s good graces, just like growing up in school: I had to work my way into my teacher’s good graces. In the marketplace, the person that performs the best makes the most money [and] gets the bigger bonus. So we transfer that whole system over to God, but the proper understanding is purely a relational one. It’s father-son, it’s father-daughter, it’s unconditional love of family. I think that the pendulum swing from law to grace goes back again to this misunderstanding. One way of saying it is this: I never impose rules on my neighbor’s children, and I never
*THINK: Do you generally consider grace and the law as opposite extremes? Where do you think that view came from in your own theology?
COURTESY OF NORTH POINT COMMUNITY CHURCH
punish my neighbor’s children. The only children I discipline [and] the only children I give rules to are my own. The reason I have permission to give them rules is because they were born into my family. If we can keep that straight in our thinking and look at both the Old and the New Testament through that grid, everything begins to make sense. There’s really no tension, and they really aren’t polar opposites. They are all part of the same system, and every parent understands that. Every parent who loves their children establishes rules, but they know if the child breaks every single one of those rules, that child is no less their child.
It seems there is a new book on grace for every age. Why did you think we needed a new one? I think fewer and fewer people come from homes where they experience grace. Very few people experience relationships, marriages or even friendships where they experience grace. Our tendency is to transpose whatever we’ve experienced humanly and relationally onto God. In an environment that is graceless, it is very difficult to come to God and say, “I understand you relate to me in a completely different way than my family did, my husband does, my wife does, my parents did.” I think in every generation there have to be spokespeople to stand up and say: “OK, nothing has changed. God is still a God of grace, and in spite of what you’ve experienced from your world, from your family of origin and even in your marriage, your father is not a reflection of God the Father necessarily. It’s a whole different system.”
How do you see this deep misunderstanding of grace in those you minister to?
It’s everywhere. People with very difficult pasts have a hard time forgiving themselves, so they assume God’s going to have a hard time forgiving them. On the flip side, [for] the good church people, it’s easy to start thinking: “I’ve been obedient, I’ve been faithful, I’ve given. I’ve, I’ve, I’ve. Therefore, God owes me.” Both sides of the equation are wrong.*
There is a hesitancy to go all the way with grace— “Yes, grace is important, but …” Why is that? We have a fear in going all the way and saying, “You know what, it’s grace plus nothing.” Because grace plus anything is anything but grace. Once you add to grace, it’s no longer grace—it’s a contract, it’s a trade. “If you, then I. If I, then you.” I think Jesus’ point [is that grace is] extremely extreme, and we fear that people abuse it. I think this is the message of the Gospel: Grace is almost always abused. Grace embodied, grace personified in Jesus, was crucified. So yeah, people will take advantage of grace, but that’s the nature of grace, and you don’t dumb it down because we’re afraid of what people might do with it. You know what we forget, too? All sin has its own punishment. Nobody gets away with anything. We think they do, but no one gets away with anything. Scripture is so clear: Sin results in death. It resulted in death in the Garden of Eden. It always results in death. Sin carries its own penalty.
How do we appropriately approach grace and still acknowledge the destruction of sin? Just like we talk to parents about disciplining and making clear the boundaries to their children—it’s the very same thing. You start with the
relationship, you’re in the relationship. God’s not going to throw you out. You can’t sin your way out—you didn’t behave your way in, you can’t misbehave your way out. But now that you’re in a relationship with a loving heavenly father, here’s how God wants you to live your life. These aren’t arbitrary rules; these aren’t some sort of cosmic, intangible things God has come up with just to see how we are doing. God loves us and He has established boundaries for us, just like a parent establishes for children. We’ve heard this so much, we certainly don’t understand the significance, but when Jesus taught the disciples to pray and said, “When you pray, pray like this: ‘Our Father.’” We have heard that so many times, but the apostles were astonished that He would encourage them to address God, not even as an earthly father like Father Knows Best, but “Papa” and “Daddy.” It was so intimate, it was staggering. This was a brand new category for them. And Jesus was saying, “Here’s how I want you to view your relationship with God: ‘Our Father.’” Because everything flows from that.
As a pastor, how do you cultivate a culture of grace at your church? I think one thing is to always preach the dos and don’ts, the thou-shalls and the thou-shall-nots, within the context of a pre-established relationship, first of all. In my situation, I constantly say something about “the God who has invited us to call Him ‘Father.’” I say that every single Sunday to just try to reiterate and help “brainwash” people or renew people’s minds to the fact that God has invited you to call Him “Father.” I just go overboard on that, because if we get that right, everything else falls into place.
*DISCUSS: These two sides might best be modeled in the prodigal son and his older brother. Which perspective do you see most often in the people at your church?
A FEW OF ANDY’S BOOKS
THE GRACE OF GOD
In his newest book, Stanley tackles the difficult subject of grace, and how the Church has an uneasy time with it. He reminds us that no matter what, we are all offered the grace of God.
THE PRINCIPLE OF THE PATH
Stanley guides readers in discovering the life path they’re meant to take—the one God has planned for them. He also discusses how to avoid distractions that would lead away from their ultimate life.
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H O W LONG WI LL SUND AY STAY SEGRE GATED ?
WHY UNITY MIGHT JUST SAVE THE CHURCH
BY DR. TONY EVANS
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y son Jonathan got called to a workout with the Arizona Cardinals a few months ago. As a fullback, he’s had success in college and has been trying his game out for a few years in the NFL. Anyone who knows me knows I love football. One reason I love football is because football is pregnant with illustrations, and—as you know, of course—preachers love illustrations. I also love football because football is oneness in action. Players come from different races and different backgrounds. However, when they get on the field, they harmonize their differences toward a common goal. They do this because the goal is larger than their individual distinctions. The moment a player’s individuality becomes more important than the team, he is of no use to his team. But the moment his individuality loses its unique skills and attributes, he is also of no use to his team.
If you attended seminary, or are attending now, you were probably taught more how to do church rather than how to be about the Kingdom. Yet the Kingdom and the Church are interconnected. The Kingdom carries out its agenda through the Church. But we can’t have the Church without the Kingdom. The Church, while building great ministries and great buildings, has missed the Kingdom principle of oneness, and in so doing, has missed the Kingdom. Many in the Church have so spiritualized the Kingdom that its sociopolitical rules have become little more than an ethereal ideology to be displayed at a later date. This has led to a reduction of the vast socioethical implications in the Church, creating an organism whose function offers little power toward the transformation of society. However, the sociopolitical nature of the Kingdom of God is very real, biblically substantiated and relevant to the embracing of spiritual oneness. The contemporary purpose of the Church, in light of the nature of the Kingdom, is to reflect the sociopolitical and socioethical aspects of the Kingdom. It is to be a model for the world, operating in the world while providing an alternative to the world.
WHAT WE HAVE DONE IS TURN RACE INTO A SOCIAL PROBLEM RATHER THAN ADDRESS IT AS A SPIRITUAL ONE. Imagine if Jonathan had shown up at the Cardinals’ workout and started playing like the quarterback, the center or even the wide receiver. He’d have been kicked off the team before the workout was over. Jonathan is a fullback, and if he doesn’t play like a fullback, then the team is worse off because of it. A football team is 11 unique players working together to reach the same goal. The Body of Christ is no different. We are each gifted with certain strengths and skills, but unless we intentionally (and with race in America, we must be intentional) bring these together under the overarching purpose of God, we will continue to run in circles on the field and never cross the goal line together. We will have programs, without power.
WHAT THE CHURCH IS MEANT TO BE And it is here that I want to pause: In my 35 years as a senior pastor, I have frequently observed that the Church of Jesus Christ has, on a large scale but with some exceptions, settled for programs rather than fulfilled its purpose.
The job of the Church is not to adopt the culture, or to merely assess and analyze the culture, but to set heaven within the context of culture so culture can see God at work in the midst of the conflicts of humanity.* There is no better place to observe this contemporary culture than in the historically divisive context of black and white relations in America. Intentionally focusing on areas of unity, cultural history and diversity in the Body of Christ is required to promote a biblical understanding of oneness. If the Church can ever merge strength with strength in order to create a more complete whole, there will be no stopping the impact Christians can have, not only in our nation, but also in our world. Conversely, the absence of a unifying purpose that is larger than ourselves, a Kingdom agenda, will continue to keep us from having a transforming influence. This is because we will remain focused on each other, or ourselves, as the end result, rather than on how we can blend our uniquenesses and gifts in order to accomplish our goal.
*DISCUSS: A powerful mission statement for the Church. What does it mean for your church to set heaven in the context of the culture around you?
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UNITY AND THE CHURCH The fundamental cause of racial problems in America lies squarely with the Church’s failure to come to grips with this issue from a biblical perspective. The truth is that God does much of what He does predicated on what His Church is or is not doing (Deuteronomy 4:5-8). In the same way God’s purpose, presence and power in the Old Testament was to flow from His people and through the temple into the world (Ezekiel 47:112), today it should flow from the Church into the broader society. When the Church fails to act in concert with God’s prescribed agenda, then God often chooses to postpone His active involvement until His people are prepared to respond. Our failure to respond to the issue of biblical oneness has allowed something that never should have been a problem in the first place to continue for hundreds of years. The key factor is that the absence of unity keeps God at bay, as far as His involvement both in the Church and in the culture is concerned. God is a
give a group hug. Instead, Scripture tells us Paul openly confronted Peter with the truth that he was messing with the Gospel by dividing the church. In order to promote the Gospel, Peter needed to get in line with not only the content of the Gospel, but also its scope.
WHAT IS UNITY? I read an eye-opening paragraph in a popular book the other day that will help explain my answer. It highlighted the reality that we still don’t get it about race. It said: “I know many of my white friends and colleagues, both past and present, have at times grown irritated by the black community’s incessant blabbering about race and racism and racial reconciliation. They don’t understand what’s left for them to do or say. ‘We have African Americans and other people of color on our staff. We listen to Tony Evans’ broadcast every day. We even send our youth group into the city to do urban ministry. Can we get on with it already? Haven’t we done enough?’”
THE JOB OF THE CHURCH IS NOT TO ADOPT THE CULTURE, OR TO MERELY ASSESS AND ANALYZE THE CULTURE, BUT TO SET HEAVEN WITHIN THE CONTEXT OF CULTURE. unified Being, who, therefore, does not fellowship in disunity. This shows up in a family situation where God says that if a husband is in conflict with his wife, then He is not going to listen to the husband’s prayers (1 Peter 3:7). This applies to the Church as well in that God does what He will in the culture through what is manifested in His Church (Ephesians 3:10). We want God to fix problems in society that haven’t been worked out with His people in His Body. Yet God will not skip His people to solve societal problems. God works through the Church to impact society. What we have done is turn race into a social problem rather than address it as a spiritual one. We have relegated racial relations in America to the area of sociology alone. Yet as a social problem, it will continue to take a couple hundred more years to solve, if at all, than the two minutes it should have taken to solve as a spiritual one. Our solution has already been modeled for us in Galatians chapter two when Peter dissociated himself with the Gentiles. In response, Paul didn’t call for a sensitivity session, a workshop on reconciliation or anything of that sort. He didn’t sing a song around a campfire or ask everyone to 42
To be fair, we have made considerable strides in our nation and in the Body of Christ toward improvement in race relations. As a teenager, and even as an adult in seminary, I was not allowed to eat inside certain restaurants or even to worship inside certain churches. But tolerance is still a far cry from reconciliation. The reality that we remain relationally separated most of the time—often only meeting up for an event or cross-cultural seminar—shows how far we need to go. The negative effect of this is that we do not have a collective restoring impact in our society. We have stopped the flow of the presence of God both in us and through us by making unity no more than sociology with a little Jesus sprinkled on top. Unity can be defined in its most basic of terms as oneness of purpose. It means working together toward a common goal. Unity is not uniformity. Just like God is made up of three distinct Persons—each unique and diverse—unity does not negate individuality. Unity embraces diversity to create a stronger whole. I intentionally use the term “embrace” when I speak or write about oneness in the Body of Christ due to the unique nature of the Kingdom.
The Kingdom would not have to be “color blind” with regard to God’s creative diversity. A Kingdom perspective urges us to open our eyes, hearts and minds in order to take what we learn about ourselves and from each other. We learn from the strengths inherent within each of us and merge these together to form a more productive union. Far too often, we have tried to achieve oneness through marginalizing racial distinctions rather than to embrace it. This is because the Church has made reconciliation its own goal.* However, the purpose of reconciliation goes further than merely being able to articulate that “we are one.” Reconciliation is not an end in itself. It is a means toward the greater end of bringing glory to God through seeking to advance His Kingdom in a lost world. Therefore, authentic oneness manifests itself through mutual relationship and service, not in seminars. Because God is a God of unity, the degree to which we embrace oneness in the Body of Christ is the same degree to which God empowers us to fully carry out His agenda. We had a situation in our church several years ago when an African-American leader approached me concerning the number of white people who were seeking to join. He was visibly upset when he asked me what I was going to do about this. “I’m not going to do anything about it,” I told him. He replied that he might not be able to stay around if I didn’t. So I said, “Goodbye.” Believers in Christ are not to expect that our personal biases rule in the Kingdom. Rather, we are to allow the Kingdom to adjust our biases to the King. The job of the pastor and church leaders is to oversee that process, not to acquiesce to it. Our racial divide is a chronic disease. Over-thecounter human remedies won’t fix it; they merely mask the symptoms for a season. What we need is a prescription from the Creator to destroy this disease before it destroys us. It is my contention that if the Church can ever get this issue of oneness right, then we can help America in its quest for “all men are created equal.” It is time for a radical approach to reconciliation to occur in the Body of Christ. We cannot just settle for songs and seminars on unity; rather, let us serve together—and in so doing, we will come together in oneness. DR. TONY EVANS is the senior pastor of Oak Cliff Bible Fellowship in Dallas and president of The Urban Alternative. He is the author of more than 50 books, including Oneness Embraced (Moody).
*THINK: What is the difference between achieving and embracing oneness? Would you say that for you it’s a subtle attitude shift—or something more significant?
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5
WAYS TO
CREATIVITY BYJASON FRIED AND DAVID HEINEMEIER HANSSON
C
reativity. Inspiration. Innovation. Everyone wants their churches and ministries to be characterized by these attributes, but how do you create a culture that encourages such elusive traits? Work harder? Wear brighter colors? Brainstorm on whiteboards? According to Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson—the co-founders of 37Signals, a software company that produces a variety of business products, including the Basecamp scheduling software—a lot of it is attitude and it’s more often about what you don’t do than what you do. Here are five unexpected tips they suggest for building a culture of creativity. 44
1
Ignore the Real World
“That would never work in the real world.” You hear it all the time when you tell people a fresh idea. This real world sounds like an awfully depressing place to live. It’s a place where new ideas, unfamiliar approaches and foreign concepts always lose. The only things that win are what people already know and do, even if those things are flawed. Scratch the surface and you’ll find these “real world” inhabitants are filled with pessimism and despair. They expect fresh concepts to fail. They assume society isn’t ready for or capable of change. Even worse, they want to drag others down into their tomb. If you’re hopeful and ambitious, they’ll try to convince you your ideas are impossible. They’ll say you’re wasting your time. Don’t believe them. That world may be real for them, but it doesn’t mean you have to live in it. The real world isn’t a place—it’s an excuse. It’s a justification for not trying. It has nothing to do with you.
2
Workaholism Is Still an Addiction
Our culture celebrates the idea of the workaholic. We hear about people burning the midnight oil. They pull all-nighters and sleep at the office. It’s considered a badge of honor to kill yourself over a project. No amount of work is too much work. Not only is this workaholism unnecessary, it’s stupid. Working more doesn’t mean you care more or get more done. It just means you work more. Workaholics wind up creating more problems than they solve. First off, working like that just isn’t sustainable over time. When the burnout crash comes—and it will—it’ll hit that much harder. Workaholics miss the point, too. They try to fix problems by throwing sheer hours at them. They try to make up for intellectual laziness with brute force. This results in inelegant solutions. They even create crises. They enjoy feeling like heroes. They create problems (often unwittingly) just so they can work more. If all you do is work, you’re unlikely to have sound judgments. Your values and decision making wind up skewed. You stop being able to decide what’s worth extra effort and what’s not. And you wind up just plain tired. Workaholics aren’t heroes. They don’t save the day—they just use it up. The real hero is already home because she figured out a faster way to get things done.
3
When You Rock the Boat, Expect Waves
After you introduce a new feature, change a policy or remove something, knee-jerk reactions will pour in. Resist the urge to panic or make rapid changes
in response. Passions flare in the beginning. That’s normal. But if you ride out that first rocky week, things usually settle down. People are creatures of habit. That’s why they react to change in such a negative way. Any change upsets the natural order of things. So they push back. They complain. They demand that you revert to the way things were. But that doesn’t mean you should act. Sometimes you need to go ahead with a decision you believe in, even if it’s unpopular at first. People often respond before they give a change a fair chance. Also, remember that negative reactions are almost always louder and more passionate than positive ones. In fact, you may hear only negative voices even when the majority are happy about a change. Make sure you don’t foolishly backpedal on a necessary but controversial decision.* So when people complain, let things simmer for a while. Let them know you’re listening. But explain that you’re going to let it go for a while and see what happens. You’ll probably find that people will adjust eventually. They may even wind up liking the change more than the old way, once they get used to it.
4
Build a Rock Star Environment, but Skip the Rock Stars
A lot of companies post help-wanted ads seeking “rock stars” or “ninjas.” Lame. Instead of thinking about how you can land a roomful of rock stars, think about the room instead. We’re all capable of bad, average and great work. The environment has a lot more to do with great work than most people realize. That’s not to say we’re all created equal and you’ll unlock star power in anyone with a rock star environment. But there’s a ton of untapped potential trapped under lame policies, poor direction and stifling bureaucracies. Cut the crap and you’ll find that people are waiting to do great work. They just need to be given the chance. This isn’t about casual Fridays or bring-yourdog-to-work day. (If those are such good things, then why aren’t you doing them every day of the week?) Rock star environments develop out of trust, autonomy and responsibility. They’re a result of giving people the privacy, workspace and tools they deserve. Great environments show respect for the people who do the work and how they do it.
5
Inspiration Is Perishable
We all have ideas. Ideas are immortal. They last forever. What doesn’t last forever is inspiration. Inspiration is like fresh fruit or milk: It has an
*DISCUSS: Is there a change you’re planning to make in the near future? Talk together about how you’re going to handle feedback and commit to sticking with the plan for a set amount of time, no matter what you hear.
5 MORE QUICK TIPS FOR CREATIVITY
When it comes to creativity, sometimes less really is more ... EMBRACE CONSTRAINTS “I don’t have enough time/money/people/ experience.” Stop whining. Less is a good thing. Constraints are advantages in disguise. Limited resources force you to make do with what you’ve got. There’s no room for waste. And that forces you to be creative. THROW LESS AT THE PROBLEM When things aren’t working, the natural inclination is to throw more at the problem. More people, time and money. All that ends up doing is making the problem bigger. The right way to go is the opposite direction: cut back. You’ll be forced to make tough calls and sort out what truly matters. GO AFTER THE QUICK WINS Momentum fuels motivation, so get in the habit of accomplishing small victories. SAY NO BY DEFAULT It’s so easy to say yes. Start getting into the habit of saying no—even to many of your best ideas. Use the power of no to get your priorities straight. You rarely regret saying no. But you often wind up regretting saying yes. DON’T CONFUSE ENTHUSIASM WITH PRIORITY Coming up with a great idea gives you a rush. [But], the enthusiasm you have for a new idea is not an accurate indicator of its true worth. Let your latest grand ideas cool off for a while first. Then, evaluate their actual priority with a calm mind.
expiration date. If you want to do something, you’ve got to do it now. You can’t put it on a shelf and wait two months to get around to it. You can’t just say you’ll do it later. Later, you won’t be pumped up about it anymore. If you’re inspired on a Friday, swear off the weekend and dive into the project. When you’re high on inspiration, you can get two weeks of work done in 24 hours. Inspiration is a time machine in that way. Inspiration is a magical thing, a productivity multiplier, a motivator. But it won’t wait for you. Inspiration is a now thing. If it grabs you, grab it right back and put it to work. JASON FRIED AND DAVID HEINEMEIER HANSSON are the founders of 37Signals and co-authors of Rework, from which this article is adapted. Copyright 2010. Crown Publishing. Used with permission.
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BY CHRIS HAW
TH E GOOD , TH E BAD AND THE DANG EROU S OF MA RKETING YOUR IMAG E
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ONCE WENT TO A SAVAGELY countercultural Christian festival, in which mohawks abounded and the tattoos were so abundant that the ink in people’s skin could have filled an Olympic swimming pool. The branding, slogans and logos of this event radiated an ethos of revolution and status-quostomping. And I found myself wondering: What is it that tempts people—even the most visually insurgent—to seek out an identifying brand, a label to define them? Over the past couple of decades, more and more people have expressed worry about the trends in marketing and branding. The magazine Adbusters and books like No Logo have been making a dent for some years in people’s unthinking acceptance of the lure of images and brands. Some countries have even tried to ban public advertising and billboards. Though it’s often hard to put it into words, something just doesn’t feel right about the persistent flow of imagery, branding and logos into our minds—especially when this has become a regular practice of our churches. But if branding, websites and logos all seem necessary and inescapable rules of the church-marketing game, how can one even begin to think about branding in light of Christian faith? In the Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and much of the mainline Protestant world, parishes are “branded” after a saint or something venerable: St. Peter, St. Paul, Sacred Heart, All Saints. But in the Protestant evangelical world, a different kind of church branding has developed. It resonates with the latest fashions in commercial trademarking: obfuscation—that is, making something unclear. This is especially a practice of multinational corporations, which, in aiming for global markets, use images devoid of concrete cultural connotations that can be recognized apart from language. Given the trend in distancing religion from religious tradition, are these abstract church logos and websites—composed of scribbles, dots or lines—an attempt (even if a subconscious one) to avoid seeming “too religious”? There is similar obscurity in the ostensibly hip names and general “branding” of many young,
zealous congregations. We hear names that are cryptic, apparently prompting intrigue. And being fairly generic on the face, these church names might designate some difference from old-fashioned traditions and “organized religion”: Warehouse 242, Journey, Willow Creek, etc. (I owe so much to the latter and love them dearly. They truly are amazing people.) Consider how many churches in your area don’t even have the word “church” in their name! Obviously the strengths that come from branding your ministry with logos, websites, names and catchphrases that echo the trends in the corporate world are similar to what marketers get out of branding. A church will get “brand recognition” from its logo, aesthetic comfort in its design and perhaps an encouragement that this congregation has gotten a facelift since the ’80s. Essentially, when you use modern branding, you assure potential church visitors that this thing— your church—is fresh and in style. The right brand ensures visitors can trust that the people behind this brand are “real” and “authentic,” unlike those churches with “corny” logos. After brand recognition, logos also serve to conjure brand loyalty, with the logo acting as a sort of Pavlovian trigger. Why do we feel the need
radius I live in. I have resigned to participating in a terrible, fallen and old-fashioned Church—not because they don’t need reform, but because you cannot reform something by leaving it. They are not up to date with the fashions, and I find comfort in this, knowing the ephemeral nature of fashions. But it is worth asking whether the comfort and organization we garner from such branding is truly “real,” and what a Christian is to do with it all.
“BY BRAND ALONE” The seeker-sensitive model is well known for its respect of seeker-anonymity and awe-inspiring lure, though some have started recognizing the limits of this approach: Willow Creek was courageous enough to publish their Reveal report a few years back that found they had grown “wide but not deep.” One of the deeper problems that seeker sensitivity must deal with is how the Gospel often doesn’t “meet us where we are at”—that is, it comes at us from an entirely new angle than we are used to. It shocks us; it prophesies to us. The Gospel destroys our obsession with the cool, as the cool is often based on the arbitrary nature of crowds, imitation and groupthink. The Gospel reminds us we are prone not only to follow the crowd into the latest fashion, but to join a crowd in crucifying God. This is the weakness, if not the evil, of the “evangelize the cool kid” strategy or the advertising that uses a celebrity to hawk its product. The social energy that venerates the cool kid is the same social energy that bullies the victim and excites a mob. Worship does its best work on us when we become more mindful and grateful for what is, not when a crowd is lured by a sexy brand. The Christian must be skeptical of fake excitement generated by the “just right” logo or the finger-onthe-pulse church name.
THE CHRISTIAN MUST BE SKEPTICAL OF FAKE EXCITEMENT GENERATED BY THE “JUST RIGHT” LOGO OR CHURCH NAME. to lure the seeker to our church in some greater way than the other church, to “compete for their business”? One simple answer, of course, is that we feel our church is better than the other one, and we feel that most people are lost sheep and they won’t be drawn into the fold without some bait.* Thoughtful Christian Protestants will have to question whether their numerous denominations (which includes the “nondenominational” ones) are some kind of “market diversity” in which we “celebrate difference”—as the different brands compete for a monopoly. Is there any kind of vision where there is unity, where there is diversity but not division? And is there a way for the Church not to succumb to the patterns of competition (and destruction) that we find in the market? My form of giving up on the competition involved joining the Catholic Church—where I attend the parish whose
HOW DOES BRANDING “REACH” PEOPLE? “All of this is well and good,” you might say, “but branding—the logo, the name, how the church looks—reaches people.” Of course it does. But how does something as anonymous as a brand identity or logo reach and affect people? And if that impact is neutral, unobtrusive and anonymous (as most brands seek to be), devoid of direct relational contact, then isn’t
*DISCUSS: Be honest: Do you feel like you’re in competition with the other churches in your neighborhood? How much of your “branding” and image control do you think could be attributed to that feeling of competition?
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IF YOU FEIGN “NEUTRALITY” AND DISTANCE FROM RELIGION, WHAT KIND OF LETDOWN ARE YOU SETTING YOUR SEEKERS UP FOR? it essentially vacuous and meaningless? Might that be counter-intuitive to the Gospel? Granted, many forms of Christian propaganda are semi-anonymous; a sermon or a tract, for example, is sent out as a blanket message. But those explicit mediums can be responded to and critiqued with some accountability. But the logo, however, is cast into the world as some kind of subliminal message. It is not even a message as much as a “sense”—almost a sort of eternal icon. If your brand is “good,” it tells people your church is “good” based on a culturally learned series of decoding steps. In the logic of debate, we all know you should not judge the contents of a book by its cover. So something is fishy when people are anonymously drawn in by an abstract, “good” logo. When we create brands or logos that are generic, abstract and intentionally devoid of meaning, are we suggesting our churches have no meaning? Or have our brands made people assume our churches ought to be comfortable? In examining the meaning of our images and brands, it’s not that I have a problem with using art in service of the Church: I am eager to argue down an iconoclast, erect a statue and admire grand architecture. My question is whether mimicking the branding styles of the marketer or the abstract logo are helpful to the Church’s mission. One of the most concealing “brands” is the claim to being “nondenominational.” When someone tells me they are nondenominational, I know they are failing to tell me they are Protestant evangelical. This word attempts to claim neutrality and peaceable simplicity, while suggesting everything 48
else is embellished with traditionalism, dogma and religion. Many of these nondenominational churches also aim for a neutral architecture. But just because you display nothing around your church that makes it look like a church doesn’t mean you’ve escaped dogmatism. It means you refrain from letting it be known. If you feign “neutrality” and distance from religion—that you are “spiritual, not religious”— what kind of letdown are you setting your seekers up for? What a bummer when they find that Jesus had an opinion about controversial matters. While your logo comforted them, the gospels might frighten them (and then, of course, the temptation might be to resolve this tension: to say the gospels are too old-fashioned, that they need a branding cleanup, like the new Starbucks logo.)
THE REAL BRAND OF CHRISTIANITY The ultimate critique of “branding” or logos is not neutrality or the anarchist’s No Logo, but it is the more specific, concrete and fertile-with-meaning crucifix. The crucifix is the most sober logo yet depicted. It declares that, even if God were among us, we would respond with torture and murder. And upon this cross, even God screams about the abandonment of God in the midst of torture. It speaks not of some ideal of love, but, referring to a real event, says Love in our world was crucified. But, on the other hand, the crucifix liberally douses on the faith, hope and love, inferring that sacrificing for love in a terrible world is actually worth doing. The crucifix relies not on pretty designs, a beatific vision of heaven or a concept of a metaphysical God, but centers upon a human and what humans did to Him. And it is inclusive
enough to not only infer humanity’s uniting with God, but also humanity’s distance from God. The crucifix is also the only logo that aims for its own destruction and outdated-ness. The crucifix depicts torture and sacrifice so that both might stop. While we had killed the righteous in ages past, we built them monuments and decorated their tombs, saying, “We wouldn’t kill the innocent.” This cover-up assured the continuance of the cycle. With Jesus’ murder we made a turn for honesty in our images. We don’t decorate a tomb but point to what we have done; we let the truth of our violence speak. But with eyes no longer trained to see God on a cross, the danger is we will fail to point to the murder of innocent victims in our day. Practically stated, the crucifix should not be “spruced up” every decade to keep it aesthetically pleasing. The moment the cross becomes pleasing, it is demonic. In being so clear and provocative, the crucifix also helps us interpret other images, events or spirits—as Paul was finally able to see that his participation in the stoning of Stephen was actually participation in violence against Jesus—“Why do you persecute me?” From then on, Paul’s “brand” became crystal clear: “Christ crucified.”* So, we might urgently ask then, why the recent and pervasive fashion in not depicting the Son of God being tortured? Why the move toward abstract logos and branding? When I asked an elder from my beloved Willow Creek why they weren’t using a cross in their decor, she said, “It is too confusing of an image, loaded with religious meaning and baggage.” I then asked why they had started hanging an American flag in the post-9/11 war-fever, as that certainly seemed to be a loaded image. Her answer was that there were many people at Willow in the military who they didn’t want to offend by not having it posted. Ol’ Glory is soothing; torture, especially of the Son of God, is offensive. But this is the confusing status we put ourselves in when we engage in obscurantist image-making: our pretty brands, which imply distance from stuffy old religion, disable us from being able to speak with definitive clarity about what actually matters. In other words, our efforts to make our message a little more attractive, a little more sexy, a little more marketable may result in a message that doesn’t mean anything at all. CHRIS HAW is the co-author of Jesus for President. He is an adjunct professor at Cabrini College in Camden, N.J.
*THINK: Have you considered the various messages of the crucifix before? How do you think your church might respond to a more prominent focus on the crucifix?
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THE IRAQI CHURCH UNDER FIRE BY REV’D CANON DR. ANDREW P B WHITE
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CANON ANDREW WHITE is vicar of St. George’s Church in Baghdad and president of the Foundation for Relief and Reconciliation in the Middle East. He has been widely involved in reconciliation efforts in Iraq and Israel, and he’s long been a prolific speaker about the plight of Christians in Iraq. His church and the members there have suffered physical and spiritual attacks and continue to live in fear of persecution. We asked Canon White to reflect on his experiences and the needs of Christians in Iraq. Many Christians in the Middle East are under attack. In Iraq, this has been the case since the war started in 2003. Since November 2010, though, it all changed for us. Ninety-three Christians were killed in my church in 2010. In December alone, more than 100 Christians were killed in Iraq. Fifty-nine were killed in one massacre in the Syrian Catholic Church on Oct. 31, 2010. Since then, many more Christians have been targeted, killed or told they no longer belong to Iraq and they should leave now or be executed. Things are so hard that many Christians are fleeing—or want to.* I have personally been under attack many times, but it’s not always clear if it’s because of what I am doing or because of my faith. As far as I’m concerned, the two cannot be separated: I do what I do because I am sure my Lord has called me to do it. Some of this work, though, is seen as a direct threat to those trying to cause violence. They will attack anybody who is seen as a hindrance to their methodology. Some of the attacks on me may have been simply because I am a Westerner and there is an opportunity to attack me. Others times, I have clearly been targeted. I will never forget the day when I was thrown into a room with chopped-off human toes and fingers—I
thought my digits would be next. My response in such an incident was not well thought-out: I simply wanted my Lord to aid my release and preserve me, and He did. On another occasion there were pictures of me plastered on walls around Baghdad; the words with the pictures were simple—I was wanted dead or alive. On that occasion my embassy made me leave the country. Fortunately, it was not long before I was able to return. As a result, my security now is very intense and far greater than in postwar years. It amazed me when I went to church each week with body armor on, in armored cars and surrounded by Iraqi military. I had a feeling there weren’t many other ministers in the world who went to church like this. Now, however, things are even more strict: I live in the church compound, where we are surrounded by bomb barricades and protected by a large number of police and army security provided by the Iraqi government.
THE SITUATION IN THE CHURCH While I am constantly at risk and have to listen to my security, at the same time I am acutely aware the members of my congregation have no security. They may not have my profile, but they are all at risk because they are all followers of Jesus of Nazareth. All who were able to have already escaped. Those who had money fled soon after the war, and those who are left behind tend to be the seriously poor who have nothing—our church provides them with food, health care and help with rent. We are the only church I know that has in our compound a large clinic with doctors, dentists, a pharmacy and laboratory. It is a service provided for all in our community, regardless of faith background. While many of our people have been murdered and kidnapped, it’s particularly difficult when your own staff is taken. In the summer of 2008, one of my two lay pastors, Majid, was taken from his house and kidnapped. When his wife and three children fled to the church, his house was also taken. As in the case of most Iraqi kidnappings, Majid was taken for money—what I call an economic, rather than political, kidnapping. We were contacted and asked for a sum of money that we simply did not have, so we negotiated the sum down and eventually arranged for the money to be handed over. In cases like this you have to arrange for quick payment or the people are killed. Once Majid was returned safely—albeit in a very traumatized state—he and his family moved
into the church. He eventually told us of his experience: how he continually quoted Scripture, and how the kidnappers told him they meant to kill him, but they could not. We were thankful to God for his miraculous return. Immediately, Majid started making plans to leave Iraq. His family had lost everything, and their faith had been under attack. They fled to Syria and now, two years later, it looks as if they will be sent by the U.N. as refugees to the U.S. Soon after Majid left, we had a church council meeting. There was only one thing on the agenda: How could we prevent Faiz, our other pastor, from being kidnapped? Our U.S. Army representatives spoke of how Faiz must not allow any habits to develop regarding his movement from the church to his residence. Eventually we concluded there was, in reality, nothing that could be done to fully ensure the safety and security of Faiz. All we could do was to move from the temporal to the spiritual. It is the Lord who we turn to for Faiz’s protection. In all cases of faith under attack, there are no guarantees of safety; what we need to do is turn to the Almighty for His help and protection.
WHAT CHRISTIANITY LOOKS LIKE IN IRAQ—PAST AND PRESENT More than 2,000 years after Jonah arrived in Nineveh, the people there are still followers of the Almighty. Seven-hundred years after Jonah arrived in Nineveh, though, another person—who also did not have a great reputation—turned up. To those in the West, that person is Doubting Thomas. To those in Iraq, his name is Mar Thoma. He stopped off in Nineveh on his way to India, saw all the people who believed in the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and told them their Messiah has come. They all believed. In the Old Testament, Nineveh was the city of the evil Assyrians; it is still the city of the Assyrians, but now they are all Christians. The Christian denominations here are very different from the West. The largest is the Chaldean Church, which is a Catholic church that is Assyrian in nature. The next biggest church is the Assyrian church that has two denominations within its structure. Then there are the various Orthodox churches, the largest being the Syrian Orthodox. There are also a considerable number of Armenians—who fled the massacre by the Ottomans in 1918—Syrian Catholics (Assyrian, not Syrian) and Armenian Catholics. The Protestant churches here are Presbyterian, Baptist and Anglican. My church is Anglican, but only has Iraqis
*ACT: These numbers and this persecution is hard to even begin to grasp. Spend time in prayer today for the Church in Iraq. Talk about this persecution with your community and invite them to pray for and with their persecuted brothers and sisters.
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from the aforementioned churches. It is now by far the biggest church in Iraq.
I am regularly asked about the suffering church, the persecuted believers and the destroyed church here in Iraq. I have tried to ascertain why our people are under attack and have come up with what I call the “Three P’s of Persecution”: Perception, Proclamation and Practice.
the most important thing in their life. A few I know did say the words because they feared being killed. They were returned, but came to me fearfully and confessed what they had done. I have always told them they are forgiven and God will not hold it against them. They are always even more severe in their faith on return. There are many others who have never been returned and, to be honest, they have always been the people who I knew would never say the words of conversion.
Perception
Practice
The other day in Baghdad I sat down with some Muslim and Christian friends. The subject of knowing the other came up. They were all sure they knew who was a Muslim and who was a Christian—they even went into great details of how the other looked. To be quite honest, I cannot tell the difference between Iraqi Christians and Muslims—but they are sure they can. What is clear is that the perceptions are very real. They are sure they can perceive who the other is. The perception of the other is real and held to also by those radicals who are involved in the persecution of the other.
Christians in Iraq always practice their faith— there is no concept of being a nominal Christian. Basically, if you are a Christian, you go to church on Sunday. Friday is not the main day of worship even if Friday is the main day off for the weekend. Christians have days off of school or work for key Holy Days, and the fact that they are Christians is seen and known. They do things differently from the Muslim majority. Everybody knows who the Christians are in each community.* With the increasing violence, many people fled from Iraq. Those who did not have enough resources to leave fled to the town of their origin, usually Nineveh, but it was not long before Al Qaeda also moved there. They targeted Christians, kidnapped them, tortured them and killed them, and now tell them all to leave. The place that was once safe has become a place of great danger. Many Christians were fleeing back to Baghdad, but that has also become too dangerous. Some will leave, but many will not and cannot go away. Our people will never deny the practice of their faith.
THE THREE P’S OF PERSECUTION
Proclamation Many Christians around the world believe their Christianity is not something they should keep quiet about, and this is also true of believers in Iraq. The Christians here are careful and don’t proselytize, but they do constantly proclaim it. Their faith is something for them to be proud of—most visibly wear a cross around their neck. Talking to those who have been kidnapped is very interesting. They all say they were told to say the Islamic words of conversion. Most of the Christians I know have not—to them, their faith is 52
WHY ARE CHRISTIANS DESPISED? It is difficult to even provide lists of how our people have suffered. They have been killed,
*THINK: Could this be said of the Christians in your church community?
kidnapped and tortured. To even write about these cases is so painful. As I stand at the front of church each week, I think of those who have been killed or kidnapped, and I remember those who are no longer with us when I see their families. I have often tried to think of ways of protecting them, but I cannot. I have certain ways of protecting them with my security when they are with me, but bombs can always hit us from below and rockets from above, so there is no way of providing total protection. Easter Sunday 2010 was not a safe haven for anybody—we were all under attack. For those doing the attacking, our people are infidels for the following reasons: 1. They do not accept Muhammad and he is not seen as the final Prophet. 2. They are seen as being connected with the West. 3. They are not seen as being properly Iraqi. For Christians, Muhammad is not accepted in any way. He is not only irrelevant, but to accept him is seen as a denial of faith in Jesus as the anointed one of God. Muhammad is not seen in any way as a prophetic figure. Apart from Muhammad, Islam’s other prophets—Noah, Abraham, Moses and Jesus—are also accepted by Christians. Christians are often also accused of being connected to the West. The fact that the Christian faith started in the Middle East is not known by many. To many of the Islamic terrorists, everything about the West is negative and Christian—the promiscuity, radical liberality and lack of virtue are seen as Christian phenomena. It is Christians who are seen by many as those who have attacked Iraq—some have even compared it to the Crusades. For this reason, Christians are often not seen as being properly Iraqi; they are connected to those who have invaded their nation. Christians are also forced to pay the jazeera tax, an Islamic tax forced on Muslims in order to be allowed to exist. Our faith is truly under attack. The risks are real, but there is no systematic approach to prevent this torture, for there is no way of preventing the presence, proclamation and practice of faith. It is this that is at the heart of our faith in the Almighty who promises never to leave us or forsake us. In the midst of the difficulties, we know without doubt that our God is the only way through. We know our Lord has informed us that our faith will indeed be under attack. We take hope from the fact that we are under attack, because we believe and know we are trusted by our Lord to persevere, and we will.
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hen you think of revival, what comes to mind? Hot, dusty tents filled with thousands of attentive listeners keen on every word spoken by the magnetic leader up front? Spontaneous baptisms in open fields? A football stadium filled with worshippers, a stream of them moving forward for the altar call? Billy Graham? Jonathan Edwards? Do you think of the past or the present? If you’re like many other leaders in the Church today, you probably think of revival as something from a bygone era. Few of us living in the West today have ever seen a revival—certainly not one on a national scale like those seen in centuries past. Globally, revival stories are common from South America to Africa to the underground church in China. To be sure, domestically we see encouraging bursts of spiritual energy as people pray together around the clock and join their hearts across denominational and racial divides to confess their sins and ask God for forgiveness. But grand visions of revival and the miraculous are not a common part of most American churches today. Postmodern believers might just be unfamiliar with the idea. Few Western Christians have ever seen God bless the Church on a national scale with His palpable presence. It can be tempting to become de facto naturalists who limit our expectations for God’s work within the man-made confines of observable, repeatable phenomena. Or maybe some are turned off by events called “revival” that would not pass the biblical or historical standard. Perhaps they know a church that holds scheduled “revival” meetings. But overwrought appeals to renew your vows to Christ do not constitute revival. During genuine revival, the Holy Spirit contends and convicts, testifying to the work and words of Jesus Christ (John 14:26). He does not manipulate, and He will not be manipulated. In revival the Spirit grants Christians a fresh, unexpected experience of divine power. Jesus is the main event. He’s praised by those He saved from sin and death by His atoning work on the cross and triumph over death in the resurrection.* There is another common reason that tempers desire to ask God to revive His Church. Some Christians worry if they chase the miraculous, they’ll demean God’s ordinary work. This concern gives many pause. No one wants to demean God’s work,
however ordinary, because the grace He grants His followers daily is pretty extraordinary. Still, it doesn’t seem like the Church’s problem today is wanting too much from God. Rather, it’s growing comfortable and complacent. It seems like most Christians today don’t even bother to ask God for anything big. But we need to remember the times when those big things seen and heard in the Bible returned again. Those who are content with their life and ministry won’t get much out of this. But maybe others have heard the objections to revival and are being nudged by the Spirit. Some may be starting to understand if Jesus is truly Lord, then everything changes. Some want to see a glimpse of the world from a loftier vantage point. In one’s disbelief, he or she asks God for inspiration to believe.
CENTRAL TO MINISTRY
Martyn Lloyd-Jones is one Christian who had a God-sized vision. He read and taught about revival, advocated for it and prayed fervently to experience it. Revival was central to his ministry as pastor of Westminster Chapel in London from 1938 to 1968. “I do not understand Christian people who are not thrilled by the idea of revival,” he said. “If there is one respect in which God confounds the wisdom of the wise more than in any other, it is revival.” But Lloyd-Jones never experienced a largescale revival. Regardless, his ministry thrived as he allowed God to expand his vision. He pleaded in prayer for God to do what only God can do. And he strove in the meantime to build the church as a faithful minister of the Gospel. He was not preoccupied with the spectacular to the point that
Why is it so difficult for people to live in light of this truth? Christ-followers are like the Israelites of old. They so quickly forget what God has done. Their problem today, though, may be worse than forgetfulness. They’ve never heard many of the revival stories that encouraged Lloyd-Jones and Christians through the centuries. Such stories have been lost. These testimonies of God’s faithfulness must be recovered so they can stoke the passions of Christ-followers to see God at work in the world. To be sure, learning those stories won’t make church committee meetings shorter. They can’t guarantee greater happiness, and they can’t be found in any ready-made revival formula. But maybe, by going back to days when God tore open the heavens and gave this world a glimpse of eternity, these stories might stir leaders to offer the sort of prayers that move God. At least that’s how the stories have affected Christians over the years. “There is no one thing that I know of which God has made such a means of promoting His work amongst us, as the news of others’ conversion,” said Jonathan Edwards, the great American pastor and theologian of the 1700s. “This has been owned in awakening sinners, engaging them earnestly to seek the same blessing and in quickening saints.”
BIBLICAL FOUNDATIONS
Encouraging stories of revival can be found in the Bible. The biblical word most commonly associated with revival, translated by the NIV as "renew" in Habakkuk 3:2, comes from the Hebrew term meaning “to bring back to life.” God brings His people back to life for His glory. And that’s what is seen in the story of Hezekiah. King Ahaz’s wife gave
TODAY’S ERA IS ONE OF SMALL THINGS. ONE MUST REMEMBER TIMES WHEN THE BIG THINGS SEEN AND HEARD IN THE BIBLE RETURNED ONCE MORE. he neglected gradual gains. He worked to prepare the church for revival by preaching the “grand, glorious, central truths” of Scripture. These include God’s sovereign rule in the world, judgment for sin, justification by faith alone, the authority of Scripture, the substitutionary death of Jesus Christ on the cross and His miraculous resurrection. These doctrines should be Christians’ delight. But people are tempted to teach them in their own power, making much of their leadership skills, speaking ability or theological knowledge. Leaders sometimes forget only God can give their teaching great power. Lloyd-Jones said, “The fact of revival proves ... so clearly again and again the impotence and smallness of man left to himself.”
*DISCUSS: Does the idea of revival excite or scare you? Where do you think your views of revival come from?
birth to Hezekiah the same year Isaiah was called by God to serve as His prophet. Hezekiah survived his murderous father and ascended to the throne of Judah when he was 25 years old. Scripture says the turnaround was immediate. Hezekiah’s devotion to Yahweh inspired a national revival with drastic spiritual and political consequences. The first thing Hezekiah did was throw open the temple doors his father had closed (2 Chronicles 29:3). He commanded the priests and Levites to consecrate themselves and clean up the temple. They offered sacrifices to Yahweh and orchestrated a grand temple re-opening that would have made his ancestor David proud. Like David, Hezekiah passionately pursued God: “Hezekiah trusted in the
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INSPIRATION FOR REVIVAL THE SERMONS OF JONATHAN EDWARDS: A READER The first published anthology of Edwards’ sermons, this reader includes five that were previously unpublished. The introduction gives readers the context for each sermon.
REVIVAL BY MARTYN LLOYD-JONES Considered one of the most in-depth books on revival, Lloyd-Jones contends that without revival in the Church, there is no hope for the Western world.
Lord, the God of Israel. There was no one like him among all the kings of Judah, either before him or after him. He held fast to the Lord and did not stop following him; he kept the commands the Lord had given Moses” (2 Kings 18:5-6). But the credit did not belong to Hezekiah. No one but God could have changed the spiritual life in 56
Judah so drastically, so quickly. God demonstrates His glory through revival in a way that believers and non-believers can behold. Assyria had plundered the northern kingdom, Israel, and they planned to do likewise to Judah. In fact, they captured all of Judah’s fortified cities except Jerusalem. Like his father had mistakenly attempted, Hezekiah first tried to buy off the Assyrian king. He lost faith and plundered the temple for silver and gold. But revival isn’t about humans. The Assyrians taunted Yahweh Himself. An Assyrian official warned Judah’s army they could not trust Hezekiah or Yahweh (2 Kings 18:30). Hezekiah, no longer the confident young king who reformed temple worship, was scared. Judah was isolated and outnumbered. They could not defend themselves against the powerful Assyrian army. So Hezekiah turned to Isaiah for help. It is no coincidence that revival often follows a period when we bottom out. Only then do we finally realize we cannot trust in anyone but God alone. And that’s when He glorifies Himself, vindicates His name and sends revival. Isaiah assured Hezekiah that Yahweh would confuse Assyria’s king and strike him down. That’s just what happened. According to 2 Kings 19:35-37, an angel of the Lord killed 185,000 Assyrians, and the king’s own sons killed him while he worshiped his god back home in Nineveh.
SEEK HIS FACE
As suddenly as the Lord sends revival, though, He can take it away. Especially if we forget what the Lord has done. That’s what happened with
Hezekiah’s son, Manasseh, who reversed his father’s reforms and outdid the surrounding nations in evil, according to 2 Chronicles 33:9. Revival fires leave behind smoldering embers. But at least those embers do smolder. Josiah, when he was just 16 years old, followed the example of his great-grandfather, Hezekiah, and repaired the temple. Perhaps he remembered Yahweh’s promise when Solomon dedicated the temple years earlier. If you’re interested in seeing revival, here’s one place to begin: Pray God’s promises in the Bible back to Him. God says in 2 Chronicles 7:14 that “if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land.” That’s what God did in Josiah’s day. When repairing the temple, a priest discovered the Book of the Law. Reading God’s Word, Josiah came under conviction as he realized how his predecessors had disobeyed. He then led Judah in renewing their vows to keep God’s covenant. Their Passover celebration was even greater than the festival enjoyed by Judah under Hezekiah (2 Chronicles 35:18). These stories illustrate a common pattern for revival. Recovering Scripture brings conviction. Repentance follows. And rejoicing ensues, because God doesn’t abandon those who return to Him.
JUST A GLIMPSE
Any worthwhile pursuit of revival starts with God’s Word. But history offers many other exciting examples of God’s work. Learn about the national awakening that touched New York City and spread throughout America between 1857 and 1858. Read about long-term awakenings in China and East Africa that help explain dramatic church growth in the last century. Discover again evangelists such as Billy Graham and Bill Bright, who saw revival following World War II in the United States.* But true revivals don’t make much of men and women, however devout. They honor the God who blesses them and His followers with Himself. He has given His followers the Holy Spirit, who leads them to rejoice in the finished work of Jesus Christ on the cross and in the empty tomb. And when He sends revival, He works through ordinary tasks: teaching the Bible, preaching the Gospel, praying through Scripture, serving one’s neighbors. Christians will know they’re seeing revival when God endows these ordinary means with extraordinary power. COLLIN HANSEN is the editorial director for the Gospel Coalition and co-author of A God-Sized Vision: Revival Stories That Stretch and Stir and author of Young, Restless, Reformed: A Journalist’s Journey with the New Calvinists (both Zondervan).
*ACT: Google a few of these names and read the stories of revival. Read with an open mind and an expectant heart, asking God what it means to believe for revival in your ministry.
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REFOCUSING ON THE FAMILY EXPANDING THE CHURCH’S VISION FOR THE MODERN FAMILY BY ALAN AND DEBRA HIRSCH
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e’ll never forget, years ago, the confused and even distressed look on one of our friend’s faces. She had just returned from speaking at a fairly large, middle-class church in the Bible Belt of our city. She had been invited to speak about the work she did with the possibility of generating some type of support, and not simply the checkbook variety. The youth organization she worked with had developed a fairly effective ministry to young teenage girls who for various reasons found themselves homeless. One aspect of the ministry was to provide accommodations, so they had set up a number of community homes in which our friend worked both as a lead tenant and director. The problem was that they had a huge waiting list of young homeless girls who couldn’t be accommodated because they had run out of rooms. During her message that morning, our friend appealed to the congregation and asked them if anyone among them was willing to house some of these girls over the short- to medium-term. She emphasized that it wouldn’t be a permanent thing, and that she wasn’t asking for them to provide for the girls’ emotional and psychological needs, as the ministry would look after them. All she was asking for was just a roof for over their heads, without which they may remain on the streets. After the service, our friend said she was inundated with people wishing her well, congratulating her on the good work she was doing, and some promising to pray regularly for her. Some who were deeply touched gave money, but no one, not one person, offered to take in one of the many girls they had on their books. Our friend came back from church that morning pretty deflated. She said she didn’t really need the money, or even the well-wishes; what she really needed was accommodation. What disturbed her more than anything was that she knew many of those families did indeed have spare rooms in their homes, and had ample resources to make a difference. But for reasons probably related to a sense of safety and security for their family, and perhaps fear of the stranger, these Christians chose not to open their homes. What’s going on here? Why would so many
followers of Jesus close their hearts to people in desperate need? In the Bible, hospitality is just assumed to be part of life. Living in a culture that valued extended relationships, people inherited a heightened sense of obligation and felt a personal responsibility to give hospitality to both friends and strangers. The gospels portray Jesus entertaining and being entertained in many different situations (some of these took place around the table of people who were actually hostile to what Jesus was about). And we are directly encouraged to entertain strangers with the possibility that they might just be angels (Hebrews 13:2). Surely our lack of hospitality points to something deficient in our culture, our sense of missional obligation and therefore also our discipleship?
NUCLEAR FAMILY We think one of the major reasons for our current lack of hospitality to the stranger lies in the modern redefinition of what it means to be family. The predominant model of family in a Western context is known as the “nuclear family” and has actually only a very recent history—some say as little as 50 years! Certainly it has its early roots in the breakdown of extended families that started in the 19th century with the industrialization of Western culture, as people moved from the country to work in factories located in the newly formed cities. In this situation, usually the father went to work long hours away from the family, leaving the raising of children to the mother and broader non-working members of the family. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, spouses, children and servants would simply work together to produce goods, and the family would include relatives and friends within the social unit. But under the pressures of mass marketing in the 20th century, the process of narrowing the family, now seen primarily as a unit of consumption, was accelerated. Over time, the family has been reduced to a unit consisting of parents (single or mixed) and 2.2 kids. The net result is the narrowing of the vision and purpose of the family from that of a supportive and productive unit to one of conspicuous consumption, whose aim it is to climb the social ladder. Now, in the single family home, both parents pursue careers, often in order to pursue the idealized vision of the middle-class home created by late capitalism.* Responsibilities beyond that of the direct nuclear family have been relinquished,
*DISCUSS: What responsibility has the Church had in promoting this idea of a closed, nuclear family? Where do you see opportunity for expanding that vision in your own church?
and have narrowed even more as child-rearing was eventually outsourced to professionals and schools. People now work all day in pursuit of a materialistic vision of the good life generated by marketing, only to come home exhausted to a house full of appliances and alienated relationships. Family relations are therefore stretched to a maximum. Under such enormous cultural pressure and stress, families have become highly protective. They have become a fortress from the outside world—a defensive unit designed to keep the cultural onslaughts at bay. Sociologist Christopher Lasch calls it a “haven in a heartless world” in a book on the family by that name. This is “our” space, and those “invited” into that space are carefully chosen based on whether they will upset the delicate status quo, be an inconvenience or pose a threat to the perceived safety. In other words, visitors, especially strange ones, are stressful. And while this is in some sense culturally understandable, the negative result in terms of spirituality is that the family has effectively become a pernicious idol—a sphere where the commands of the Shema are no longer applied to the whole of life. Culture has once again
THE PURPOSE OF THE FAMILY HAS NARROWED FROM THAT OF A PRODUCTIVE UNIT TO ONE OF CONSPICUOUS CONSUMPTION. trumped social responsibility. In such a situation, missional hospitality is seen as a threat, not as an opportunity to extend the Kingdom; and so an idol (a sphere of life dissociated from the claims of God) is born. No one intended this; we simply inherited it. We never stopped to seriously question it. But we can, and must, do something about it. Part of the problem is that the Church, a bastion of conservative values, has now taken the family to be the frontier in its stand against the eroding forces of secularizing culture. And in
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THE WAY THE BIBLE CONCEIVES THE TERM “FAMILY” AND THE WAY WE SEE IT ARE WORLDS APART. many ways this is right—the family is eroding— but the problem is that we find ourselves defending a non-biblical idea of the family. And it’s not hard to see how this is absolutely disastrous from a missional perspective. Our families and our homes should be places where people can experience a foretaste of heaven, where the Church is rightly viewed as a community of the redeemed from all walks of life (Revelation 21). Instead, our fears restrict us from letting go of the control and safety that we have spent years cultivating. Any sense of personal obligation is tapered down to exclude anything beyond “me and my family.” This culture of fear is totally inconsistent with Jesus’ redemptive vision of the Kingdom of God. So the problem is that, by and large, our churches and church leaders are not challenging us to get beyond this captivity. In fact, they end up catering to it by justifying it on biblical grounds. The so-called “family church” usually assumes the very narrow understanding of the nuclear family and gives it theological legitimacy. But the way the Bible conceives the term “family” and the way we see it are worlds apart. The concerns of the “idol” take precedence over other “social” concerns. As Janet Fishburne points out, a church that focuses its concerns around the needs of the “nuclear” family inevitably tends to become conservative, class-conscious, sexist and ineffectual in the society at large. She goes on to say: “Family idolatry is a tragically misdirected form of religious devotion. It involves a preference for the familiar over the unknown, the local over the universal and treats the familiar 60
and local as if they were absolute. When Christians direct reverence toward love of family without acknowledging the source of that love, they may imagine they are expressing reverence for Christ when they are, in fact, engaging in idolatry.”
WHO IS MY MOTHER, MY FATHER? Our foster child Jacob’s biological mother was a heroin user and prostitute, and the identity of his father was unknown. He was removed from his “mother” not long after he was born, because she was unable to care for him. Jacob was then placed into a foster home. His main foster parents were a lesbian couple. Our household—consisting of us (a married couple without children), two single women (who just so happened to be sisters), a gay-oriented man and a dog called Ruby—all became Jacob’s other foster parents. We provided respite care for Jacob when his main foster “moms” needed a break. In Jacob’s 3-year-old world, “family,” in the traditional or nuclear sense, simply didn’t exist or even make sense. Who, or what, was family for Jacob? It is real stories like Jacob’s that force us to reconsider just what family is.* The perfect family, if there is such a thing, is not an idealized nuclear unit of consumption, but an inclusive, warm, inviting environment where people can get a glimpse of true community, and therefore of heaven. In contrast to the narrower perspective of the nuclear family, the Bible has a much larger vision that incorporates the nuclear unit, but goes well beyond it to include grandparents, cousins, friends, servants and the stranger. This is no family-first approach as we now conceive it. Rather, for disciples, it must be Jesus first and all things in relation to Him. Jesus, following the logic of Shema spirituality (loving God first and then loving our neighbor as ourselves), radically redefines all our loyalties, including that of family relations, around Himself; and our love for parents may even appear to be hostility in comparison with our love for Him. “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to turn a man
against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law—a man’s enemies will be the members of his own household. Anyone who loves their father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves their son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me” (Matthew 10:34-37). Here, Jesus once again challenges our loyalties and claims right of rule. And He redefines family around the community of disciples. “He replied to him, ‘Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?’ Pointing to his disciples, he said, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers. For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother’” (Matthew 12:48-50). Fishburne is absolutely right when she says, “If love of family is stronger and deeper than love for Jesus Christ, this is family idolatry.”
CHURCH AS THE FAMILY OF GOD In his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela exposes the reader to a concept of family that we want to suggest is much closer to that of the biblical world. He says when he visits another village or city, he need not call ahead to let them know he was coming, because when he arrived there everyone was his mother, uncle, sister or brother. It is this wider understanding we must apply to the church as the household, or family, of God to understand it correctly. The nuclear family idea simply will not do. Think about it: If God’s family were a nuclear family as we define it, none of us would be included. Only the “insider members” would be. It probably wouldn’t go much further than the inner relations of the Trinity. But if it did manage to include humans, then perhaps the nation of Israel would be included ... leaving everyone else as outsiders. We know that is not the case in the New Testament. All the redeemed are together, co-heirs with Christ, adopted into the family with full membership privileges (Romans 8:13-18; Galatians 4:4-6; Ephesians 2:11-22), thus making God’s family a massive, culturally diverse collection of plain, beautiful, dumb, brilliant, weird and wonderful people. ALAN AND DEBRA HIRSCH live in Los Angeles, CA. Alan is the founding director of Forge Mission Training Network and co-founder of Shapevine. Debra is a minister at Tribe of Los Angeles and on the leadership team of Christian Associates International. Adapted from Untamed: Reactivating a Missional Form of Discipleship (Baker, 2010) by Alan and Debra Hirsch. Used with permission.
*ACT: Talk with your spouse and children, and seriously consider how you can open up your own home and family to your neighbors, to the suffering and to the stranger.
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RECOMMENDS
Here are a few of the things we’re enjoying these days for inspiration, motivation—and an occasional moment of amusement.
BROWSE
READ
USE
PlaySpent.org | You only have $1,000, no job and no home. ... How do you make it through a month? This interactive site from Urban Ministries of Durham puts you in the shoes of the unemployed or homeless and personalizes the challenges of getting back on your feet.
Common Prayer: A Liturgy For Ordinary Radicals | With the recent popularity of liturgical practices, Shane Claiborne, Jonathan WilsonHartgrove and Enuma Okoro wanted to reemphasize the importance of intentional community. They include prayers and key traditions, adapted for modern-day group readings.
JackThreads daily newsletter | Sign up for the JackThreads newsletter (JackThreads.com) and receive a daily email with remarkable discounts for spiffy men’s clothing. It saves time, saves money and works flawlessly on a mobile device.
MiniMotivation.com | From Ralph Waldo Emerson to Bruce Lee, this simple site generates inspirational quotes from anyone worth listening to. If you’re having a particularly draining day, just keep hitting refresh. It’s like gumption to-go.
Counseling and Psychotherapy: A Christian Perspective | The overlap between Christian counseling and secular therapy has always been curious ground. Here, Siang-Yang Tan offers a thorough, spiritual perspective of the history and effectiveness of popular approaches.
CreativeCollective.is | Fresh artists share their work with the goal of “deleting copy and paste.” Be sure to check out the free new e-book, Creative Matters, a resource written to spark originality and innovation in the way the Church communicates.
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Soulprint: Discovering Your Divine Destiny | There are plenty of “Be who you are and nobody else!” books out there. But Mark Batterson begs readers to delve into the most defining moments of their lives to fully realize their true identity.
Diddybeats earbuds | By now you’ve probably seen LeBron James and Dr. Dre sporting the large white, black or red headphones. In case you’re in the market for something more subtle, check out the black and silver earbuds that bring the same quality without the higher price tag. EGO Compact Semi Submarine | Because having your own plane is so 20th century. Move into the 21st century by owning your own personal submarine. We think this is the perfect gift to give to pastors heading out on their sabbatical.
WATCH
LISTEN
FOLLOW
Bifrost Arts — http://vimeo. com/14429217 | What is the worth of production value in a service if the people are set apart from the experience? Isaac Wardell of Bifrost Arts shares how they have reimagined the purpose of music within a worship setting and magnified the congregational voice.
Hillsong United — Aftermath | Hillsong United has practically been a vending machine for live worship albums. However, Aftermath is only their second in-studio effort. The team goes for a more subtle, layered sound, while carefully delivering a timeless message for a new age of worship.
Lauren Chandler @laurenchandler | This musician, mother and Instagram fanatic is the wife of Matt Chandler. She also happens to have quite a way with words. For further evidence, browse through her blog posts at ThemChandlers.Blogspot.com.
Neulore — Apples & Eve | This new band is creating fresh folk music, but from very old ideas—as old as humanity itself. Their concept EP tells the story of Adam and Eve in the garden, interweaving themes of fractured love and fallen faith.
Steve Timmis - @stimmis | Steve Timmis plants churches in the U.K. and crafts bite-size pieces of wisdom that read like tweets from your grandpa. That is, if your grandpa is a wonderful, distinguished man who loves the Church and has a British accent.
Christmas service at Church on the Move — http://vimeo. com/18160286 | If you love highquality production, you’ll be moved and impressed by the opener that Church on the Move pulled off for Christmas this past year. Never before have “Drummer Boy,” “Deck the Halls,” “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch” and “Thriller” been used together (at least we don’t think so). Church like you’ve always wanted it to be — http://bit. ly/aTsguj | There’s a lot of joy happening in this video of a small, lively worship service. You at least have to admire the heart (and the athleticism) of this church. Keep your eye on the baptistry.
Dead Man’s Bones — Dead Man’s Bones | Ryan Gosling might have achieved A-list status, but he’s clung tightly to mystery through the melodies of Dead Man’s Bones, a dark musical project with friend Zach Shields. Ghostly and whimsical, this album is as unexpected as its source.
JR Vassar - @jrvassar | He may be Texas-born and raised, but JR Vassar is seeing a lot of Gospel transformation in New York City as the pastor of Apostles Church NYC. He’s also mastered the art of being appropriately introspective for his thousands of followers.
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LAST WORD
SPRINTING A MARATHON JOSH LUJAN LOVELESS I found out this year what makes a pastor jealous. Tell a pastor about a vacation you just had, a sabbatical you have coming up or how you’ve taken time to rediscover the weekend, and you’ll find another pastor wrought with envy. It’s more than just the usual person mildly amused that someone they know has some vacation days ahead. The pastors and leaders I am meeting are desperate for someone around them to call timeout so they can finally catch their breath. Some are aware of the condition of their mind, body and soul. The ones who are aware they need a break of some kind seem to make incremental, as well as intentional, steps in healthier directions. The question is whether that slow change will happen in time to keep them from developing high blood pressure. I don’t know what it says that most pastors I know have suffered from physical heart pains of some kind. Have you ever wondered if a more radical shift of rest is necessary so you can stay the course, or even stay alive? We’ve all seen the numbers, but we usually drive through them like a red light at an empty intersection on a country road. According to statistics released by PastorBurnout.com, 75 percent of pastors report severe stress causing anguish, worry, bewilderment, anger, depression, fear or alienation. In case your
our lives because the machine of ministry (that we are responsible for creating) needs to keep moving. If we trusted Jesus, we would do as He did when it comes to patterns of rest. Jesus once said, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28). We as a pastoral community are not rested. Yet we are promised rest by the Rabbi we follow. It’s obvious we’ll all be weary and burdened at some point, but He is saying if we aren’t rested, we have a Jesus problem. If we aren’t rested, it’s because we aren’t pastoring our churches with Jesus. You’re tired because you’re alone working on your church without Jesus. Don’t blame me if you don’t like that. Blame Jesus for saying it. We’re carrying our churches as if people’s spiritual formation rests on our shoulders.
IF WE TRUSTED JESUS, WE WOULD DO AS HE DID WHEN IT COMES TO PATTERNS OF REST. seminary didn’t make you do fractions, that means three out of four pastors in your church, your city and your denomination are begging for someone to keep them from drowning. We’ve told ourselves over and over that the stress we feel is the “spiritual nature of what we do.” We have bought the myth that says we carry a “special” weight due to the role we play within the Church. That is a lie from the enemy that is meant to make us feel superior and entitled to sin when we feel overwhelmed with the pressure. I’d like to speak plainly on this: We carry heavy burdens with us as pastors because ultimately we don’t trust Jesus. We don’t trust the way He lived His life. We brush off the rhythms of fasting and solitude, we excuse patterns of rest from
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We carry the responsibilities of God into every message we preach, leadership team we develop and counseling session we do. The reason we feel like a failure, the reason we feel as though we may not be able to make it is because we have refused to come to Jesus. PastorBurnout.com reports that every month, 1,500 pastors leave the ministry because of a moral failure, spiritual burnout or contention in their churches. An additional 57 percent say they would leave if they had somewhere else to go or some other vocation they could do. Did you know clergy have the second highest divorce rate among all professions? These are not just stats. These are people you and I both know and love. I think it’s because we’re trying to sprint
a marathon. We want to get ahead. We tell ourselves God needs us now. We’re only a certain age for so long. Somehow I think it isn’t as much about what we’re doing as it is how we’re doing it. There is something broken about the system we’ve created that says “this”—this ridiculous pace of meetings, expectations, book writing, visitations and so on—is what it looks like to pastor a successful church. Steve and Cheri Saccone write in this issue about the lack of anticipation and excitement found in our church communities these days. They turn the tables back on us as leaders by asking, are you excited about your church? Sure, everyone tweets about how “excited” they are to “go this weekend,” but would you be at your church if you weren’t paid to be there? Steve and Cheri push all of us even further by asking if we are the problem. If the answer is “yes,” they go so far as to ask if you should step down. Collin Hansen wonders why many of us have stopped expecting revival in our churches. It’s as though we’ve made an unspoken vow with complacency where we’ve come to expect the ordinary in lieu of being disappointed. Revival has disappointed us in the forms we’ve seen it take in our generation. He encourages us to read the old revival stories and let them inspire hope and faith in a move of God sweeping a city like yours. Our cover story is all about what we’re doing to mature our church’s theology about sex. We have to tell a new story about sex. Except this time it can’t just be a message developed for teenagers. Most people are getting married in their late 20s, while most churches stop talking about sex altogether after someone “graduates” through a college ministry. A simple abstinence message to young people has been the one bullet most churches have had in the gun. The Church is facing massive challenges. God needs healthy, inspired leaders. More than that, He calls leaders to a life of rest—in Him. If you are exhausted, it’s because you haven’t gone to Him. So go.
JOSH LUJAN LOVELESS is the senior editor of Neue. Josh has 14 years of pastoral experience and lives in Orlando, FL.
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