Author Archives: Rob Harrison

Out of the past, in the present, toward the future

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Joyce over at tallgrassworship has a post up that I’ve been meaning to comment on, asking the question, “How Can An Older Congregation Live Into Christ’s Future?” (In her case, she’s talking about one service in her congregation, rather than the congregation as a whole, but as she notes, it’s all the same issue in the end.) I appreciated her post, and especially this quote she pulled from Bishop Will Willimon’s blog:

No existing, older churches can be revitalized without risk, commitment, and a determination to be faithful to the mission of Christ no matter what.If your church is in decline and not growing, it is because your congregation has decided to die rather than to live (alas, there is no in between when it comes to churches). The majority of our churches are not growing, thus we have a huge challenge before us. Still, our major challenge is not to find good resources for helping a church grow and live into the future; our challenge is to have pastors and churches who want to do what is necessary to live into Christ’s future.

Bishop Willimon’s dead right in his analysis: revitalizing churches isn’t primarily about programs, skills, or doing this or that; at the core, it’s about the willingness of the congregation to choose life over comfort, “to be faithful to the mission of Christ no matter what,” even though the one we follow is the one who had no place to lay his head. That’s why Joyce is right to emphasize “a deeply felt and theologically sound spirituality, lived out in an outward focus, a welcoming and inviting atmosphere, flexibility, and willingness to embrace change for the purpose of reaching and assimilating newcomers” as the signs of a church that has chosen life, because those are marks of a church that’s primarily about its mission rather than about itself. (Incidentally, from this angle we can see that it isn’t only older churches that need revitalizing, nor only smaller churches; I’ve known a few large congregations with plenty of money and plenty of younger folks that weren’t in very good shape spiritually. It may be harder to get churches full of older folks to embrace change—but I’m not sure that’s necessarily so.)It’s interesting to me that Bishop Willimon describes this in terms of “living into Christ’s future,” because it seems to me that it requires us to take a different attitude toward time, past, present, and future, than we often do. First, I think, for a church to be revitalized, it must live out of its past—neither living in the past, as so many dying churches do, nor cutting itself off from its past, but rooting itself in the successes and lessons of the past in order to meet the challenges it faces. Second, in doing so it must live in the present—which is to say, in the present reality as it actually is, not as we wish it were. In order to be faithful to carry out the mission of Christ in our world, we have to understand where the needs are, and how to make our message heard clearly and faithfully. Third, it must live toward the future—not simply seeking to maintain itself, but working toward the goal Christ has set before it, reaching out to draw in new people and address new ministry needs. There must be roots; there must be an understanding of the environment; and there must be a clear sense of purpose.

Reflection on Amos 5 worship, for a thoughtful friend

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“Woe to you who desire the day of the Lord!
Why would you have the day of the Lord?
It is darkness, and not light,
as if a man fled from a lion,
and a bear met him,
or went into the house and leaned his hand against the wall,
and a serpent bit him.
Is not the day of the Lord darkness, and not light,
and gloom with no brightness in it?
“I hate, I despise your feasts,
and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.
Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings,
I will not accept them;
and the peace offerings of your fattened animals,
I will not look upon them.
Take away from me the noise of your songs;
to the melody of your harps I will not listen.
But let justice roll down like waters,
and righteousness like a wadi that never dries up.”—Amos 5:18-24 (ESV, alteration mine)Thus says the Lord:
“For three transgressions of Israel
and for four, I will not revoke the punishment,
because they sell the righteous for silver,
and the needy for a pair of sandals—
those who trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth
and turn aside the way of the afflicted;
a man and his father go in to the same girl,
so that my holy name is profaned;
they lay themselves down beside every altar
on garments taken in pledge,
and in the house of their God they drink
the wine of those who have been fined.”—Amos 2:6-8 (ESV)It can be tempting to take verses like Amos 5:21—“I hate, I despise your feasts, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies”—as if we can just lift them right out of Amos and apply them to the church today, or to parts of the church we don’t like. Certainly, we may feel, there are an awful lot of churches whose worship can’t possibly be pleasing to God—and this is the word of God, so it applies to us just as it did to Amos’ neighbors in Tekoa; it’s tempting to rise up in the prophet’s place and pronounce the damnation of God on all that we see is wrong in the church. It is, however, a temptation which must be resisted, for our own sakes; it must be resisted because it’s an abuse of the Scripture, and it’s abuse of the Scripture that opens the door to all the other abuses we see in the church. It must also be resisted because it leads us away from humility, and into the trap of spiritual pride.Amos 5 does indeed say something very important about worship, something which clearly applies to us today—but it doesn’t say that God hates all the worship offered him by the Western church, or that all the services and conferences and organizations and rallies are despicable to him. Some of them no doubt are; but this is not a blanket condemnation, except for those who are guilty of the sins of which Amos condemned his contemporaries. To understand why he denounces their worship so powerfully, we need to understand what he’s denouncing. We need to understand the real problem.First off, to be clear, the problem wasn’t that Israel wasn’t worshiping God, or that they weren’t doing so correctly. It’s not that they weren’t a religious people—by any standard, they were considerably more religious than we are. God doesn’t complain that they weren’t showing up to church. They were keeping up their duties, showing up to the temple on the great holy days, offering their sacrifices, playing their music, and so on; they knew the stuff they were supposed to be doing, and they were doing it—all the right words at all the right times, all the right sacrifices done all the right ways, all down pat.The problem wasn’t what they were doing—the problem was why. Their worship may have been directed to God, but it wasn’t about God, it was about them; specifically, it was about dotting all the “i”s and crossing all the “t”s necessary to get what they wanted from God, keeping up their end of the bargain so that God would have to keep up his. That’s why, just to make sure they had all their bases covered, they didn’t just worship the one true God, they worshiped a number of other gods, too—being quite sure, no doubt, to get all those forms just right as well. Of course, the Bible calls that idolatry, and makes it quite clear that God won’t stand for it; but his people just didn’t see the problem. After all, wasn’t it all about getting their needs met? If worshiping another god or two on the side helped them get their needs met, why should God mind?This attitude bore all kinds of bad fruit. God is just, and his law set high standards for how the rich and powerful were to treat the poor and vulnerable, and yet his people felt free to come to worship with the blood of injustice on their hands, as we see both in Amos 5 and in Amos 2 (and in fact in lots of places throughout the prophets). The people of Israel thought they could buy God’s favor by showing up at the temple at the scheduled time and going through the motions, then go back into the “real world” and do business however they pleased. They didn’t understand that real worship begins with surrender—with giving over to God our plans, our ideas, our desires, our fears, our dreams, our visions, our conceptions of justice, our expectations of mercy, our wants, even our needs, and saying, “This is what I would do, but your will be done”; they just wanted to show up on Saturday morning, go through the motions, and walk off with the assurance that God was happy with them for showing up and would, in consequence, give them whatever they might happen to ask for.And that, God says, is false worship, and I loathe it. “I hate, I despise your festivals; I take no delight in your church services. Take away your sacrifices—it makes me sick to look at them. Stop singing and put down your instruments—I can’t stand to listen to your noise.” All their worship was just an empty, cynical production; they were keeping up the shell of their religion, the ritual and the outward conformity, but without any reality at the center—and it made God madder than if they’d never bothered to show up at all. They shouldn’t have bothered, because they were essentially committing religious fraud, and God can’t and won’t tolerate that. Instead of all their show, what he wanted, and what he wants from us, is what he’s wanted all along: for his people to live lives of worship, for what we say in church on Sunday to be reflected at work on Monday.He declares this in one of the most powerful and striking verses in the Bible: “Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like a wadi that never dries up.” “Stream” doesn’t really capture the point here; as one commentator put it, “A wadi in the Middle East is a narrow valley, often a deep channel, through which rapid torrents of water gush during the rainy season, but which may have only a trickle of water or be completely dry in the summer.” When it flows, it brings life and color to the land, which then returns to desert when it dries up. But where a real wadi would flow only sometimes, God calls for justice and righteousness to be like a wadi that never stops flowing, but pours out ceaselessly in a mighty, thunderous flood, bringing life to the nation.Now, in tying true worship to justice and righteousness, is Amos saying that the purpose of worship is to change our behavior? No; but true worship will, nonetheless. Worship brings us into the presence of God to focus on his character, on his beauty, and on all that he has done in creating this world and in saving us as his people—and the more time we spend looking at God, the more we will desire God, and thus desire his holiness. Worshiping God transforms us; spending time focusing our attention on God changes our priorities, our preferences, and our outlook on the world. It’s a gradual change, to be sure, not something that happens overnight, but no less real for all that; the proof of the pudding, so to speak, is whether our daily life, as individuals and as a community of believers, demonstrates and reflects the justice and righteousness of God. When that isn’t in evidence—as it wasn’t among Amos’ fellow Israelites—it’s a sign that however highly we might think of it, there’s something wrong with our worship.Unfortunately, we don’t look at our worship the same way God does. We don’t judge our worship by whether or not our lives are characterized by justice and righteousness, or whether they look like the picture Paul paints in Colossians 3; we don’t examine our hearts to see if we, like the Israelites, are guilty of idolatry, worshiping our false gods of money, pleasure, ambition, and self-fulfillment right alongside the one true God. Instead, we ask, did we have a meaningful worship experience?—Did we enjoy the music?—Did we get something out of it?—Did it move us?—as if whether we found it meaningful was all that mattered, as if this is all about us. When those are the only questions we ask—when our only concerns about our worship are for ourselves and our own opinions and desires—we’ve gone off the rails. Our worship is about God, and what matters first and foremost is whether he is pleased, whether we’ve been focused on praising him, giving him glory, doing him honor; if not, if our concern is more for ourselves and what we think and feel than for God, then we aren’t really worshiping him at all.The bottom line of our worship is this: God calls us to gather together as his people to praise his name, to honor him as our God, to hear him speak to us through his word, to confess our sins and affirm our faith, to lay our needs before him in prayer—and to go out again resolved and empowered to live out his justice and righteousness in a lost and broken world so loved by God. He calls us to take everything we have—yes, even our pain, even our struggles, even our anger, even our grief, just as much as our joy and our faith, our money and our talents—and give it to him, give it completely to him, as our offering. He calls us to give up trying to bless ourselves—let him take care of that!—and instead to bless his name with everything we have, with our words and with our lives, because he is worth it. He’s worth everything we have, and everything we are, and far, far more. If we understand worship in this way, if we seek to worship God in this way, it will change us, and it will change how we live; and so the proof of our worship, if you will, is in the fruit.When are we justified in applying Amos 5:21 to the worship of the church? When the life of the church looks like Amos 2.

The Year of the Lord’s Favor

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(Isaiah 61:1-4; Luke 4:16-21)

At various points in the second part of the book of Isaiah, we have the appearance of the Servant of the Lord; these passages are usually referred to as the Servant Songs. The Servant is the one who will bring about God’s justice on the earth, and carry his salvation not only to Israel, but beyond, to the whole world; and in Isaiah 53, we see that the Servant will accomplish this through his suffering. Now, here in Isaiah 61, we have I believe the last appearance of the Servant, promising the day when God will make everything right. The Servant speaks both as a prophet—that’s the meaning of “the Spirit of the Sovereign LORD is upon me”—and as a king—that’s the significance of “the LORD has anointed me”—so he has power both from God and on earth to bring this about. He has been given, as God’s chosen prophet and king, the mission to bring good news to the poor, to bind up the brokenhearted, to set captives and prisoners free, to comfort those who mourn, and to raise up the oppressed so that they may restore all that has been lost and rebuild all that has been destroyed.

The keystone of this passage comes in verse 2: “The Spirit of the Sovereign LORD is upon me, because the LORD has anointed me . . . to proclaim the year of the LORD’s favor, and the day of vengeance of our God.” In our day and age, we think we can control time—we have atomic clocks, and we do business at all hours of the day and night, and we have computer calendars that keep our schedules months into the future—and so we use time words very precisely, because for us, time is about precision. For the ancient Hebrews, it wasn’t, and so we shouldn’t take this “year” and “day” language in that way; rather, this is typical Hebrew parallelism, pairing a time of God’s favor with a time of his vengeance. The significance of this is that they’re not two separate times—they’re the same time. The year of the LORD’s favor is the day of vengeance of our God. There are folks who think that’s strange, that there must be something wrong with that; but if you’ve ever been oppressed, if you’ve ever been done unjustly, you know better. To bring good news to the oppressed means bringing vengeance on their oppressors; healing the brokenhearted means judging those who broke their hearts; setting the captives free means breaking the power of those who hold them captive. These two things go together; the world cannot be put right until those who put it wrong have been judged.

Which is the interesting thing about Jesus’ reading of this passage: he gets as far as “proclaim the year of the LORD’s favor,” and then he stops. He takes these two things that go together, and he splits them; and then he says, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” This is an incredible thing, because it opens an incredible opportunity: in Jesus, you can miss out on the vengeance of God. We all need God’s vengeance on others, because we’ve all been done wrong; but we all have it coming on ourselves, because we’ve all done others wrong, too. We have been victims of injustice, but we’ve also done injustice, when we’ve gotten the chance. As much as we need the year of God’s favor, the day of his vengeance is a perilous time for us—and so Jesus came to create a space between them. In Jesus, the year of the LORD’s favor has already begun, but his vengeance is held off, to give us a chance to respond to his offer and escape judgment; this is God’s grace. That’s why Paul says in 2 Corinthians 6, “Now is the favorable time; now is the day of salvation.”

Wronging rights and depressing the oppressed

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Last month, the PC(USA)’s Office of Interfaith Relations put out an excellent paper titled “Vigilance Against Anti-Jewish Ideas and Bias”; to the surprise of many, it was (and is) an excellent piece of work, searching and honest in its examination of the ways in which Presbyterians have been guilty of “anti-Semitism and anti-Jewish motifs and stereotypes, particularly as these find expression in speech and writing about Israel, the Palestinian people, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and steps toward peace.” Consequently, it garnered considerable praise from evangelicals in the denomination.Given the way things tend to operate in the PC(USA), the cynic in me is tempted to think that someone saw that praise and decided they must have done something very, very wrong; whatever the reason, the original paper has now been strangled in its bath and replaced by something very different under a revised title: “Vigilance against Anti-Jewish Bias in the Pursuit of Israeli-Palestinian Peace.” The actual concern for vigilance against anti-Jewish bias is, to say the least, much more muted in this new paper; there is, however, a great deal of concern for how awful Israel is. It’s also far more self-congratulatory, to the point of arrogance, as Viola Larson notes; where the first document was an honest confession of denominational sin, the new one is effectively a frontal assault on that confession. That’s a shameful thing for those who are called to follow the Way, the Truth and the Life. I think the Rev. John Wimberley, of Western Presbyterian Church in D. C., said it best in his letter to Presbyweb:

I simply don’t know how we can release a document, receive high praise from the Jewish community, withdraw it and release a new document which profoundly angers the Jewish community and all of us who have spent a lifetime trying to build trust between Presbyterians and the Jewish community. This is beyond bad process. This is bad ministry. Who will trust our words in the future? Why should they?

Tim Russert, RIP

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This is a shocker. Tim Russert, host of NBC’s “Meet the Press” and chief of their Washington bureau, is dead at 58, apparently of a heart attack. According to the New York Post, “the network allowed itself to be scooped by other media outlets as it tried to contact Russert’s wife Maureen and son Luke, who just graduated from Boston College”; it’s good to know someone had their priorities straight. Too bad the rest of the media didn’t.As Newsmax noted, “Washingtonian magazine once dubbed Russert the best journalist in town,” and he probably deserved that label as much as anyone. Raised Catholic and trained in Catholic schools, he consistently stressed the importance of both, in such venues as commencement addresses at the Columbus School of Law (part of the Catholic University of America) and Boston College, and a fundraising dinner for the Catholic schools in the Fall River diocese. Russert, like most Washington media, was well to my left, but from where I sat he always seemed worthy of respect, both professionally and personally, and someone it would have been enjoyable to know. Requiescat in pace, Tim Russert; the decline of TV news just accelerated.(Update: I had to add a link to this excellent reflection on Russert by Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal.)

On being Reformed and missional

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At this year’s General Synod (our annual national decision-making assembly) of the Reformed Church in America, the delegates were blessed to hear three addresses from the Rev. Dr. Richard Mouw, currently serving as the president of Fuller Seminary. Those three addresses, with the discussion questions that followed each, have been combined into a single video. Taken as a whole, it’s a long one—almost an hour—and I wish they’d been posted separately, but they weren’t. Don’t let that stop you from watching Dr. Mouw’s messages, because there’s excellent material here. The first address, which focuses on the “Reformed” half of the equation, is about twenty minutes, while the second, which focuses on the “missional” half, runs another thirteen or so; the third, which brings the two together, takes up the rest of the video. They’re excellent, and if you’re interested in these matters, when you have the time to listen to them, I commend them to you.(Technical note: it’s my understanding that some versions of IE have had problems with this video; if you run into difficulties, you might try clicking the “Google Video” button in the lower-right corner, which will take you to the Google Video page for this clip.)

Update: I was pleased to find this post on the same subject on the blog Pursuing Truth (a blog I hadn’t tripped over before this); it’s not an interaction with Dr. Mouw’s addresses, but rather a separate consideration of being Reformed and missional (and an excellent one).

Living life flat-out for Christ

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Ray Ortlund, in a post in memory of his father, sums up the most important lesson he learned from his dad this way:

There is only one way to live: all-out, go-for-broke, risk-taking, pedal-to-the-metal, ferociously joyful and grateful enthusiasm for the Lord Jesus Christ. Halfway Christianity is the most miserable existence of all. Halfway Christians know enough to feel guilty about themselves but haven’t gone far enough to get happy in Christ. Wholehearted Christianity is very happy. How could my dad get there and stay there? He really, really knew that God loved him and had completely forgiven all his sins at the cross of Jesus. I saw dad in repentance. But he did not wring his hands and wonder what God thought of him. He believed the good news, his spirit soared and he could never do too much for his Savior.

Amen.

Our Swiss-cheese Bibles

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Scot McKnight has a piece up on the Leadership section of CT’s website about (and linking to) the hermeneutics quiz devised by BuildingChurchLeaders.com. I don’t actually find the quiz all that interesting, though I think they did a good job putting it together—the quiz informed me that I’m conservative, but moderately so, which wasn’t exactly news to me—but I thought Dr. McKnight’s comments were.

For some reason of late, I have become fascinated with the portions of the Bible we don’t tend to read, passages like the story of Jephthah. Or how God was on the verge of killing Moses for not circumcising his son, and his wife stepped in, did what needed to be done, and tossed the foreskin at Moses’ feet, and God let him alone. I’m curious why one of my friends dismisses the Friday-evening-to-Saturday-evening Sabbath observance as “not for us today” but insists that capital punishment can’t be dismissed because it’s in the Old Testament.I have become fascinated with what goes on in our heads and our minds and our traditions (and the latter is far more significant than many of us recognize) in making decisions like this.What decisions? Which passages not to read as normative. The passages we tend not to read at all.If we’re all subject to selective perception, at least to some degree, it’s important to recognize what we tend to miss or gloss over, especially if we’re church leaders.

He goes on to credit the quiz with helping us do this, which I don’t really think it does, to any significant degree; but I certainly agree that this is something we need to address, because it leads to us missing and misunderstanding what God wants to say to us. It gives us a truncated gospel—one which, funnily enough, usually tends to be truncated neatly to fit our comfort zones.There are, I think, several reasons for this. In churches that use the lectionary, a lot of this is done for you, as the folks who put the lectionary readings together did a nice job of trimming around all the troublesome spots. We do it ourselves, because dealing with those spots takes work—we can’t just toss out the pat answers we’ve all learned, we have to wrestle with the text and put thought and effort into it. What’s more, dealing with those sorts of passages carries an emotional cost, as we come face to face with the fact that we don’t worship a nice, comfortable god who wants us to live nice, comfortable lives. In some cases, as Jared Wilson points out, the Scriptures tell us things we just flat-out don’t want to hear; it’s no shock that we tend to avoid those passages if at all possible.And so we end up with Swiss-cheese Bibles, with great voids in them, and we take our nice neat slices with their nice neat holes in them, and we end up with a much less messy and much less discomfiting faith as a consequence; but then, it seems to me, we end up with a faith much less able to deal with the messy and discomfiting parts of life—they go sailing right through the holes. We need to make the effort to fill in the holes, to consider what parts of the Bible we’re avoiding, and why, and take them head-on; we need to open ourselves up to listen to, and proclaim, the whole counsel of God.

On the power of stories to teach, part II

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I’ve been meaning for several days now to get back over to Dr. Stackhouse’s blog, having gotten a couple weeks behind on reading his posts; I was interested to find there a four-post consideration and defense of the novel The Shack, which has generated quite a bit of interest and comment, both positive and negative. I haven’t yet read the book, and given the events that drive the book’s plot, I’m not at all sure I’m going to read it, either, at least in full; but given the responses it’s generated (both positive and negative), I definitely want to know as much about it as I can from reviewers who are both fair and perceptive. That’s why I appreciated his four posts addressing the book’s genre, some theological concerns, and some praiseworthy aspects of the book.In light of my post this past Sunday, I was also interested in the first of those posts for another reason. Dr. Stackhouse writes,

It seems to me important that authors of fiction defend art as needing no justification on some other grounds. From a Christian point of view, a well-rendered novel—or short story, or poem, or song lyric—needs only to be good in and of itself. It does not have to explicitly praise God or testify to Jesus or draw people closer to the gospel or attract people to Christianity—although the paradox is, I suggest, that inasmuch as it is authentic and true to both the artist and to reality, such fictional writing does indeed do all those things implicitly. Still, art needs no justification, as H. R. Rookmaaker’s book title reminds us, and it is good that art is free from the obligation to perform some other service.To assert that principle, however, is not to assert the corollary that art must not ever serve more than one purpose, and in particular must not “preach,” as Atwood says. One can defend art “for art’s sake,” as Wilde put it, without restricting oneself to aestheticism in which art is only for art’s sake. . . .So, yes, if you want to preach, write a sermon—which is a truism, in fact. But if you want to depict your concerns in a fictional way you hope will render them plausible, even cogent, to a reader, then the weight of western civilization is on your side.

Lest anyone think this is a Christian defense of propaganda, here’s the late Dr. Isaac Asimov saying something very similar:

But in every worthwhile story, however long, there is a point. The writer may not consciously put it there, but it will be there. The reader may not consciously search for it, but he’ll miss it if it isn’t there. If the point is obtuse, blunt, trivial, or non-existent, the story suffers and the reader will react with a deadly, “So what?”

The danger of propagandizing is very real, of course, for the writer who consciously desires to communicate their understanding of truth through stories, through fiction; the question of when one has crossed the line is very real. Dr. Stackhouse argues that that point comes

when the fictive art is compromised for the sake of the ideological message. When dialogue becomes stilted, when characters become inconsistent, when events become implausible, when a deus ex machina saves the day—in sum, when “what would happen” is sacrificed to “what should happen.”

Or, to put it another way, it comes when we as sub-creators cease to be thinking “primarily about what is best for this thing we are making” and let the good of our agenda trump the good of the creation; it’s when “what’s best for us or what we want to do” becomes the primary consideration.