Category Archives: Church and ministry

Teach your children well

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The title, of course, comes from Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, but the theme is as old as history, going back at least to Deuteronomy 6. Unfortunately, too often the church does a poor job of this. It’s not that the curricula we use aren’t effective—most of those that I know are; nor is it that they don’t teach children good things, for those which I’ve used certainly do. Nor am I saying that churches use them poorly, for though I’m sure a notable percentage of churches do, I have no reason to think that that’s broadly true. I can, however, second the point that John Walton recently made on the Zondervan Academic blog: most of our curricula in the American church do a brutally lousy job with Scripture. Dr. Walton does a good job of laying out the ways in which common American curricula misuse, misinterpret and misapply the Word of God, and especially of hammering home the reason why we should care:

If we are negligent of sound hermeneutics when we teach Bible to children, should it be any wonder that when they get into youth groups, Bible studies and become adults in the church, that they do not know how to derive the authoritative teaching from the text?

We all have a working hermeneutic, even though most have never taken a course. Where do we learn it? We learn it from those we respect. For many people this means that they learn their hermeneutics from their Sunday school teachers. Teachers in turn teach what is put into their hands. Perhaps we ought to be more attentive how Sunday school curriculum is teaching our children to find the authoritative teaching of God in the stories.

 

Photo of The Magic Hour by Dirk Joseph © 2019 Elvert Barnes.  License:  Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic.

Change and Christ’s ministry

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Most of the time, when you listen to the arguments for change in the church, they usually boil down to this: the world is doing a new thing and we need to catch up with it. There are two unexamined assumptions here. The first is that giving the world what they want and expect is the best way to do the work of the church; the second is that the work of the church is our work, to be done with our tools. Both of these are false. The work of the church is God’s work; the ministry of the church is the ministry of Christ. Only Christ’s ministry is redemptive; only his power can change lives; only his work will bear fruit; only what he is doing will prosper. It’s not our job, it’s never our job, to figure out what people have already decided they want and give it to them; we’re not here to study what the world is doing this week and copy it. Rather, our job is to figure out what Jesus is doing, where his Spirit is moving, and get in on that. This isn’t our church, nor is it our ministry, that we might do as we please; it’s God’s church, and Jesus’ ministry, and we need to do as he pleases. Our focus needs to be not on what we want to do, but on what he wants us to do.This means two things. First, we need to remember that this isn’t politics, and we shouldn’t be trying to match our ministry to the polls; it’s not our place to cater to our own preferences, or anyone else’s, either. We need to seek God, not the approval of others; our concern needs to be that we’re doing what he’s doing, and what he wants us to do. Second, we need to remember what God has led us to understand along the way, what we’ve already figured out, and to make future decisions in light of that. This is where tradition comes into play, as we remember that the church’s we is God’s royal “we,” in the sense that it’s the whole body of Christ—every nation, every era, and every theological and ecclesiological stream of thought and practice—not just the people we know or those who think like us. We cannot lightly assume our superiority to the church of times past, or in other parts of the world—indeed, we cannot assume it at all.Does this mean the church shouldn’t change? Certainly not; we should indeed be ecclesia reformata semper reformanda, secundum verbum Dei, the church reformed and always reforming according to the Word of God. Change in non-essentials is important in that non-essential things (such as style) should always be secondary to preaching the gospel message; if those non-essentials get in the way of people hearing that message, or distort it, they should be changed promptly and with as little fuss as possible. But change should always and only be at the service of the unchanging, and never designed merely to please or soothe the culture. After all, as C. S. Lewis rightly observed, those who change with the times inevitably go where all times go.

In defense of the church, part V: process

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There are churches out there that are actively poisonous, no question, and there are people who have been badly hurt by such churches. (Not all of them are in the pews, either—some are pastors.) That said, there are a lot of folks out there complaining about the church for a lot less reason, whose gritching essentially boils down to “the church isn’t perfect according to my standards.” Well, no, it isn’t. You aren’t perfect according to its standards either, believe me. There are three things that need to be said here:

1) It’s an old saw, but it bears repeating because it obviously hasn’t occurred to a lot of people: If you ever find a perfect church, it will stop being perfect the minute you join. This is the most basic thing to understand: every church is an imperfect combination of imperfect people, of whom you are one.

2) Every good church is in process: specifically, in the process of being grown by God the Father through the work of Jesus Christ as applied to us in the power of the Holy Spirit into the church which God intends for us to be. Every church will hurt you at times; every church will let you down at times; every church will fall short of what it’s supposed to be at times. That’s because every church is made up of people, and people do that. What matters is how theyrespond to those times, and particularly how the leadership responds; churches ought to admit their failures and shortcomings, apologize and try to make things right, and then work to address them and get better. A church that generally does that, with leaders who usually model that approach, deserve support and praise, not to be bashed for their mistakes. (Even the best of churches won’t always respond as they should; when they don’t, though, they should be corrected gently and graciously, with humility about our own imperfection.)

We have to understand that we can’t expect the church to get everything right; the most we have the right to expect is that the church be in the right process, moving in the right direction. That’s what the church is, after all: not a bunch of people who have it all together, but a bunch of people who are together, growing together, following Jesus together, and helping each other along the way. We need, as Jared put it, to be willing to “submit to community,” even with all its inevitable imperfections, if we’re going to live as Christ calls us to live.

3) If you want to receive grace, show grace. It amazes me how many people gracelessly and self-righteously bash churches for being graceless and self-righteous. If you show that sort of attitude, you’re as much a problem as the church you’re criticizing.

The general principle here, it seems to me, is one that Tim Lane and Paul Tripp articulate well in their book Relationships: A Mess Worth Making, in a passage quoted by Jimmy D. atCruciform Life:

Worshipping God as Savior means that I acknowledge that I am a sinner in relationship with other sinners. I remember that you are still in the middle of God’s work of redemption—as am I. He is still convicting you, teaching you, and changing your heart. He is faithfully doing all these things at the best time and in the best way possible. None of us ever gets to be in relationship with a finished person. God’s redemptive work of change is ongoing in all of our lives. When I forget this, I become self-righteous, impatient, critical, and judgmental. I give in to the temptation to play God and try to change you in ways only God can . . .

When I fail to worship God as Savior, I am too casual about my sin and too focused on yours. Our relationships are often harmed when we try to atone for our own sins while condemning the other person for his. When you are sinned against, you will be impacted by the weaknesses and failures of that other person. When this happens, you need to allow God to use you as an instrument in His redemptive hands rather than seeking to make changes in the other person yourself. Only God can accomplish these things. Are you trying to do work in someone’s life that only the Savior can do? (HT: Jared)

Many churches are guilty of this mistake on a systemic level, and I don’t blame anyone for avoiding such congregations. Even those that aren’t, even those that consciously teach and preach and disciple against this, will still struggle with it, because it’s one of the subtlest of the sins that beset us, and one of the most insidious forms of spiritual pride. But when we bash “the church” for being imperfect without acknowledging our own imperfection, when we denounce “the church” as sinful without confessing that we too are sinners—when we insist that the problems of “the church” are everyone else’s fault and we are innocent of all responsibility and all blame—then we too are guilty of being “too casual about my sin and too focused on yours.”

There are, to be sure, many congregations that have problems that are intractable, and many people who have worn themselves out trying (and failing) to bring change to such congregations; but the answer to that is not to write off “the church” as a whole. Rather, it’s to find a church that will love you for who you are while you heal, and in which, when you’re ready, you can step up and use the gifts God has given you to help grow his church into what he wants us all to be. I do not deny that the church is imperfect, sin-riddled, flawed; I simply deny that that’s justification for attacking or dismissing it. Rather, it’s our call to do our part to help fix the problem.

Previous posts in this series:

Part I: Preaching

Part II: The institution

Part III: Doctrine

Part IV: Jesus

Segregated worship

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And no, I don’t mean racial segregation, problem though that is in the American church; as J. I. Packer noted recently in Modern Reformation, segregation by age groups is increasingly a problem as well, and perhaps an even bigger one. As Dr. Packer says,

In the New Testament, the Christian church is an all-age community, and in real life the experience of the family to look no further should convince us that the interaction of the ages is enriching. The principle is that generations should be mixed up in the church for the glory of God. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t disciple groups of people of the same age or the same sex separately from time to time. That’s a good thing to do. But for the most part, the right thing is the mixed community in which everybody is making the effort to understand and empathize with all the other people in the other age groups. Make the effort is the key phrase here. Older people tend not to make the effort to understand younger people, and younger people are actually encouraged not to make the effort to understand older people. That’s a loss of a crucial Christian value in my judgment. If worship styles are so fixed that what’s being offered fits the expectations, the hopes, even the prejudices, of any one of these groups as opposed to the others, I don’t believe the worship style glorifies God, and some change, some reformation, some adjustment, and some enlargement of spiritual vision is really called for.

(My thanks to Andy Naselli for the quote; MR on the web is subscription-only.)

Follow the evidence

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As I sit here, CSI is going in the other room; it’s an old episode, of course, but apparently someone was interested in watching it. I didn’t like the episode well enough the first time around to want to watch it again, so I’m in here tapping the keys. It did spark a thought, though: the preacher’s job in studying Scripture (and anyone’s, really) is much the same as that of a criminalist or forensic scientist: follow the evidence, wherever it leads. When we run into problems—as individuals, as churches, as denominations—is usually when we set the evidence aside in favor of what we want to believe, or start allowing our preferred conclusions to distort our interpretation of the evidence. As Christians, we need to let Scripture speak for itself, to seek to understand it on its own terms, to the best of our ability; we need to allow it to tell us things that we don’t want to hear, to challenge our comfortable assumptions and stretch our cozy faith. We need to allow God to speak through his Word to lead us to the truth, rather than insisting on leading ourselves to our own ideas.As Gil Grissom is wont to say, “people lie, but the evidence never does.” To be sure, we’re never guaranteed to interpret that evidence correctly—even when we’re trying our best to be faithful, we still make mistakes because we’re still limited; but we can trust the Spirit to work through the process to correct our errors, if we’re open to correction. It isn’t solely on our shoulders to get it right—that’s the work of the Spirit in and through us; ours is to learn to get our own agendas out of the way so that they don’t block the Spirit’s work.

Considering the practice of the Jesus way

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In the latest issue of Perspectives, I was interested to run across a review of a recent book called Jesus Brand Spirituality: He Wants His Religion Back. With a title like that, I would have expected “just another critique of the shallowness of evangelical certitudes or the meanness of some of the Religious Right or yet another call to be open and in conversation as we emerge into new ideas”; according to the glowing review by Byron Borger of Hearts & Minds Books, however, it’s nothing of the sort. In fact, the book’s author, Ken Wilson, isn’t a liberal at all, but rather a Vineyard pastor, and according to Borgan,

Wilson has written a thoughtful, mature, and deeply engaging study of the ways in which we can approach Jesus, how to make sense of life in light of his ways. It talks about how the best of four streams within Christianity can unite to help create a passionate, faithful and yet grace-filled, life-giving spirituality. (Wilson’s four dimensions, by the way, are the active, the contemplative, the biblical, and the communal.) . . .

Jesus Brand Spirituality is ideal for mainline Protestants who want to make sure their liberal theology doesn’t go off the tracks, who want to stay close to Jesus and the earliest biblical truths, even if they are not quite where more traditionalist conservatives stand. It is equally helpful for anyone committed to historic Christian orthodoxy but who may sense that the recent cultural conflict, dogmatism, moralism, and overlays of the evangelical subculture may have obscured some of the clearest elements of the faith. And—please don’t miss this—it is also a fabulous read for anyone who is a skeptic or seeker; at times, it seems like it is written precisely for those who just are willing to get “one step closer to knowing.” . . .

No matter where you are on your spiritual journey, or with which denomination or tradition you stand, I am confident this book will challenge, stretch, inspire, and bless you.

That sounds promising. Interestingly, it fits in quite well with the other review in this issue, by David Smith, of Craig Dykstra’s Growing in the Life of Faith: Education and Christian Practices.In that review, Smith writes,

“Practices” is, in this context, a pregnant term, used in a way that reaches beyond its everyday meaning. Dykstra’s usage draws upon the widely discussed account of social practices found in the writings of Alasdair MacIntyre (particularly in After Virtue). Roughly speaking, for MacIntyre a practice involves a complex and coherent social activity pursued with other people because of goods that inhere in the activity itself—like playing a sport for the satisfaction of a well matched game rather than with the aim of getting one’s name in the paper. Such practices have their own standards of excellence to which the practitioner must submit, and they provide a matrix within which our own pursuit—and perception—of excellence can evolve. Such matrices, MacIntyre argues, are where virtue grows: not through having moral rules explained, but through submitting to the discipline of socially established practices. . . .

What if being and growing as a Christian is not well characterized in terms, say, of assent to doctrines but requires a pattern of Christian practices within which Christian beliefs are at home? What if faith development has as much to do with being enfolded in and submitting to such practices as hospitality to the stranger, worship, community, forgiveness, healing, and testimony as with grasping increasingly complex articulations of doctrine?

This, too, I think is a book I want to read, and in part for the same reason: to consider how Christian belief and Christian practice are interwoven, neither making sense without the other—indeed, neither truly existing without the other. Christian belief is belief which is lived out, and Christian practice is an expression of belief—they aren’t separable; and at their core, they’re all about becoming, living, walking, being, like Jesus, living life in his footsteps.

Ministry in emerging adulthood

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I’ve been mulling over these links for a while, and I haven’t really come to a clear sense of what I want to say about them; but somewhere in there, I think, are some important things about what it means to be a young pastor in a time when more and more people in their twenties and early thirties are finding the transition into adulthood long, disorganized and uncertain (such that sociologists are now labeling this stage of life “emerging adulthood”). The pastor of a church is, essentially, the Adult in Chief; that’s a hard role to fill if you haven’t yet come to see yourself as fully an adult and the peer of all those grizzled, experienced, opinionated, strong-willed folks who most likely make up the lay leadership of the church you serve. That’s a problem, because if you don’t see yourself as their peer and equal, they won’t either . . . and if they don’t, you’re toast.Emerging AdulthoodEmerging Adulthood IIThe Father Pfleger ShowSFTS Experience

Thought experiment

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I had a session of our inquirers’ class this evening—that’s the class I do for those who want to join the church and those who’re trying to figure out if they do—which left me, as I was driving back home, in a contemplative mood, just mulling over things with the church and praying a little; and as I was doing this, I’m not sure if it was merely my own thought or if perhaps it was God speaking, but I had this thought: Suppose God gave you a choice between two promises. Either you could ask that John McCain be elected president, and that would be granted (though Gov. Palin didn’t figure in here); or you could ask for a breakthrough for this church in attracting young people and young families who aren’t currently attending a church, such that we’d start drawing large numbers of younger folks, and that would be granted. The other might or might not happen, but whichever you chose, you could be sure would happen. Which would you choose?—OK, so it sounds artificial; I don’t dispute it. (That’s probably the biggest argument for it just being my own random thought, and even then, I don’t know where it came from.) Artificial or otherwise, though, the question came to mind; and while it will probably surprise some of you who’ve read my various political posts, I had no doubt of my answer: I’d choose for the church.Part of that, I’m sure, is a matter of direct personal welfare: whether or not this congregation grows will have a more direct and immediate effect on my well-being (financial and otherwise) than who gets elected president. That’s a consideration. It isn’t, however, the main one. The main one is the limitations of my own knowledge. If, through whatever combination of programs, circumstances, and whatever else, a lot of people of my generation and younger in this community started attending the congregation I serve, I have a high degree of certainty that this would be a good thing for our congregation (and, yes, for me and my family as well); and as to whether it would be a good thing for those folks, and for our community, I believe it would be, and I would be able to do everything in my power to make sure that it was. I can look at that possibility as a clear good.By contrast, while I truly believe that Sen. McCain would make a good president, and while I’m equally convinced that Sen. Obama would make a very bad one, I have far less ability to be certain of that. I don’t know Sen. Obama at all, and my only personal knowledge of Sen. McCain is secondhand; there are a vast number of unknown variables (on multiple levels) which will play into the success or failure of our next president; and Sen. Obama has a short enough track record that it’s more difficult than usual to predict how he would govern, making it unusually possible that he could surprise all of us. Then too, even if I’m absolutely right about what to expect from both of them (which is unlikely, no question), it’s possible that for the long-term good of our country, we’d be better off with a worse president for the next four years. I’m not sure exactly how that would work, but I can’t say that it couldn’t be—the ironies of history won’t let me.All of which is to say that while I know which candidate will get my vote this November, I’m content to leave the overall outcome of the election to God’s providence; indeed, I wouldn’t be presumptuous enough to think I could do better. I’m just not confident enough that I truly know for certain what’s best (nor should I be, nor should any of us be). On matters closer to home, within my purview and my circle of influence, I can be a lot more certain; and there, my responsibility is more direct, as well. (Which is why, if God actually did make me such a promise for my church, I would be thrilled.)

In defense of the church, part IV: Jesus

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I started doing these posts “in defense of the church” (as you can see from parts I, II and III)

in large part because I think the church takes a lot of flak that really isn’t fair; granted that there are a fair number of congregations out there which are truly poisonous (any pastor can tell you that), and a fair number more which are thoroughly dysfunctional (ditto), and another pile on top of that which are preaching something other than grace, to move beyond criticisms of specific congregations to dismissal of the church as a whole seems to me ungracious and unwarranted. Hence my three previous posts in this irregular series.

I have others of that sort I could add to them, and I may well, at some future point; but lately I’ve felt God poking me that there’s something else I need to say first, something that comes out of a place where he’s convicted me in the past. The most basic thing to say in defense of the church, the first thing that needs to be said, is that Jesus loves the church; in Ephesians 5, Paul describes the church as the bride of Christ (and says that we husbands are supposed to love our wives as much as Christ loves the church—remembering always that Christ wascrucified for the church). We’d best be careful, I think, what we say about the church, because I’ve never met a groom yet who took kindly to people ripping on his bride; I don’t imagine Jesus does, either.

Which is not to say that criticism of particular congregations (or denominations, for that matter) is out of line; as noted, there’s a fair number of them that have gone fair wrong. I come out of the Reformed tradition, which makes a point of the three marks of the true church; from our perspective, just because something calls itself a church doesn’t mean it is in any meaningful sense. (If anything, my theological forebears were probably a mite too willing to declare churches to be false churches.) And for that matter, fair, reasoned, gracious critique is important for all of us, as individuals and as the people of God, to grow, and so that’s never out of place or inappropriate. But when we go so far as to denounce “the church” and suggest that God doesn’t like “the church” any more than we do—no, that’s too far. Jesus loves the church, and that isn’t going to change.

Yes, this even means that he loves the people in it who hurt us and make us miserable—he died for them just as he died for the soldiers who crucified him, praying as he died, “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they’re doing.”  As brutal hard and painful as it is, he wants to bring us to the point where we can love them, too, even as he commands us to love all the rest of our enemies. The love and grace of God are hard things, because they go as much to the people we want cut off as they do to us; if we’re going to accept them for ourselves, we have to be committed to showing them to others. (Which is not to say that we have to be able to do so right away; forgiveness takes time. There are people in my past that I can’t forgive yet, so I know that full well. But we have to be committed to getting to that point, as we heal.) Jesus loves the church—and yes, that includes that pastor, that elder, that deacon, that member; which means we’d best be careful what we say about it, and about them, and in what spirit we say it.

I was going to link to this song, which I posted as song of the week over a year ago; but I think I’ll just post it again here. I like this one a lot, in large part because it continues to convict me, and to call me back to a proper heart for ministry; and because it gives me hope that someday, we as the church will live up to the love Jesus has for us.

Jesus Loves the Church

You say that you believe in us—at times, I wonder why;
You say you see the Father in our eyes.
But I think if I were you, Lord, I’d wash my hands today,
And turn my back on all our alibis.

Chorus:
For we crucify each other, leaving a battered, wounded bride—
But Jesus loves the church;
So we’ll walk the aisle of history, toward the marriage feast,
For Jesus loves the church.

We fight like selfish children vying for that special prize;
We struggle with our gifts before your face.
And I know you look with sorrow at the blindness in our eyes
As we trip each other halfway through the race.

Chorus

I want to learn to love like you; I don’t know where to start.
I want to see them all but through your eyes.
For you believed enough to live amidst the madding crowd,
Enough to die before our very eyes.

Chorus

Words and music: Sheila Walsh
© 1988 Word Music
From the album Say So, by Sheila Walsh

Praying on the front line

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Something else I’ve been meaning to post is this passage from Tim Keller:

Biblically and historically, the one non-negotiable, universal ingredient in times of spiritual renewal is corporate, prevailing, intensive and kingdom-centered prayer. What is that?

  1. It is focused on God’s presence and kingdom. Jack Miller talks about the difference between “maintenance prayer” and “frontline” prayer meetings. Maintenance prayer meetings are short, mechanical and totally focused on physical needs inside the church or on personal needs of the people present. But frontline prayer has three basic traits:

    a. a request for grace to confess sins and humble ourselves

    b. a compassion and zeal for the flourishing of the church

    c. a yearning to know God, to see his face, to see his glory. . . .

  2. It is bold and specific. The characteristics of this kind of prayer include:

    a. Pacesetters in prayer spend time in self-examination. . . .

    b. They then begin to make the big request—a sight of the glory of God. That includes asking: 1) for a personal experience of the glory/presence of God (“that I may know you”—Exod. 33:13); 2) for the people’s experience of the glory of God (v. 15); and 3) that the world might see the glory of God through his people (v. 16). Moses asks that God’s presence would be obvious to all: “What else will distinguish me and your people from all the other people on the face of the earth?” This is a prayer that the world be awed and amazed by a show of God’s power and radiance in the church, that it would become truly the new humanity that is a sign of the future kingdom.

  3. It is prevailing, corporate. By this we mean simply that prayer should be constant, not sporadic and brief. . . . Sporadic, brief prayer shows a lack of dependence, a self-sufficiency, and thus we have not built an altar that God can honor with his fire. We must pray without ceasing, pray long, pray hard, and we will find that the very process is bringing about that which we are asking for—to have our hard hearts melted, to tear down barriers, to have the glory of God break through.

This is the kind of prayer the church needs to practice, and the kind of prayer meeting it really needs to hold (not that there isn’t value to maintenance prayer meetings as well, as part of the pastoral care of the church); it’s the kind of prayer which I’m working to encourage in the congregation I serve, which means first of all in myself. It’s hard; it takes faithfulness and commitment and attention; but I do believe the fruit is more than worth it.HT: Joyce