Pastor Dan Scott

Last week, Tom McDonald made this startling statement:

“Too many of our senior pastors have exchanged their original calling to shepherd a flock for a driving ambition to build their city’s largest congregation. This has set up the conditions in which many church leaders have become abusive to their staff. As these frustrated pastors (and other church leaders) gradually transfer their own inner torment onto their coworkers, the church staff becomes a seething cauldron of bitterness and anxiety. This situation is epidemic among our nation’s churches. It must stop.”

Dr. McDonald is hardly some embittered cast-away, using the pulpit to nurse a grudge. He is the worship pastor at Church on the Way, one of our country’s largest congregations. He delivered his message to several hundred worship leaders. I was there, in a conference held at Christ Church in Nashville. I noted the compassion and tenderness with which he spoke.

I certainly felt the pull of his call for us to return to our calling and to our core spiritual values.

Here is another statement from that same message:

“Something serious occurs to our worship and music whenever we change them from sacramental instruments that we employ to connect the human heart with God, into mere tools for church growth.”

Wow. Please read that statement again.

These two statements expose a spiritual illness that has been afflicting the heart of American Evangelical Christianity for several decades. The illness evolves from an exchange of secular for spiritual terms, then into a continual secularizing of our worship and spirituality, and finally into a complete redefinition of the church’s purpose and ministry.

As an example of this, McDonald told the story of a minister of music who discovered he had cancer. After going through treatment, his church – HIS CHURCH -- terminated his employment. The church leaders had become afraid that the group health insurance premiums would rise as a result of his struggle.

Now, that is surely an exceptional story! It is however, only an extreme example of how we have come to deal with church matters. We tend to smile sweetly at the old fashioned and naive voice that meekly makes some appeal to scripture, trying to gently rebuke our marketing plan or our fund raising methods. We are quick to remind the protester about how things are done “in the real world.” We then lecture the poor soul about our “competition,” “our market share” and “our bottom line.”

Someone had to tell us that our new vocabulary suggests that many of our church leaders have left the narrow path that leads to life. They have joined the multitudes of our disenchanted and soulless age and are leading their congregations to walk the wide road that leads to destruction.

Our liberal counterparts did this intentionally and honestly; we have done it through our spiritual neglect and denial.

We need to remember some things.

Worship is not a concert.

The father of a flock is not a CEO.

Spirituality does not result from a market poll.

Orthodoxy is not a political persuasion.

The church is not the world.

The “real world” is not this present age; it is the age to come.

If these things are not so, why don’t we have the courage to stop pretending? If we are making our living by comforting lonely people with ancient myths, why don’t we just say so?

Every Evangelical leader in America should listen to McDonald’s message. He is a spiritual physician. He showed us the X rays of American Evangelicalism. It turns out that something is dreadfully wrong in the way we are doing church work.

I know: we do many marvelous things. We make our country a better place. We provide a moral influence for our nation. We feed people. We absorb the effects of many of our society’s ills. I am ready to defend all of that. However, the issues that McDonald raised are real. If left unchallenged, this spiritual disease will ultimately destroy our influence even with our own grandchildren – much less with secular America.

McDonald is right. Too many churches are destroying too many people.

Some of the people most harmed by church business were once called to carry the gospel to the lost, or pastor a flock, or heal the hurting. It took some of them years to discover that such things must be done “on their own time;” that the church actually pays them to feed the maniacal frenzy of church growth – getting nickels and noses into the pews.

Why are people in our pews in the first place?

Many of us seemed to have forgotten.

Why did we work so hard to get those people -- mostly from sister churches that are not as cool as we are -- into our pews?

Surely we didn’t call them here to perpetrate the spiritual emptiness that eats at the core of many of our church staffs.

Well, my daughter has shifted her attention from Nostradamus to Galileo. www.beatriceblount.blogspot.com

In her latest post, she claims that we post-modern ‘sophisticates’ are as likely to misjudge those who offer challenging knowledge as the people of Galileo's time.

The famous astronomer, you will recall, made the discovery that the sun was the center of our solar system. That implied that the earth was not fixed but rather moved around the sun. Under pressure, he recanted. He feared banishment from the Lord's Table. It’s very old news. Also, the story has been repeated in so many scholarly text books and articles by now that few people in the Western World have escaped hearing about it.

We are not likely to face such a problem in our times, of course. We don't have any astronomers in our churches to begin with. They simply don't attend. Neither do paleontologists, physicists or anthropologists. As the church's infatuation with ignorance as a form of piety has deepened, we have steadily eliminated great swaths of human knowledge and those who pursue it, from our congregations. Today, among a shocking number of believers, even theology and biblical studies have become suspect.

We expect our faith to comfort us. We don’t expect it to offer information about origins, meaning, justice, jurisprudence, history, art and so forth. Furthermore, if a biblical or spiritual insight cannot be stated as a sound bite followed by a joke, (hopefully illuminated by clever lighting and delivered with excellent sound) we tend to be uninterested.

The most literary religion in all of history has suddenly fallen in love with ignorance. It’s an enormous tragedy.

American Evangelicalism is presently afflicted with a late stage of cognitive dissonance. (The term means “the voluntarily suppression of any knowledge that may challenge what one has decided in advance to believe.”)

In addiction work, we call that “denial.” It is a simple word that describes a serious condition. For example, it keeps an otherwise loving dad from noticing that his teenager has become anorexic. “That just doesn't happen in our family,” the dad keeps repeating to himself. Soon, the sedative pleasure of denial numbs his eyes to his daughter’s shrinking body.

The same process works to cover up any addiction in one’s family. Everyone outside the family may know that the old man is mad as a hatter but the family members just smile and tell stories about his eccentric and creative ways.

Cognitive dissonance is simply a fancier word for the same reaction.

Everyone is prone to cognitive dissonance, by the way. Thomas Samuel Kuhn wrote a very famous book about how it affects scientists. He claimed that when newly discovered facts threaten old theoretical structures, aging (and not so aging) scientists will often go to work to expel the people who take the new discoveries seriously from respectable positions in universities and laboratories. As it turns out, even scientists tend to fight new information. It's a very human trait. That’s why intellectually honest people intentionally adopt a process for information-gathering and information-evaluation that purposefully challenges what they would prefer to believe.

Christians call that process “discernment.” St. Paul says that it is a necessary for any Christian group that allows people to prophesy. “Let them prophesy,” writes Paul, “but let the others judge.” In other words, a prophet must not judge his or her own prophesy. The community must stand back, assess, ponder, reflect, examine, debate – do the difficult work of testing the origin, accuracy, and biblically faithful nature of the prophetic utterance. This is supposed to protect the Christian community from cults, stupidity, and from egomaniacal wind bags that manipulate Christian’s hunger for God in order to enrich themselves.

A genius can be wrong. After all, very intelligent people have sometimes taught heresy, a spiritually toxic spirit that comes wrapped in the guise of clever words. It is also possible to be a genius without acquiring wisdom, which is more spiritually desirable. So genius is not everything.

I certainly do not think we should open up all our doors and windows for every novel and cool idea. The church was right to be cautious in past generations. We are the poorer for our modern abdication of theological responsibility.

On the other hand, we must be cautious – and humble about our own tendency to suppress knowledge. We must own up to the real reason we tend to reject knowledge – to become cognitively dissonant. It is rarely because we think we are battling heresy; it is usually because we have become so ill informed about the world and our own faith that we are now uncomfortable with anyone who knows very much about anything. That’s why (by our actions and attitudes) we often tell thinkers and artists to go away.

And they do.

It hurts us when we look into the past and are forced to acknowledge the harm Christian leaders did to our witness. We still live with the results, as Tiffany points out. The historical church sometimes required intelligent people to deny what they knew to be true in order to keep peace with those they loved. That was a sin against truth and we must admit it. Every generation of young students rediscover these sins against science that our spiritual ancestors committed in the name of Christ. When our children discover these events in their studies, we must acknowledge their pain and embarrassment and tell them how we can avoid committing the same sin.

There is probably no better example of the church’s sin against intellectual integrity than the defeated Galileo leaving worship, the taste of consecrated bread and wine still on his lips, muttering to himself as he went, "and yet it moves."
However, our sin may be greater. We have allowed our knowledge base to become so weak that a developing Galileo will have left the Lord’s Table long before we ever have to threaten to deny him the body and blood of Christ. He probably will have left while still in high school, when the church refused to teach him, listen to his questions, treat his quest for knowledge respectfully, or find some mentor who is not threatened to explore the cosmos and to joyfully (And worshipfully) confess that “we know in part and see in part.”

My daughter, Tiffany, writes a blog that has become widely read. I can see why; she is one of the best writers around. Not only do her words dance and perform all sorts of intellectual acrobatics, she actually says something; and that’s refreshing these days!

Both of my daughters are believers, thanks be to God. They attend church faithfully and are raising my grandchildren in the faith. However, each of them struggle with American Evangelicalism’s current flight from the arts and sciences. They are not theological liberals, so its not an option for them to attend a church that is not committed to an orthodox expression of biblical faith. On the other hand, they often feel they must hide their interest in social concerns, philosophical questions, art, science – well, much of life that currently falls outside of the interest of many American Evangelicals.

In her latest blog, Tiffany muses about the relationship between Catherine de Medici, wife of King Henri II, and Nostradamus. She dips her foot in the swamp of history, fantasy, myth, fear and fascination that surrounds the old soothsayer. Then she raises the question of whether he actually was a soothsayer/wizard/devil-inspired spiritualist. She does this because she discovered that he saved lives during a plague by proscribing rose hips, which is of course a potent source of vitamin C.

The issue of Nostradamus leads her to wonder whether he was misjudged by his generation of believers simply because he made eerie predictions about the future. (For example, he predicted the rise of an evil European leader he called “Hinster” who would murder millions of people.)

Well, I don’t know. My knowledge of Nostradamus is limited. Like most of you, I realize that New Agers and the like find him fascinating. Through the fog of centuries he appears sinister and altogether mysterious.

But that’s not her point.

Her point is that church people have gotten it wrong a few times and have attacked (and even killed) people for witchcraft or heresy who were actually just intelligent. She names Galileo and Michelangelo and raises the specter of the Salem Witch trials.

Probably Nostradamus had a better grasp on pharmacology than others. Not knowing about vitamin C, he nonetheless intuitively grasped that something in rose hips could help people fight disease. As for his prophesies, why would that frighten any Christian? After all, don't we read daily from a text full of such predictions?

Tiffany is circling around what I think is probably the answer: Nostradamus was both an intellectual and a Charismatic.

Not good, especially now.

One must be either spiritually alive or intellectually curious...but not both.

Intellectuals and Charismatics are enemies; each expels the other from their camp. Therefore, if you are an intellectual and discover that you have Charismatic gifts and interests, you better hide that side of yourself from your intellectual friends. If you are a Charismatic who develops an interest in the intellectual life, you will have to hide that interest from your Charismatic friends.
An anti-intellectual mood has swept over Evangelicalism in the last few years that resembles the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the sixties. A couple of generations have grown up believing that fidelity to the Word of God requires a return to the nineteenth century. The Christian liberals’ capitulation to modernity has been met with a conservative retreat from the arts, science and social justice.

It leaves some of us with no place to go.

I grew up in an extremely conservative Christian home. We never had a television (we read books!)

We heard bible stories every single day. We prayed. We fasted. We cared for poor people. We did the stuff of spiritual life in a socially conservative context. However, I never once heard anyone ever claim that the earth was six thousand years old. I never heard anyone rebuke my boyhood interest in dinosaurs. No one yelled at me for reading Freud when I was a teenager.
My parents encouraged me to develop intellectually and welcomed my questions about life and reality.

I was thirty when I first heard an intelligent Christian man claim that the earth was six thousand years old. I thought he was kidding!

He wasn’t.

He was my first encounter with a growing tide of American believers who had declared war on all aspects of modern life; except for its technological toys.

Before this blog becomes a book, I must somehow wrap up my thoughts.

Truth, Goodness and Beauty exist. Believing that separates me from modern and post-modern thinkers.

I believe that a dead man rose from the dead and that He was God made flesh. That conviction destroys any intellectual credentials I might otherwise be allowed to establish.

Perception of Truth, Goodness and Beauty differs from person to person; from culture to culture and from generation to generation. That statement separates me from the current mood of many conservative Christians. Reality and the perception of reality are not the same things. That is why we must quest for all three of those eternal qualities. The quest begins in awe and humility. It cannot begin in a naive certainty that my family, my church, my culture and the age in which I happen to be living, gives me a privileged view of reality. That would be the doctrine of immaculate perception! Continental drift occurred; its not a theory or a speculation. That provides us with a visible proof of an earth that is the product of untold ages and cataclysmic (as well as incremental) change.

Quantum mechanics has uncovered truth that no previous generation ever considered: that our concrete world rests upon a constant motion of particles and energies that have only probable existence.

Relativity –now proven through numerous experiments – reveal a universe in which there is no fixed point, or for that matter, any fixed flow of time.

And there is more, but I must conclude.

Creatures who live for the briefest moment against a backdrop of infinity, ought to be humble. As St. Paul says, “We know in part and prophesy in part and see reality as in a glass, darkly.”

Nostradamus startles us by depicting a coming European monster centuries in advance, alluding to machines that would fly and rain down fire that would consume entire cities. However, he called the European monster “Hinster”. That’s really close! But not quite right.

We see in part and prophesy in part.

He discovered that vitamin C had potent powers to heal the sick. However, he had no explanation for what he had found, at least one that would satisfy his contemporaries.

The Salem witches were apparently smart women who were trying to discover ways of keeping their families alive with things they learned from Indians – that some roots and berries have medicinal properties.

Galileo tried not to see what he had seen in order to maintaining his community with those he loved. “And yet,” he was heard to mutter as he left the church, “the sun does move.”

The scripture commands us to “comfort the feeble minded.” We are forbidden to ridicule or mock those who struggle with mental deficiencies.

Why then do we feel free to ridicule or mock those who exercise their minds to discover the wonders of the world?

I don’t know. But it isn’t right.

If you want to read the blog that provoked this diatribe, here’s the link: http://beatriceblount.blogspot.com/2009/07/nostradamus.html