Kicking Ourselves

In The Divine Conspiracy, Dallas Willard refers to “the gospel of sin management.”  The Gospel of Sin Management is essentially, that the Christian life is all about trying to do the right thing and be a good person–that being right with God is about managing your sin.  

I wonder how much damage we’ve done to ourselves because of this thinking.

I was reading a study that said that 41% of Christians believe that the top priority of being a Christian was lifestyle–being good, doing the right thing, not sinning.  That same study said that only 15% of unbelievers actually saw a difference in how Christians lived their lives.  In other words, most Christians aren’t smoking what they’re selling.

And that’s the problem.  Maybe we’re selling the wrong thing.  We’ve set ourselves up for this one.  We’ve claimed that our top priority is sin management, and we can’t live up to our own expectations–so why would anyone else outside the faith want to?  If we can’t practice the faith we’ve set up for ourselves, why would anyone else want to? 

I don’t have all the answers to that, but I will say that my love for Jesus is growing in me a God-honoring life, but it doesn’t seem to work the other way around.

I used to be Presbyterian

Over the last few years, my views have changed quite a bit.  It’s not as if I have abandoned my Reformed roots or anything like that.   I would still consider myself to hold to a more Reformed tradition to Christianity.  What has changed then?  I believe that Christian denominations are traditions of the Faith.  

Much of my Christian theology was shaped when I was in my late teens and early 20′s.  I was dogmatic about my slant on the Christian Faith, and I believed that everyone who didn’t align themselves with my perspective were wrong.

I wasn’t very loving in how I dealt with truth.

But there’s so much that each Christian tradition brings to the table that many of us fail to recognize.  Baptists, Methodists, Episcopalians, Lutherans, and Presbyterians–they all have something to offer Christianity.  

Recently a friend off mine told me of a conversation he had with someone in leadership of a church.  In the conversation, the man classified his church as a “theological church”.  What does that even mean?  All churches are theological.  They all concern themselves with God.  What this man was insinuating was that they were a church with the “right” theological slant.  

Systematic theology is man-made.  It isn’t gospel, and the narrative of the gospel story is so much more than bullet points on how to get to heaven when you die.  It’s not just about a three step process that will help you be a better person.  The gospel is Jesus Christ offering Himself to you–the ultimate love story–that, in my opinion can’t simply be told in a series of three steps.

Please don’t misread.  I’m not suggesting that systematic theology is bad.  Systematic theology is a great guide.  I’m just suggesting that when we firm up our foundations on any one system, and not Christ Himself as He has offered Himself, and we start to believe that we’re right–and everyone else is wrong–well, I just don’t believe it’s what Jesus had in mind.  In fact, He prayed for the opposite in Gethsemane–He prayed that we would be one as He and God are one.  

That’s why I used to be a Presbyterian.  Now I’m just trying to follow Jesus.

This one really hits home…

“My pastor and friend Rick McKinley talked to me recently about a meeting he had with a young pastor who was beginning a church plant in another city.  In the course of the conversation, the young pastor asked Rick at what point he should kick people out of leadership because they were failing to understand the nature of ministry.  Rick looked at the pastor, confused.  ’Kick them out of leadership?’  Rick asked.  ’Sure,’ the young pastor replied.  ’We have to move forward, right?  And if they don’t get it, I need to weed them out.’

Rick sat back and laughed.  ’Listen,’ he said.  ’If I threw out the guys who didn’t get it when I started Imago, we wouldn’t have anybody left, including me!  You are never going to build a church by kicking people out.  This isn’t a fast-food restaurant; it’s the kingdom of God, and quality disciples take a lot of time.  Jesus is patient to the end.’”

–Donald Miller in Searching For God Knows What, pg 135-136.

What’s in the Box?

When I was in Junior High, I used to watch this movie called UHF over and over; I must have watched it 150 times by the time I was 13.  It stars Weird Al Yankovick, and in it, Weird Al tries to keep an inherited UHF TV station alive by showing these original and wacky programs.  One scene in particular has Gary Wantanabe in full Samurai garb as the host of a show called “Wheel of Fish”.  Here’s the scene:

This kind of movie definitely appealed to my 13 year old sense of humor; and still does for the most part.  But I wonder how much of this we’ve done with God.  I wonder how often we box God in to our own systematic theologies and rigid explanations of Him.  I wonder how much of the mystery of God we miss because we’re too interested in having the right answers than recognizing when God is at work.

What is it that we’re afraid of?  Are we afraid of serving a God that’s too big and awesome and powerful for us to control or imagine?  Are we afraid that our explanations aren’t even scratching the surface of the depth of who He is?  What are we afraid of?

My spirituality doesn’t fit into a nice box.  It’s messy.  If I’d try to put it into a box, it would spill over and break the bottom out.  And as Donald Miller put it in his book Through Painted Deserts–“I need(ed) God to be larger than our free-market economy, larger than our two-for-one coupons, larger than our religious ideas.”

Christianese Part 2

I was reading Acts 15 yesterday, and the Apostles are trying to figure out what to do with these new Gentile believers, and the Bible says, “It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us not to burden you with anything beyond the following requirements.”  This is in the Bible, and the Apostles are making a decision that will affect Christianity for thousands of years,  and this is the best they can come up with?  It seems good?  

But it’s a fair statement.  It’s fair because they take responsibility for their decision.  They seek the guidance of the Holy Spirit, and they do something about it.  They don’t just sit back and wait for God to miraculously intervene.  

How about instead of saying, “God is telling me to do ______” or “I feel led by the Spirit to _______”, or “God wants me to _______”; instead we say, “It seems good to the Spirit and to me…”  Of course that means we’re actually going to have to take responsibility for our actions and wrestle with our decision-making, and above all, pray harder.  But I think we can do it.  In fact, I know we can.

Stand Up For Jesus

My friend over at The Boneman recently posted a video he calls “Stand Up, Stand Up For Jesus.  CLICK HERE to watch.  I almost fell out of my chair laughing.

Surprised by Hope

I started reading this NT Wright’s new book this week.  It’s called Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church.  I’m only a couple of chapters in, but so far his thesis is that most Christians have a misguided notion about the Resurrection and life after death.  According to ancient Jewish and Christian understanding of what Jesus and Paul are talking about, NT Wright states that it’s not about “going to heaven after you die”.  It’s about our real, physical bodies being resurrected and heaven coming to earth (through the new heavens and new earth) that God is creating.  Here are a couple of excerpts:

“It comes as something of a shock, in fact, when people are told what is in fact the case: that there is very little in the Bible about ‘going to heaven when you die’ and not a lot about a postmortem hell either.  The medieval pictures of heaven and hell, boosted though not created by Dante’s classic work, have exercised a huge influence on Western Christian imagination.  Many Christians grow up assuming that whenever the New Testament speaks of heaven it refers to the place to which the saved will go after death.  In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus’s sayings in the other gospels about the ‘kingdom of God’ are rendered as ‘kingdom of heaven’; since many read Matthew first, when they find Jesus talking about ‘entering the kingdom of heaven’, they have their assumptions confirmed and suppose that he is indeed talking about how to go to heaven when you die, which is certainly not what either Jesus or Matthew had in mind.  Many mental pictures have grown up around this and are now assumed to be what the Bible teaches or what Christians believe.  But the language of heaven in the New Testament doesn’t work that way.  ’God’s kingdom’ in the preaching of Jesus refers not to a postmortem destiny, not our escape from this world into another one, but to God’s sovereign rule coming ‘on earth as it is in heaven.’  The roots of the misunderstanding go very deep, not least into the residual Platonism that has infected whole swaths of Christian thinking and has misled people into supposing that Christians are meant to devalue this present world and our present bodies and regard them as shabby or shameful.”

“Likewise, the pictures of heaven in the book of Revelation have been much misunderstood.  The wonderful description in Revelation 4 & 5 of the 24 elders casting their crowns before the throne of God and the Lamb…is not a picture of the last day, with all  the redeemed in heaven at last.  It is a picture of PRESENT reality, the heavenly dimension of our present life.  God made heaven and earth; at the last he will remake both and join them together forever.”

And finally, one of my favorites so far:

“A piety that sees death as the moment of ‘going home at last’, the time when we are ‘called to God’s eternal peace’, has no quarrel with power-mongers who want to carve up the world to suit their own ends.  Resurrection, by contrast, has always gone with a strong view of God’s justice and of God as the good Creator.  Those twin beliefs give rise not to a meek acquiescence to injustice in the world but to a robust determination to oppose it.”

Wright is a great author.  He’s been challenging my thinking.  More to come.

Faith AND Science

My wife and I have started watching this new show on ABC called Eli Stone.  We first started watching it because it comes on after Lost, but we keep watching it because we like the message it gives.  But before I explain a little more about the show a warning: if you’re an Evangelical or conservative, or an Evangelical Conservative, you might want to just stop reading now, as you may find yourself extremely displeased with my take on this show.

Eli Stone is a show about the title character who experiences visions that tell him to use his legal expertise as an attorney to help people.  And these visions have something to do with George Michael songs.  Eli’s brother, a doctor, discovers that Eli has a brain aneurism, and that is what’s producing his strange visions.

However, Eli also visits an acupuncturist, who also happens to be a mystic sage to Eli; interpreting Eli’s dreams as prophetic visions–and pronouncing Eli as a modern day prophet. I don’t believe the message of this show is to challenge the Evangelical/Conservative Christian “heresy” over the issue of modern day prophets.  I believe the undertone of this show is to display the validity of the balance of science and faith; one in which more Christians need to see.  Science doesn’t discredit faith, and neither does faith seek to destroy science.  Christianity isn’t about defending itself against science.  

As Catherine Crouch has said, “Certainly a few prominant scientists…make pronouncements that science tells us everything we need to know about the world, or even that science shows that religion is a delusion.  But that’s not the way most people who do science think about it anymore.  It’s an outdated attitude.  Yet, many conservatives think this is where the battle is to be fought…”

While the show clearly develops characters who believe in “science only” (mainly Eli’s brother, the doctor), it also shows us that many in the show don’t have all the answers and while they believe in Eli’s diagnosis (the science part), they also believe his visions have meaning (the faith part).  The acupuncturist sage-mystic, for example, has much to say about God that is refreshing.  In one exchange, Eli and The Sage are arguing about why God would choose to give Eli visions, and Eli wonders why God would pick him as a prophet.  Eli says, “I’m not sure I even believe in God.”  The sage then says, “Do you believe in love?  Do you believe in truth?  Do you believe in justice?  Then you believe in God.  God is all those things.  Look–(as he points to the sunset) God is everywhere.”

If we are to respond redemptively to the world, we are going to have to stop seeing science as the enemy and start worshipping the God who gave us science.  God’s fingerprints are all over this world, and He speaks through them.  I mean, Moses had the burning bush…

Responding Redemptively 1: Image

In response to my paper “Postmodernism in the Pews”, a close friend of mine asked me elaborate more on my closing statements. In the paper, I describe 2 ways that the Church typically responds to the postmodern culture. It either runs and hides, or it totally embraces the culture. My closing remarks stated that the Church instead needs to respond to the culture redemptively–“…the Church needs to be about redeeming God’s world while reclaiming and transforming postmodern people. This way models closely the ministry of Jesus and, I believe reflects his will. And this redemption is not limited to personal salvation, but is about ‘…believing that God’s redemptive and transforming activity extends to every element of the cultural soup.’”

So, I’d like to take a deeper look into what it means to respond to our postmodern culture redemptively. What better place to start then with people?

I’m originally from Southern California. It is truly a melting pot of all types of people from all walks of life. Growing up in the Greater Los Angeles community, there was plenty of diversity around me all the time. This is why I have to laugh when I see people react to teenagers dressed in Goth as they walk through the doors of a Starbucks. It really is funny to me. Most people go out of their way to avoid others that look weird or different.

This reaction is actually a reaction that is contrary to the Gospel itself. In The Message paraphrase, at Genesis 1:26 it reads, “Let us make human beings in our image, reflecting our nature…” Everyone, everywhere is a bearer of the image of God. It’s not just Christians that have the image of God–as if to hold it as a standard for those who aren’t “in”. This means everyone matters, and we need to treat all people like they matter–to love them like they matter.

It comes from the understanding that all people NEED God’s great story of Grace, and not only understanding that fact, but DESIRING it to be so, and LIVING a life that says you actually believe it. The Gospel is good news for everyone or it’s not good news for anyone.

Paul even mentions this in Romans 8. He says that ALL CREATION groans for redemption. All creation. Even those who don’t believe in redemption. GK Chesterton has even said that, “…the man who knocks at the door of the brothel is looking for God.”

So, how do we respond to our postmodern culture redemptively? By really believing that all people are created in God’s image, and that the Gospel is truly good news for everyone…not just for us. What does this look like? We’ve got to start by understanding our own cultural biases. Our way of understanding the Christian Faith is simply that–our way of understanding it. God’s world is so much bigger than our little square of it. I believe that most Evangelicals and conservative Christians are guilty of this, and it shows through their preaching: we want so desperately to understand Scripture as it relates to us that we assume the writers must have been writing to a 21st century, Western audience; and in the process take no time in understanding the ancient context.

We also have to build relationships with and love people. In the movie, The Patriot, British General Cornwallis is arguing with Col. Tavington about his treatment of the Colonials. In the exchange, Cornwallis warns Tavington to treat them better because when the war is over and the British have won, they will again have to take up residence in the colonies and be neighbors and live and work with the Colonials–essentially that these men and women are their brothers.

May that picture not be lost on us. May we see that following the way of Jesus is not about “us vs. them”, but that we are all created in God’s image, and we all matter. May we see that we’re all crying out for Grace–and we all need the good news.

Postmodernism In The Pews

Click Here to access my paper, “Postmodernism in the Pews: How Postmodernism Has Impacted the Church”. Enjoy!