Pastor Dan Scott

Why Was Jesus Born During Hanukkah?

2011-12-02T12:41:00.000-08:00

I predict that this year, as in every other year, someone will tell me about the pagan origins of Christmas. They will passionately point out the lack of evidence that Christ was born in December. They will rant about commercialization of the season. They will say all sorts of things to discredit the importance of Advent.

So, this year, as in other years, I will sigh. Then I will go buy presents for my family and friends.

The attitude that produces the distrust of Christmas is, at the root of things, a rejection of the incarnation. It is a sense of disgust at the thought that God became a man; that he didn’t just put on a “man suit” and walk around but BECAME a man.

Jesus got hungry.

Jesus wept.

Jesus defecated.

Therefore, the spiritual path Jesus offers must necessarily be consistent with the incarnation. In other words, Christianity is human, as well as divine. As a consequence, “spirituality” cannot mean becoming increasingly detached from material things or from physical action. Instead, Christian spirituality must involve the redemption of matter and its use as a spiritual instrument. Consecrated matter is to be received with gratitude, enjoyed and celebrated as God’s gift to his children.

There is, in other words, an inescapable sacramental reality to our faith.

Cut out the ceremonies, sacraments, awe and reverence; the material components of worship and all human ways of expressing spiritual life and you will end up with a philosophy or a political path. You may call the result “Christianity” if you wish, but it will have no lasting grip on the human soul. It will gradually lose its hold on the human imagination. It will die because it never really lived.

Nor is Christianity meant to be an endless repetition of the first century. Otherwise it would be unholy to sing Amazing Grace or to play Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring. We would chant the Psalms and read the scriptures from a scroll, just as Jesus and his apostles did.

The demand that we return to the first century is impossible nonsense.

It is also a sin against the gifts God has given through His church for two thousand years

Christianity is not a thing. It is a river of life that flows from God, through the Jewish law and prophets, culminates in Christ, and then flows from Christ into the entire world. It keeps flowing through history, collecting the contributions of God’s people in all times and in all places and carries those contributions toward the end of days. Thus, Christians joyfully receive not only the contribution of Christ and his apostles but the contributions of all who have benefited and been transformed by the work of Christ and the apostles.

St. Francis of Assisi taught us to build a manger scene.

Charles Wesley gave us Hark the Herald Angels Sing.

St. Nicholas gave us the idea of following the example of the wise men by expressing our faith by giving gifts, especially at Christmas time.

If the pagans offer something to the season that doesn’t offend or undermine our message of redemption, who cares? Their gifts are also welcomed.

God sends rain on the just and the unjust. That’s why we may eat corn that God’s rain produces, even if it comes from farms owned by pagans.

If a string of colored lights helps people celebrate the birth of the Lord, why all the fuss?

And yet, the origins of most of Christianity’s sacramental and liturgical life is not pagan at all, but Jewish!

The Jews gave us incense for worship.

The Jews gave us the public reading of scripture.

The Jews gave us the basic structure of the Eucharist. (The traditional Christian liturgy of Communion is simply an adaptation of the Passover ceremony.)

And, yes, the Jews gave us Christmas.

1 Maccabees, chapter 4, tells the story of the first “feast of dedication,” or what we now call “Hanukah.”

The Gospel of St, John, chapter 7, tell us that Jesus celebrated Hanukkah, even though it was rooted in the Apocrypha rather than in the Old Testament.

This connection between Hanukkah and Christmas must surely mean something.

Christians have always believed that the ancient Jewish feasts reveal something important and enduring about spiritual life. But for some reason, the feast of Hanukkah is one we often ignore. Perhaps that is because Hanukkah is first mentioned in the Apocrypha rather than in canonical scripture. Or, perhaps, because the New Testament does not say when Christ was born, modern Christians are uncomfortable with the idea that genuine knowledge can sometimes come through oral tradition. At any rate, early Christians seemed to have connected the birth of Christ with mid-winter celebration and their belief has stubbornly resisted the centuries of complaining by frustrated puritans.

Of course, every ancient culture in the Northern hemisphere noted when the days of darkness were about to make a subtle turn toward the light. They all had some form of celebration and ritual to mark the turn.

Many people believe it’s just too great a coincidence that the Lord’s birth should come so conveniently, at the very same time of the year as the mid-winter pagan celebrations.

But that is hardly the point.

Whenever Jesus was born, Christians have always associated his birth with two great spiritual realities: the coming of light and the cleansing of the temple.

Hanukkah is the celebration of the Maccabean revolt against the Greek-speaking Syrians. The Jews drove them out, not only because the Syrians had occupied their land but also because they had defiled their temple. This “abomination that makes desolate,” had inflicted a deep psychological wound on the Jewish people. They felt driven to rededicate the House of God.

As they had fought to regain the city of Jerusalem, the consecrated oil in the temple nearly ran out. In fact, there was not even enough oil to keep the lamps burning. But the lamps burned anyway. For eight days.

After driving out the Greeks, Judah Maccabee led the people to rededicate the temple. When this was accomplished, the Jews regained a sense of God’s presence. The darkness had lost. The lamps were burning.

God’s Temple had been cleansed.

But a greater cleansing was coming. The world had grown dark from a much darker force than that of Syrian armies. The world, made by God and for God, had suffered a long, long spiritual winter. The people who lived in the world, whose bodies had been made to be the temples of the Holy Spirit, had been occupied by an alien force. Evil had defiled the souls of humanity.

Then, “in the fullness of time,” a light suddenly flickered in the darkness and the darkness could not overpower it.

Why was Christ born during Hanukkah?

No one explains it better than Christina Rossetti.

In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,

Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;

Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow

In the bleak midwinter, long ago.

Our God, Heaven cannot hold Him, nor earth sustain;  

Heaven and earth shall flee away when He comes to reign.  

In the bleak midwinter a stable place sufficed 

The Lord God Almighty, Jesus Christ.

This year, as in other years, I will put up lights. I will set out candles. I will buy gifts. I will eat with my friends. Then, on December 24^th, I will eat bread and drink wine as someone sings Silent Night.

God became a man to cleanse my heart and to rededicate my soul.

I will joyfully receive all the gifts a grateful people throughout history have given that help me honor the coming of Light of the World, God-made-flesh we could well call Holy Hanukkah.

Reflections on Incense

2011-11-26T20:44:00.000-08:00

Blindfold me. Drive a few hundred miles.

Stop your car one block from MacCorkle Avenue, in front of a little house on the banks of the Kanawha River, lead me into the house.

Ask me where I am. I’ll know.

The scent of cedar and apples, mixed with the slightest hint of mothballs will reveal your secret more effectively than sight.

I’m at Grandma’s house.

The fragrance of home will give you away.

A fragrance lingers in that old place that announces the presence of the woman who inhabited it. Gone now for twenty-five years, she still inhabits the house through her fragrance.

And you know just what I’m talking about.

There’s just something about scent that grips a person.

The magi’s second gift, the carol insists, “owns a deity nigh.” It speaks of “prayer and praising all men raising,” and calls us to “worship him God most high.”

Their third gift is a “a bitter perfume that breathes of life of gathering gloom.”

Together, the two scents create a unique fragrance to fill the house of God. The historical churches have burned this unique combination to call the worshipper to prayer.

The holy scent fills the pages of the Bible too.

All along their earthly journey, God’s people offer incense. According to the Bible’s final book, we will offer it still after we reach eternity. Heaven is evidently filled with holy smoke; its scent penetrates the souls of pilgrims as they travel toward the holy city.

The scent is also present in more mundane facets of the believer’s life.

In the Song of Solomon for example, the lover offers scented oils for lovemaking. She sings about the fragrant smoke that rises above the place of her lover’s dwelling. She longs to anoint her beloved’s body with those oils and enjoy with him the fragrance she has prepared. After their night of love, the smell becomes his mark of identification. She breathes in the fragrance to become entranced with his presence, especially when he is absent.

Later in the Bible, a sinner woman approaches Christ and pours upon his feet the fragrant oils she has been saving her entire life.

For what purpose, you ask?

Well, such oils were used for two things: for one’s honeymoon and to honor one’s loved one who has died. This woman pours her scented oil on Jesus, her chosen bridegroom.

She will never experience a physical union with him but a bond stronger than death attaches her soul to his. But she also pours the fragrance on his body because he is about to die.

Both purposes are fulfilled in this act of devotion: scented oil for love and scented oil for death.

As the scent fills the house, the Pharisees recoil from the intimacy the fragrance creates.

And they still do.

Despite the continual mention of incense in both the Old and New Testaments, many Protestant Christians find incense frightening and, some even find it diabolical.

They associate it with pagan rituals and Eastern mysticism.

Not me.

To me, it smells like home.

In John Travolta’s silly movie, Michael, the archangel comes to earth. He travels with a group of less-than-holy friends. As God’s great angelic warrior walks among human beings, a strange phenomenon follows him. Women swoon, overcome by a fragrance they say is something like fresh baked bread. But it is much more than that, they claim. The scent takes their breath away. As they swoon, the track plays “It Feels Like Home to Me.”

The mighty archangel carries a scent of human’s forgotten home. The fallen human people interpret their response in an erotic way but their longing is something far beyond mere eroticism. It is an intimacy that erotic love cannot reach. But that is the only intimacy they know and it seems so inappropriate to attach to God.

That’s precisely how Pharisees respond to Mary Magdalene’s scented praise: too much, too intimate, too ‘out there’.

Pentecostals and Charismatics correctly employ the idea of incense as metaphor: fervent worship is that “sweet smelling savor” the Lord most seeks for us, they claim.

Well, yes.

But if a metaphor is spiritually accurate, why would we reject the material offering upon which the metaphor is based? The Magi did not offer the baby a metaphor; they offered a material substance that smelled good.

So, no, we don’t need incense for worship. Nor do we need music, or nice buildings. We don’t NEED art, or anything else material. But honestly, coming as I do from a Pentecostal background, it is difficult to think what worship really means without referring to music. In fact, to most Charismatics and Pentecostals, worship has come to mean mostly music. When we say, “I loved the worship in that church,“ we certainly don’t mean the testimonies. That isn’t worship. We don’t mean the sermons; that isn’t worship. The offering is not worship. So what is left?

Music.

In other words, sound can be worship, but not scent.

Should we even talk about taste? Can taste ever be worship?

When the Lord says, “taste and see that the Lord is good,” is he using JUST a metaphor?

I mean, think about it. Human beings in love don’t just meditate and talk about love. They touch, taste, and smell one another. Every lover knows the scent of his or her beloved.

Why? Because human beings want to experience love with skin on it.

Like human love, Christian spirituality is not abstract. It is material. Our body, and not just our mind, participates in experiencing God. We don’t just talk and ponder about God. We touch, taste, see and feel God.

And, perhaps, smell Him.

The frankincense and myrrh, the sweet and the bitter, the life and the death, the love and the loss mingle and create holy smoke. It fills the house. It shakes the soul. It’s unsettling.

It’s irresistible. It’s unforgettable.

I have long ago given up trying to convince people of the worshipful nature of incense. I let it go. Except in my heart.

But when I step on the other side, the first thing I’ll notice may well be the fragrance.

“Frankincense and myrrh,” I’ll think.

Then, perhaps I’ll notice something else. Maybe, just for me. God will mix in a bit of cedar, some apples and the slightest hint of mothballs.

And I’ll sigh and say, “ahhh, that smells just like home to me.”

What About Our Class Struggle?

2011-11-11T15:03:00.000-08:00

A few centuries ago, the English aristocracy were trembling at the news they were hearing from France. Dukes had been decapitated. The wealthy had been despoiled of their goods. The poor were rioting in the streets. France was wallowing in anarchy.

What would keep the same things from occurring in England, where conditions were not much different? In England the poor shivered in the cold while ladies danced at balls in castles and bishops discussed philosophy at Oxford. In England, as in France, the class divide had become unsustainable. The wealthy didn’t have enough money to hire enough soldiers or build high enough walls to keep out people who were hungry. Catastrophe was coming their way. The aristocrats knew this; they just didn’t know when.

Then, something unexpected happened.

An Oxford doctor of theology went to a prayer meeting. He experienced the power of the Holy Spirit and felt called to preach the gospel to England’s poor. Soon, coal miners and farmers, street vendors and orphans began crowding to the meetings to listen to John Wesley preach and to learn Charles Wesley’s songs.

In a few years, twenty percent of England’s population became Methodists. They experienced the power of God, the social lift that often comes with the gospel, and the intellectually transforming energy that comes from wrestling with Holy Scripture.

We need something like that now.Our class divide is also becoming dangerous.

I know that I shouldn’t even discuss this but I am a pastor. So, I must.

I am responsible to tell you that Karl Marx was not the first to address the consequences of dividing human beings into socio- economic classes.

What are we to say about the constitution of a proposed kingdom that begins with the words, “blessed are the poor; for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven?” Or to the Christ’s claim that he had fulfilled the prophecy that the messiah would “preach the good news to the poor?”

How are we to respond to the apostle James, who clearly prohibits any sort of economic stratification within the church, particularly as an evangelistic strategy?

And, to mention just one more out of many New Testament passages, how do we respond to the assertion of the Apostle Paul in Galatians that he had been obedient to the request of the leaders in Jerusalem to “remember the poor?”

Such passages have become uncomfortable to many American Christians. In today’s supercharged political climate, they seem to smack of some sort of ancient socialism; a kind of embarrassing proto-Marxist rhetoric that we must quickly explain away.

They will not go away, however, unless conservatives do to the Bible with these passages what liberals have done with the passages about the virgin birth and the Lord’s physical resurrection from the dead. We could learn from the liberals how to claim that these passages were for another time and situation; that the poor back then were not like today’s poor; that the kingdom of God has been advanced by using an evangelistic strategy that deliberately markets to the upwardly mobile; and so forth.

What we have been doing is not right. It is a betrayal of the gospel.

It is also having bad results.

George Barna recently noted that the poor are the most un-churched group of American society, and that this is particularly true of English-speaking Whites. His research shows that White poor people in our country are actually falling away from the church in great numbers, and that in the younger generations, the statistics become even more alarming.

A recent edition of Time magazine focused on the accelerating pace at which American culture is shrinking its middle class. There are many factors to blame, not the least of which is a native working force that is now largely uneducated and unskilled compared to that of other industrial nations. In other words, too large a proportion of our middle class young adults don’t know the basics of Western Civilization. They can’t read at adequate levels, don’t know geography, can’t speak a language other than their own, have inadequate math skills, and are not aware of the basic scientific discoveries of the last many decades.

For all these reasons, American workers are having an increasingly difficult time competing with their Polish, English, Spanish, Russian, Indian, Korean, and Brazilian counterparts in a globalized economy. Corporations can often get more for their money elsewhere.

But why is that?

For one thing, other countries have been pouring huge amounts of their national attention and treasury into education for several decades. Also, our country had no real competitors for much of the twentieth century. The other great powers destroyed had much of their infrastructure through their insane wars. However, in the last fifty years, those same powers have been rebuilding and modernizing their infrastructure. What’s more, many of these nations have also continued to value the intellectual structures of civilization, and to insist that diplomas ought to be rewarded to people who have taken the time to learn what it means to be civilized.

We have been watching television and playing video games, while ignoring boring subjects like literature and math. It worked too. We could still find a good paying job even if we didn’t know how to think critically.

Well, its over.

Now, if a worker doesn’t have an education, and sometimes even if he does, he will have to get in line behind the Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Germans, Canadians, Swiss, Swedes, and all the others who have been studying for years in schools that their countries funded.

Furthermore, our situation is not going to turn around; at least for some time. In fact our situation will never turn around unless we stop ignoring vast portions of our population. If our poor people keep going to bad schools and our teachers never make enough money to feed themselves, our cycles of poverty will keep turning. As a result, our workforce will not be able to compete at global standards.

America will not be successful just because.

A recent edition of Time Magazine focused on the economic dangers ahead of our country, which unfortunately we seem willing to ignore. For this reason, our future does not appear to be bright at the moment.

So, what will happens to our poor? And, if you consider yourself to be middle class at the moment, I may be speaking about you. Your own family may be slowly descending into poverty in years ahead unless you are preparing your children to do otherwise.

I know, blogs are supposed to be short.

So, I will now confess that I do not have an economic solution for our country since I am neither Marxist nor Libertarian, I also don’t have a revolutionary solution – armed or political.

What I offer is a spiritual solution.

Our churches are not offering this type of solution. They are too busy fighting to stay on the right side of things, as secular society defines it.

It’s not the first time Christianity has done this. We have often come precariously close to offering Christianity without a Christ.

Oh, we adore the Christ we sing and theologize about. We have proven ourselves perfectly capable of worshiping Jesus without listening to a thing he said. Pictures of Jesus, statues of Jesus and songs about Jesus move us to tears; it’s the Sermon on the Mount that we find impractical.

That was true in his day too. Jesus didn’t die because he refused to honor Caesar, Herod and the High Priest but because he didn’t honor them any more than he honored anyone else.

It was true in Wesley’s day as well. The Church of England was about doing well rather than about becoming good. The rabble was staying away from church because there was nothing there for them.

The English church had become a means of maintaining the culture’s status quo.

The only alternative the English church leaders saw was a French-style revolution that they prepared to fight to the death.

Since all of that, we have been wrestling with Marx.

Like the French revolutionaries, Marx hated the upper classes. His followers were willing to kill people in order to bring about a classless society.

Jesus didn’t hate anyone. He did not want his followers to do that either. However, He did refuse to acknowledge class. He loved the rich young ruler. He received with respect a member of the Jewish Supreme Court. On the other hand, he ate with a tax collector. He allowed a sinner woman to wash his feet in public. He didn’t hate the rich and powerful. He had come to save them too! He just didn’t prefer them or esteem them more than he did others,

The Jesus way of attacking class structure is simply to stop empowering it.

A Christian loves a man or woman because he or she is made in the image and likeness of God. Titles, rank, money and societal importance are noted as one notes the color of a person’s hair or the shape of his nose. It is there. It is part of that person’s identity. But all of that is like the value of foreign money; it’s not accepted as legal tender in our realm.

This is a form of class struggle, I suppose. At least many would view it that way. Nonetheless, I disagree with the assertion of liberation theologians that Christianity must necessarily prefer the poor. No, it shouldn’t. On the other hand, it should not prefer the wealthy or the talented or the powerful. Or the Tories or Whigs.

Christianity is good news to the poor because for the first time in their lives they have no hurtle to jump. They can get into our club simply because they breathe air. They do not have to sit in coach class. They don’t have to eat inferior food. They are not passed over when the church decides to promote people to positions of influence. They are in.

End of story.This kingdom is theirs.

Jesus made that decision.

By the way, the French revolution never came to England.

Jesus got there first.

Oh, the aristocracy sneered at the Methodists. They kept enjoying their port and cigars, as their humble neighbors became citizens of another world.

But their poor neighbors no longer cared.

They had forgotten how to view themselves as poor.

They also did not view their neighbors as rich. They saw them as lost. They no longer hated their wealthy neighbors. They had pity for them.

They no longer cared because they had won the class war.

Christian Prostitution

2011-11-07T14:05:00.000-08:00

I learned about Christian prostitution in Spain.

Bernice and Annabel told me about it.

They lead one of the seven rescue homes in the province of Cantabria sponsored by the ministry of Nueva Vida.

Bernice is a Mexican pastor’s daughter and seminary graduate.

Annabel is a missionary, first sent by her home church in Malaga to do missionary work in Morocco. She holds a graduate degree in Spanish language acquisition.

They invited Trish and me to their home after church, at the normal Spanish time for dinner, 10:00 PM.

As we drove to their house, Bernice told us about their work in Morocco and what had led her and Annabel to relocate to the city of Santander.

Prostitution.

I am somewhat aware of sex trafficking through Free for Life, a ministry based in our church. Colette Bercu and her husband Dan lead that ministry and have done an incredible amount of work in a short amount of time. They have passionately worked to educate me about the scope and power of the global sex trade.

But even Colette never told me about Christian prostitutes.

In Santander, most Christian prostitutes are Nigerians. They are teenagers or young adults who have been transported from their native country. They are taught to work the streets and parks of Santander in ways that will not invite police interference. As they work, they often listen to Christian praise music on iPods. Before and after work, they may attend church, where they worship fervently. One prostitute actually leads her small church in worship before heading out for her late night employment: prostitution in the city park.

Here’s the deal: these women have a loaded gun to their heads. The sex trade operators know their families. They will kill the parents and siblings of those who quit the trade. If a prostitute doesn’t show up for a couple of days to work, she gets a call from a family member at home, asking if everything is OK. That means that someone in their village has informed mom and dad that she is not working and may need a call to see if she is sick or something. This reminds the sex worker of the dire circumstances that threaten her family if she decides to bolt.

These women, many who are poorly educated and without significant, safe connections in the country where they work, decide that although what they are doing is difficult it is not as wicked as exposing their families to death. Besides, some make enough money to help feed families at home.

So the prostitute walks the parks, advertising her trade through her clothing and mannerisms, that she is available. As she walks, she listens and sings to herself:

“Lord, I lift your name on high;

Lord I love to sing your praises.”

Now that think about it, I had heard about Christian prostitutes, from Susan Ruden, author of Paul Among the People.

Ruden is one of the world’s greatest experts on the classical world and its literature. She had read Paul’s writings late and reluctantly, after extensive work in classical Latin and Greek literature. What she found was explosive, for her personally and for her career.

St. Paul, you see, is the bad boy of academia, even in religious studies.

However, as she read him, Ruden decided that modern scholars had terribly misjudged and maligned this man, whom she claims invented the Western world as we know it today.

As she describes the horror of the late Roman Empire for the bottom two thirds of its inhabitants, she graphically describes the perpetual erotic atmosphere of the Greco-Roman cities. Few people, she claims, male or female, escaped being raped before reaching adulthood. The slaves especially were used and passed around to friends and were often physically disfigured by sexual abuse.

Women who claimed to have escaped this abuse were from a higher class, which made it possible for her father and husband to afford a bodyguard to accompany her wherever she went. It was obvious who these women were because they walked through the streets wearing beautiful veils.

The apostle Paul insisted that all women wear these veils when gathering for worship. Susan Ruden claims that Paul did not do this in order to put women down but rather to provide an atmosphere of equality for the lower classes. In the church, none would be able to distinguish between those who were privileged and pure and those who were not.

They all would lift holy hands in prayer and worship, their past and present struggle hidden under a symbol of purity.

Ruden says that the slave women, who were many, and in the Roman Empire often educated and cultured, would leave church and participate in all sorts of sexual situations. They had no choice; their owners could kill them without any interference by Roman authorities.

There was one place where they could go to escape, for a while at least, from the plight into which society had placed them and in which it maintained them: the church.

A woman who later would be removing her clothing and doing whatever powerful people demanded her to do, took a beautiful piece of lace and covered her head. She then walked into the house of God and lifted her voice in prayer and song, adding her redeemed voice to those of her brothers and sisters in Christ.

Somewhere today, a young woman from Laos, Nigeria or Nicaragua is preparing to go to work. Later she will do nasty stuff. For now, she slips on her headset and joins her spiritual family in worship. She realizes that her brothers and sister in Christ would not understand what she is doing, but she sighs and quietly sings along:

You came from heaven to earth, to show the way

From the earth to the cross, my debt to pay

From the cross to the grave, from the grave to the sky

Lord I lift your name on high.

Perhaps today this young woman will meet someone like Colette, Bernice or Annabel. Perhaps she will learn to trust them when they tell her that they have safe contacts who can help keep her family safe if she wants out.

In the meantime, why doesn’t she join them for dinner later, after work?

The table will be ready and, if she wants, she can play video games or just tell jokes. And, if she likes, perhaps they can have some friends over to sing and play some music.

‘Sure,” she’ll say. “Cool.”

These angels will give the young woman a bottle of cold water and their card with contact information.

Then she will put on her headset and tune one world out as she tunes another world in.

And does what she must do.

The Globe's Grinning Jack-O-Lantern

2011-11-03T06:33:00.000-07:00

The world’s economy breathed a bit easier this week after the European governments agreed to shoulder Greece’s debt.

With the understanding that Greece would adopt a set of reasonable austerity measures, the Europeans promised to make good on all loans the nations and world banking system has made to Greece. This meant that the country would not default, which possibly would have dragged the fragile economies of Portugal and Spain to ruin. The fear was that this might prove too much for Italy, triggering a collapse there. Were that to happen, moderately well-managed economies of several other nations might follow these smaller nations into the abyss. At this point, the growing contagion would probably seriously affect the major economic world powers.

The world’s leaders stared at this approaching train wreck and sighed when they seemed to have averted the disaster.

Their relief was short-lived.

Greece decided to put the matter up for a national referendum. The Greek government evidently lacks confidence that it speaks for its own people, and can assure the world that the country will accept the austerities required for an infusion of European money.

What we need to notice is that Greece is only one dramatic example of a growing global reality: governments are finding it difficult to govern. They fear the wrath of their people as much as the looming economic disaster. Governments are paralyzed because they are not sure their people will follow their direction.

That is why in October, the traditional month for economic horrors, the world’s people were terrorized by rumors of a catastrophic global meltdown.

The crisis is far from over. In fact, it appears to be only beginning.

For months, people around the world have been protesting in the public squares of their great cities.

Some say they were angry about the growing global inequity between the rich and poor. Others are upset with the international banking systems’ lack of accountability to national governments. Yet others seem hostile against the very notion of government itself.

One thing for sure, the world’s people are frightened. The target of their unrest varies, as do their stated values. However, these global protesters have at least one thing in common: an intense anger toward, and a profound distrust of, authority.

The people seem to fear the potential of tyranny, which leads to a distrust of all authority, even in its most innocent and benevolent forms.

This profound distrust of authority allows a dangerous amount of people to romanticize, or at least to tolerate, a state of anarchy.

Unfortunately, anarchy, not sometimes, but always, leads to tyranny.

The mobs are driving us toward what they most fear.

Although most of people are leery of strong government, governments rarely produce tyranny. What produces tyranny is lawlessness. When a people become weary of societal chaos, they began moving toward the extremes of the political spectrum. At the end of this process, the differences between the left and the right becomes little more than the colors of their respective parties. In such times, the most hated voices, whether in religion, politics or everyday life, become those who seek moderation, compromise and grace. The warriors of the extremes emerge to lead their troops to battle, and each side works to eliminate the middle.

The truth is; it is the boring moderates who create societal stability. Even in a dynamic and creative culture, there must be a time when everyone in that culture knows when to stop yelling, to back down and to compromise. Otherwise, the culture’s center cannot hold. This is true of all social entities of any size, from families to nations.

In healthy times then, moderation is viewed as a virtue. In chaotic times however, the moderate is seen as a coward, a man without conviction.

Healthy government -- whether in a family, church, or nation – is, more than anything else, a process of conflict resolution among individuals based upon principles common to those individuals and the management of the tension between the individual good and the common good of all those who belong to the society being governed. Government thus works within the parameters of what is possible in a given society and aims the energies and vision of its people toward productive common pursuits,as well as protects the rights of the individual to seeks their individual pursuits.

Thus, every society has a right to define itself, including what is required for an individual to belong to the group. However, every healthy group must also have defined internal boundaries, lines that delineate between individual rights and corporate responsibilities.

Without individual freedom, there is no healthy personhood; without a sense of the common good, there is no healthy community.

When a government consumes the individual, the individual has the right to resist the government. When the individual refuses to acknowledge the legitimacy of government, the government has the responsibility to contain or expel the individual. The balance must therefore be maintained. The individual needs self-determination to flourish. The state needs the loyalty, respect and responsible cooperation of its citizens to flourish.

This balance between individual freedom and societal stability is difficult, not only because of human sin but because we differ on how the balance works.

Some tolerate a small loss of personal freedom in exchange for a stronger sense of the common good; others prefer less emphasis on the common good in exchange for greater personal freedom.

These differences create political parties and form the political cultures of the world’s nations.

People differ over how they define the society’s common good.

People differ over the extent to which they are willing to accept personal responsibility to maintain the common good.

In Europe, for example, even political conservatives are usually in favor of a much more complex social infrastructure than Americans. Therefore, European parks, mass transit systems, educational opportunities and basic health care availability allow a broader proportion of the citizenry in European nations to benefit from a common infrastructure than in our country. However, this comes at a cost that most Americans view as too limiting to the individual’s privacy and economic freedom.The difference between these approaches to government is not really about democracy and socialism, as we often hear in our heated political campaigns. It is over our different definitions we offer for the concepts of “common good” and “individuality. “

None of these differences are new.This debate has been going on for a long time and has produced very different ways of thinking about democracy and capitalism.

What is changing in the world is a loss of belief in a “common good,” and in the legitimacy of governments and other kinds of authority to maintain and protect the common good.

So, the global protest movement is not about whether we will have an American system, a European one or something else. The protest movement is not that sophisticated.

The global protest is about raw fear and a profound distrust of authority.

The world’s people fear the loss of their individual and national souls. They worry about whether their children will eat, or get an education. Sometimes they fear without even knowing the specific reasons for their fear.

That is why the protesters come from both the right and the left and why they are made up of both nationalists and internationalists.

They are united only by their common fear and distrust that anyone; especially anyone who represents any sort of authority can solve their problems.

As this spirit of anarchy spreads, the policeman, the clergyman, the doctor and the judge seem alike, in that each seeks to define and address society’s issues in ways no longer viewed as legitimate. The training, credentials, and experience of the world’s “experts” are being swept away as utterly irrelevant.

Nor is that the end of the matter.

The credentialing agencies that maintain the various authorities of society -- the medical establishment, the church, the state and other institutions traditionally viewed as having legitimate power-- have lost much of their right to speak and act.

The apostles warn us of this time and identified the Antichrist as a personification of the spirit of lawlessness.

So this season of chaos is not about Greece. It is not even about Europe. It is about the legitimacy of law itself.

Never has the second Psalm’s opening line been so relevant as today: “Why are the heathen so furiously raging?”

The October terror shouts back its reply: because there is no center. All is sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Without God, law has become a grinning pumpkin, staring blindly at a world that has just now grasped its awful secret:

It has lost its power to hold people together in a healthy state of order.

How can it?

Without its traditional foundation in spiritual reality, it hardly even exists.

For all these reasons, this chaos will persist until despotism -- another kind of corporate admission of the loss of law -- promises to remove it. Then despotism will persist until the world’s legitimate king finally declares that time shall be no more.

Until then, we each must make a choice: to live in peace by following the prince of peace, or to gape in horror at the world's Great Grinning Pumpkin

History, Spaniards and Youth

2011-10-27T06:14:00.000-07:00

Santander is in Northern Spain, not terribly far from France. Proud of having never been under Muslim rule, it is a part of old Europe. A city of merchants in the days of the Spanish Empire, the Spaniards, who created the global market, made this city especially wealthy and elegant by sailing to and from the world’s great ports. As I look out from my window down the street toward the Atlantic Ocean, the old mansions and parks of Santander reveal that the modern inhabitants of this city retain much of the elegance and some of the wealth their ancestors created.

Today, I visited Potes, a small mountain town about one hundred and thirty kilometers from Santander. Despite its size, Potes was important when the Muslims occupied much of Spain. On the border that separated Christendom from Islam, it served as a bastion of Western culture. The European powers filled the area surrounding it with monasteries to create a cultural and religious boundary that would separate them from their enemies. Some of those monasteries are now impressive ruins; others are still in use.

We visited one ancient church that monks established in the sixth century. An elderly Franciscan received us at the door, took us on a tour, and pronounced a blessing over us when we left.

As in many places in Europe, monuments and memorials are abundant here. To all who have ears to hear, these houses of history speak of things that have transpired over the last two thousand years and, to those who listen, pass along their wisdom for the present and their warnings for the future.

Augustus Caesar conquered the Celts who originally inhabited Santander. He called it Port Victoria and made it an outpost of the Roman Empire. Not long afterward, Christians settled here. They made a contribution to the city that has survived through the centuries and which remains visible today.

This history is wonderful to experience, all the more because we are in the company of contemporary Christians. As they show us these various sites, they neither defend nor defame their history. They merely tell the story of their homeland as we pass one historical marker after another.

Last night, I met with a group of them in an apartment. Most of them were college students who meet each week to worship and pray. They asked me to share with them something from my pastoral experience. I immediately loved the professional, intelligent young adults sitting in that room. They have made a choice in this post-Christian culture that may seriously affect their careers and their placement in society. Many of them are responsible for small groups around the city and so have already become the present and future leaders of the Lord’s church in Northern Spain.

There are no monuments to announce the greatness of these young leaders. However, they are far more important to the future of God’s work in Spain than all the magnificent memorials I have found so impressive.

When I returned to our apartment, they made me think about Alfred McCroskey, a man once full of vigor and vision who has now become a part of history.

I cried, thinking about how he is no longer with us. I thanked God for his work and read over the eulogy I had written for his funeral.

I wrote the eulogy to tell the story about a great and good man. I wish I could do more, and perhaps I will, to mark the magnificence of his spiritual accomplishments. For now I have written the eulogy because such things, like the monasteries and monuments in Spain, connect us to our roots. They must be maintained so we can copy the achievements, and escape the mistakes, of our past. That is why history is important and must be told.

This morning however, I thought about how much easier it is to praise the dead than to honor the living.

Furthermore, how much easier it is to respect elderly leaders than to respect younger ones. This is probably the reason St. Paul told Timothy not to allow people to despise his youth. Presumably, some had been doing just that and Paul wanted them to stop. The disrespect toward the young pastor was discouraging Timothy and undermining God’s work.

Paul wrote as one who worshipped a man who had died before he even reached his mid-thirties. The Lord’s disciples, whom he knew, had also been young, as is evident by the fact that they lived for many more decades, spreading the faith and writing the New Testament.

Since its very beginning, young leaders have been important to our faith.

I am trying to keep this in mind as I notice how the young Spanish leaders look at me. They treat me like some sort of patriarch. I appreciate their respect, even though I don’t view myself as old as they seem to see me. Nonetheless, it makes me cautious.

What if I say something to them that influences them to take a wrong path? What if that harms the work of God in this country? What if I discourage them from following their chosen vocation because I know, as they cannot know, that the road ahead will be difficult?

Should I tell them that some of God’s people will treat them poorly? Should I inform these young, idealistic people; eager as they are to take the gospel to the streets of Santander, that there will be those who will take no delight in their enthusiasm, will not acknowledge any success they may have, nor grant them any respect for the sacrifices they will make? Must I tell them that they will receive very little grace from some of their flock as they learn to teach the scripture and to care for the needs of the church? Am I obligated to say that they will be expected to work as many hours as their friends and get as much of an education; and, even though they will be expected to wear presentable clothes and to be socially active, will probably not make enough money to do this as often as many think they should?

Must I tell them that earning the respect of God’s people is a long and difficult process and that whatever they do, some people will never respect them or their work?

No, I must not say such things.

I rebuked one young Gypsy pastor for saying that while he loved the Lord and loved the Lord’s church, he knew that his Gypsy heritage would always be an obstacle for those who come from polite society.

“NONESENSE!” I replied. “People hungry for God don’t care about such things. Those who do care about such things are not yet ready for the kingdom of God.”

I then walked over to where he was sitting, hugged him and impulsively kissed him on the head.

“You are the servant of the Lord, “I said. “I esteem you. Being a Gypsy and being young has nothing to do with anything. Lead the flock.”

After that, I read some selected passages that Paul wrote to Timothy.

When I finished talking, I sent a text to Austin, my son-in-law. I asked him to stop what he was doing and read the passages I had just read to the Spanish leaders:

“Let no one despise your youth. Be a good soldier. Study to show yourself approved.”

And so forth.

So, I have been thinking today about our young leaders at Christ Church. I have been realizing how much I respect them – not just love them, but respect them. They study. They pray. They work hard to meet the needs of a changing world. And, most importantly, they will outlive those of us who are today’s seasoned leaders. When we are gone, they will carry on.

And if not them, who?

St. Paul didn’t want to die. He had much more to do. He had much more to say. But time had caught up with him. Great apostle or not, his time was almost over. He was worried about the future of the church. He knew Timothy wasn’t ready to lead. Perhaps he was concerned that Timothy may not even be up to the task of learning to lead. But he had no choice. The future was arriving. The aging apostle would soon be gone. So, Paul picked up his pen and wrote a letter to Timothy, and through him, to every Christian leader who would ever guide the Lord’s church through changing times.

I read Paul’s two letters to Timothy again last night. As I read, I did a lot of thinking.

I have watched my son-in-law learn how to be a husband, a father, and a minister of the gospel. I have watched him struggle with debilitating physical illnesses. I have watched him open his heart to spiritual experiences that were new and strange for him, simply because older brothers and sisters in Christ whom he respected, urged him to do so. I have come to respect him as a man of prayer, a student of the Word, and as a man who has a profound concern for the Lord’s church.

He is a good and a godly man.

I have watched Daniel Bell, who is older than Austin but still younger than me, undertake the long and difficult hours of study required for a first-class seminary education. I have observed how his presentation of the gospel has deepened. I have noted his tears as he recounted to me the struggles that people in our flock are facing. I have watched him grow in pastoral abilities. I am glad to work with him.

Colleen Hollis amazes me. She accepted a call from God often especially difficult for a woman: preaching the gospel. I have observed her grace, humility and dedication to study, prayer and Christian service in the face of her own self-doubts.

I could list others, such as Christopher Phillips, already a leader wise beyond his years. Or Michael Alfred, who for two years, walked to church every day because he did not make enough money to both pay for a car and health insurance to protect his family. He learned Greek in order to read the New Testament in the original language. He teaches our youth the Word of God.

Jeremy Carlson and Jay Clark do whatever they are asked to do because they love this congregation.

These are all noteworthy things, which we should acknowledge and respect.

Behind all these young leaders (and some of them not so young) are dedicated spouses, volunteers, staff and employees who work untold hours to serve our community, a board of experienced wise men and women, and a growing group of seasoned deacons and other kinds of spiritual leaders.

We are truly blessed.

But I must end my reflection, which has already grown too long.

I knew Alfred McCroskey before people honored him. In those days, he lived in a tiny apartment that a church member made available. No one asked Alfred to preach in a great church conference. Christian television celebrities never asked him for an interview. He used a tiny office in our church until we needed it for other things. He did whatever he had to do, without bitterness or a sense of entitlement, to follow his call.

All that made it easy for us to honor him at his funeral. His work is finished. The quality of his accomplishments is evident. It is now safe to praise him.

But I am thinking today that Alfred probably needed more encouragement earlier in his journey than he needed it at the end.

When he was new to the stage, he was not always sure how to present himself. A kind word or a bit of praise would have gone a long way to reassure him and give him the energy to continue his work.

Alas, emerging leaders rarely get the praise they need. Instead, they endure their own self-doubts, the attacks of the devil, and the needless wounds inflicted on them by the household of faith.

We must do better.

As Jesus warned, “it is inevitable that offenses should come; but woe to those from whom it comes.”

I will speak for myself: I am sometimes guilty of expecting from youth a level of maturity that I did not have when I was young, and which indeed I do not always demonstrate today. If a young leader is timid, I tend to think he will never become a great leader. If he has confidence, I am tempted to think him arrogant. With such impossibly demanding criteria, we in effect eliminate everyone from Christian leadership, especially the young.

Sitting here in Santander, overlooking two thousand years of history, I am asking myself “does it have to be this way?”

That’s why I will go to the meeting tonight and hug those young leaders. I will tell them that they are our hope and future. I will tell them that I believe in them and that the Lord believes in them. I will confess that we didn’t know what we were doing either and often still don’t. I will tell them that this has been the case for two thousand years, but that the Lord has nonetheless led his church through flawed and stumbling people like us, generation after generation. They need to know that they will not be an exception.

And I will tell them, “Let no one, including me, despise your youth.”

I don’t want to wait for another funeral to esteem those who do God’s work, whether they are young or old.

That is how I will intend to honor Alfred, the old Franciscan monk and all he represents, my spiritual fathers in God, and God Himself: By affirming the Head of the Church’s sovereign choice to call young leaders into the work that has been ongoing ever since Jesus left us and went to heaven, at age 33.

The Evangelical Balloon

2011-10-26T07:21:00.000-07:00

Trish I have been having a wonderful time in Spain.

Last year, a group of Spanish Pentecostal leaders invited us to visit their country to teach and encourage their pastors. So we set aside a couple of weeks to do that. We are so glad we did!

Naturally, we have enjoyed all the historic sites (and the foooooood).

(However, I must say that in Madrid, we waited outside the gates of the royal palace for King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofia to invite us to lunch. Unfortunately, someone had failed to let the royal family know that Trish and I were in the country! That was disappointing. But other than that …)

What we have really liked is the hospitality of Spanish Christians and especially our informed and spirited conversations with them.

For example, Sunday after church, a young pastor, (who, like many pastors here, works a secular job in order to support his ministry) invited me to his home for lunch. I had no sooner sat down than he asked, “As an Evangelical, how do you view St. Augustine and the impact of his work on the Protestant Reformation?” He then brought out copies of The Confessions and The City of God, as someone might present a fine wine. His young children and wife soon joined in, occasionally offering bunny trails about trout, cheese and Hanna Montana. This went on for a couple of hours, as we slowly ate our meal.

The day before, riding from Madrid to Santander, a lively interchange broke out between the pastor and a member of his church concerning the ideological relationship between Christianity and Marxism. This was followed by reflections on Sufism and the openness of Sufis toward Christian spirituality. In that conversation, occasional comments erupted about the nation’s best wines, the viability of the European Union, and how God was at work in the world.

Day after day, I have encountered an informed, educated and spiritually alive people who want to talk about the important issues of our times. They want to discuss the spiritual implications of globalization, the surprising explosion of Christianity in the Southern hemisphere, and what one is to make of the Charismatic renewal among ancient Christians in the Middle East. They want to understand what American Christians think about these issues, and tactfully say that they often find us (and our opinions) mystifying.

I should hasten to add that my guests are not particularly wealthy. Nor do they think of themselves as intellectuals. They are working-class Christians who enjoy learning and who want to make sense of the world in the light of their faith.

They remind me of a time when American Christian leaders talked like this.

Pastors, especially in conferences and retreats, used to converse for hours about theology and their spiritual experiences. They would quote scripture and Christian literature to support their ideas, sometimes hoping to win an argument no doubt, but mostly trying to get to know one another.

Today, pastors’ conferences usually schedule a Bible scholar early in the morning. A handful of spiritual nerds go to the session, carrying Bibles, hoping to hear something substantial. For the rest of the day, crowds will halfway listen to a cute exposition about how to grow a church or become relevant in today’s world. Over lunch, conversation will usually turn toward the economy and how it is affecting the offerings or perhaps how one may acquire the latest technological gadget to make worship interesting. Biblical and theological reflection rarely affect the conversation, one way or the other.

In other words, serious conversation has become rare among American Evangelicals.

Now that I think about it, our culture has made it increasingly difficult to talk about anything at any depth anywhere at any time.

The last thing a contemporary American politician would want people to say about him is that he studied at a great university or that he is well read. Even Bill Clinton had to go to great lengths to cover up his sordid past as a Rhode’s scholar. He used his bag of pork rinds as a brilliant intellectual camouflage to help him to appear common enough to become president. George W. Bush was forgiven for going to Yale because he didn’t make good grades while he was there. Even our doctors must not get too dogmatic now about medical science; they certainly can’t insist that they offer superior treatment than the quack on TV who sells Cellulite-fade-away cream for $19.95.

In such a climate, why would one possibly want a pastor who cares much about theology, history or biblical studies? Young pastors quickly learn to keep their knowledge to themselves, or chose another line of work.

American Evangelicals are in a season akin to the Cultural Revolution that China experienced under Chairman Mao.

In those days, like those we are currently experiencing, it was dangerous to be an expert of anything. One could not use “elite” vocabulary, had to belch out loud, had to stay away from classical literature, and had to refrain from demonstrating refinement of any sort. Mao insisted he was the incarnation of a dragon and that it was harmful to brush one’s teeth. So, for a decade, China quoted Mao’s foolishness and laughed at its own cultural giants. Lao-tzu and Confucius had become decadent; the powerful peasant had become wise. No one could tell the great one that his breath stank and that his teeth were rotting because that would make them appear smarter than him.

Similarly, it is not wise now for a pastor to quote Luther, Aquinas, Calvin, Wesley, Cyprian or Barth. It is far better to quote Bono, or even Lady Gaga; which will at least get a laugh or two.

The spiritual giants of history fare no better. Who speaks now of George Muller or even of Watchman Nee? And is anyone interested in Francis Asbury or in William Booth?

Well, of course, some people are interested in the words and works of great Christians. Obviously, I am overstating my case.

But not by much.

In fact, if you are a Christian and do not recognize the names I just mentioned; I rest my case. You do not know them because no one thought it was important for you to know them. But because you didn’t learn about them and learn from their contributions, your Christian intellectual formation is probably weak. In that case, you are forming your thoughts by listening to the part of secular culture with which you most agree. You may not even expect your church to offer intellectual formation or believe that a Christian should have a unique perspective on life, art, science, ethics and the meaning of world events.

How then can we expect you to have an informed Christian opinion about anything?

I am certainly not trying to insult you; you must care about intellectual formation or you would not have kept reading this blog. However, I am trying to make a serious point.

American Evangelicals have been losing influence in a growing number of fields, in part because we are not as informed as our secular neighbors. We have replaced our historical robust biblical orthodoxy with an insipid secular conservatism. In fact, we no longer understand the difference between the two. Furthermore, many American Evangelicals now view biblical orthodoxy with more suspicion than they do secular culture. Our own history and scholarship now seems like “uppity elitism” to many of our people, which, of course, no one wants. As a result, singing Zippity Do-Da; Zippity Ay would go over better in many churches now than trying to sing A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.

Can you understand now why my conversations with Spanish Pentecostals seemed so shocking?

Perhaps, European believers realized years ago that their countries were not churches. Therefore, they have not been as surprised as we when unbelievers do not follow God’s ways. They are not shocked that atheism, immorality or other religions exist around them. They seem to realize that there is a cost in following Christ and that becoming a believer involves actually knowing what Christians believe today and what they have believed through history. They also feel some obligation to understand what their neighbors believe and why they believe it. They know that being a witness to their neighbors involves words, deeds and attitudes.

Spaniards love to worship, and they pray fervently. But they do not substitute feeling for thinking. They want to feel God’s presence but they also want to learn Gods thoughts.

They are absolutely right: it is not enough to feel.

An honest person must understand why he believes as he does.

When one does not think, he can only feel. When what he feels is not an adequate answer for what his adversary thinks, the one who feels can only become more passionate about what he feels. His increasing passion will then require him to banish thought and, if possible, to ridicule the very process of intellectual formation.

When enough people within a given society buy into this kind of Cultural Revolution, a fool mounts the throne and wise people learn to hide their knowledge and hold their tongue.

Sooner or later though, a generation arises that prefers difficult answers to comfortable foolishness.

Europe, for example, already had its Hitler, Franco and Mussolini. These men, who promised their countries easy solutions for modern complexities, bathed the continent in blood while many believers prayed for their success. The aftermath was a wholesale departure from the faith. The humbled believers who remain serve their neighbors with a deeply rooted faith that they can capably and lovingly defend.

They serve the poor.

They do nasty work.

They seek the face of God.

They discuss serious things.

Whether church growth will come to Europe or not is God’s business. However, if and when it comes, it will be rooted in a serious search for God and not come hiding behind empty platitudes, trying to sanctify intellectual sloth.

Of course, there is a shortcut around thinking about serious things: one can market triviality and praise foolishness. One can sell sugar pills and call it medicine. One can talk in sound bites without saying anything and make a very good living doing it.

One can also keep blowing hot air into a balloon until it grows very large. However, there comes a point when the thin superficial material holding the hot air gives way.

Sometimes I think of that as I ponder the present and the future of American Evangelicalism.

Of course, I would have said none of that to Juan Carlos and Sofia had they invited me to their palace.

Instead, I would have asked their royal majesties to pose with me for a photograph, which I would have tastefully included in this short essay.

I could then have began my blog with,

“Recently, while eating paella with the king and queen of Spain, …”

Sigh.

A Man of Quality - A Tribute to Alfred McCroskey

2011-10-22T20:45:00.000-07:00

It is difficult to say the words, “Alfred McCroskey is dead.”

He stared down the grim reaper so many times! It had become commonplace to hear he was in the hospital and that his condition was serious, only to see him in church the following Sunday. He was a force of nature. He was such a vibrant presence in our lives that losing him is like hearing that the last lion has died and that our world is bereft of an entire species.

What can I say about Alfred that will illustrate what I mean?

First, I will acknowledge that he was a bundle of contradictions.

Until the day he died, he was a marine, a cold-war marine from Alabama who ran a Christian bookstore. Nonetheless, he continually pled with us to care for the souls of those he had been trained to hate and to fight.

I think he was the world’s most reluctant Charismatic. He never gave up his Reformed Presbyterian theology and preferred its way of worship. However, his sphere of influence was, almost without exception, within Pentecostal and charismatic circles.

He had a hard time with baby boomers. Sometimes that included me, whom he deeply loved.

Once, when pontificating about the damage inflicted upon the world by baby boomers, I remarked sarcastically that, “yes, all of us baby boomers were at Woodstock, Alfred. We were all there; taking drugs, practicing free love and playing rock music.” Without missing a beat he replied, “ I know. At least you all wanted to be there. I wanted to be there too – to call the cops on your crazy generation!”

How delighted I was when I learned that Alfred’s first contact in Moscow was a long-haired hippie, who had become a Christian after listening to Jesus Christ Superstar. I often pointed that out to Alfred. Believing in God’s sovereignty as he did, I wanted him to notice our Lord’s sense of humor to have given him baby boomer colleagues all over the world.

As we all knew, even as a missionary Alfred never ceased to be a marine.

Once, while addressing a group of Pentecostal leaders about to get on the plane for Russia, he barked: “listen, this is not a sight-seeing tour. You will do a little bit of that, but just remember that while you are looking at monuments, I will be trying to show the love of Jesus to the damned communists!”

I could hardly believe my ears. So I turned and asked Gerhardt Richter, “Did Alfred really say that?” To which Gerhardt replied, “Don’t worry about it. Jean will let him have it all the way to Moscow!”

The friendship that Alfred and I shared revolved around two things: a commitment to missions and a love for doctrines and practices of historical Protestantism. We both loved the classical hymns, the great theologians and the Lord’s Table. The only problem was that I was a Wesleyan and he was a Calvinist. So we never lost an opportunity to argue about things like free will and sanctification. I once remarked that although he thought liked a Calvinist, he certainly evangelized like a Wesleyan. He responded that the Lord had designed him that way.

It was difficult to win an argument with Alfred.

The reason he didn’t run with Calvinists too much because he was so open to the contemporary work of the Holy Spirit. That didn’t please many Presbyterians of his generation. Nonetheless, he would sometimes call me after a Charismatic worship service where he had heard some song or sermon he felt had misrepresented sound biblical teaching. The words of the Reformers would roll off his tongue and then he would lament the sloppy theology of my generation. (Then usually go on to comment on our politics as well.) Had you been listening to our conversation, you might have believed he was utterly opposed to tongues, prophecy or any other spiritual phenomena.

Nonetheless, once, when he got sick, he called to say that he was flying to Phoenix to attend our healing service. When he got there, he said to the congregation; “Look, I didn’t fly all the way out here for prayer. I can get prayer back in Florence. I came here to get healed. So you people do what you do. I need to get back to my work in Russia.”

At that, our Hopi and Navajo ladies ladies surrounded him and prayed. When they were finished, he thanked them, flew back to Florence and went on with his work.

I think sometimes Alfred desperately tired to hide his tenderness. He wanted us to think he was gruff and blunt. So he carefully constructed that perception. However, if he actually thought he had offended us, or discovered we were hurting about something, his tears came quickly and his words would grow soft and kind.

We were friends for twenty-five years.

We met at a mission’s conference in Marietta, Georgia, chatting over coffee. He told me he wanted to put a million Bibles into the hands of the Russian people. So I impulsively blurted out: “well, then move to Nashville and let us help you.”

“O.K. I think I will!” he responded.

He and Jean moved to Nashville just as Christ Church was beginning to connect to the world. We had been a regional, and rather provincial congregation. So we did not have deep ties to the globe or even much desire to form such ties. All we knew was that the Lord was opening up all sorts of connections for us within the Soviet Union. Our hearts just kept opening up to the needs of the Russian and Ukrainian believers. At the center of this work was the old cold-war marine, believing God for funds to launch his mission into Russia. It should be added that Alfred never manipulated people to supply his funds. He believed in God and God did not fail him.

You know the story about that powerful evening at Christ Church, when so many great ministries were birthed in the space of a few hours. He was one of the people who stepped forward to announce his dream.

“I believe God wants me to plant a thousand churches in Russia before I die!” he said emphatically.

To the day he died, he claimed that I laughed out loud.

“You did laugh," he insisted. "You laughed just like Sarah when the angel told her she would have a son. You laughed. You weren’t even subtle about it!”

Well, if I did laugh – and I will concede that perhaps I did – the laugh was on me. Year in and year out, Alfred and Jean plugged away at that vision. They trusted God, the made friends throughout the Russian Republic, and they have encouraged hundreds of young people – and some not so young -- to start churches.

That work is accomplished now.

Alfred ran the race. He finished his course. He kept the faith.

As I think about Alfred and his legacy, one word comes to mind: “quality.” He was a man of quality. He used his powers and talents to the fullest to advance goodness in the world.

Great men are not always good men, and good men are not always great men.

A great man is one that alters history in some significant way. He leaves a mark etched in the minds and on the customs of a people. His words and deeds reverberate through time, leaping out from the narrow constraints of his own generation. Alexander was great because what he accomplished was so far reaching that history itself has become inconceivable without him.

Goodness also leaves a mark, but it is not always obvious. Nearly everyone can remember some grandparent or and uncle – perhaps even an usher at church – who seemed invisible against the crowd but who, in retrospect, left a mark of sanctity and grace upon their world.

Bob Dylan once said of Jesus, “He unleashed His power in an unknown hour, when no one knew.”

That is the way goodness works, without regard for either humanity’s praise or for its condemnation.
We praise goodness but tend to ignore it. We are more attracted to greatness. That is evident in the things we study and the things we neglect.

Steve Jobs died a few weeks ago and the world acknowledged his passing with editorials and commentaries. He left a void that is not likely to be filled any time soon. Jobs was obviously great. He altered our technological and social landscape as much as legends like Ford, Edison and Disney. So Jobs deserves the attention.

In contrast though, Alfred McCroskey’s death is scarily unnoticed, except by his family, a handful of friends in Nashville, and a few people in Florence and the surrounding area. When we lay his body down, it will be in a common place without any sort of ostentatious monument to mark the spot. Not only that; he lived and worked in the same kind of obscurity.

When I was younger, I fretted over the fact that even in Christian circles, greatness trumps goodness. How many church conferences have I attended in which powerful speakers with nothing to say rose to speak to invisible men and women who were changing the world! But with the passing of time, one realizes that the obscurity is often a weapon. God has stealth fighters, people who require obscurity in order to do great things.

And yet, it is not true to say that Alfred has no monument. We are his monuments. The thousands of Russians in churches across that vast and great country are his monuments. As he worked, powerful dictators and bureaucrats, churchmen and policemen kept walking on and then off the great stage. They were unconcerned about an old marine who kept flying to obscure places in the Russian tundra and steppes, leaving a word here and a book there – like God’s own Johnny Appleseed – moving on before the plant he had left broke the surface, traveling far away before his fruit became visible.

The oaks of righteousness that now dot the Russian countryside are his monuments.

I have written these words because for over a year I have been scheduled to speak to a group of pastors in Spain. I decided to keep my appointment. I too want to finish well. In fact, Alfred’s life has played no small part in forming my determination to finish well. Therefore, my ongoing work is also a part of Alfred’s monument.

So Alfred has the monument he desired.

But more is coming.

Soon the books will be open.

On the great and terrible day of the Lord, when the secrets of men’s hearts are laid bare; when history’s great and good men pass one by one before the judgment seat of Christ, it will not be a day to glorify the likes of Napoleons and Caesar. Many of the great minds of philosophy and the innovators of industry and finance will be scarcely noted. But a few people that day will be crowned. They will be people who were once faithful in little and have been made masters over much. These invisible hinges of history; these small and seemingly insignificant individuals; these people of quality who work to push time toward its apex and fulfillment, will finally be revealed and acknowledged.

Among them will be a marine from Alabama, a faithful father and husband, a missionary and a friend.; but above all, a servant of God and a disciple of the Lord Jesus Christ.

My dear, dear friend:

“Go rest high upon that mountain.
For your work on earth is done.
Go to heaven a shoutin’,
Love for the Father and the Son. “

Ancient - Future

2011-10-14T12:35:00.000-07:00

I often speak and write about two things which especially seem to get me into trouble with fellow believers: globalization, the fact that the world’s peoples are now culturally interpenetrated among one another throughout the globe; and, the importance of practicing an “ancient-future” as opposed to a “secularized” faith.

Perhaps later I will write about the spiritual implications of living in a globalized world. For now, I want to write a blog or two about what I mean by "ancient-future." A few words on that subject may help clear up where I stand on the subject. At very least, an explanation may offer my critics more effective and accurate ammunition than what they have been using so far.

The concept of ancient-future faith has theological implications, of course. However, it is the way the concept affects worship that seems to provoke people the most. So, let’s focus our attention there.

First, ancient-future worship is intentionally “other than” a contemporary experience. It deliberately leads us out of contemporary culture, not in order to glorify the past, but in order to help us experience eternity. It is the experience of "tasting of the powers of the world to come," as the Epistle to the Hebrews puts it.

Secondly, ancient-future worship does not deny that we live within a contemporary culture. For this reason, traditionalists -- those who worship the past -- do not tend to appreciate the concept any more than do those who worship the present. Ancient-future faith is not traditionalism, in that it does not seek to reproduce the past by reviving ancient practices for their own sake, as though the past were more sacred than the present. Ancient-future worship acknowledges that contemporary music and contemporary settings may be as sacred or as holy as ancient ones. So, our quest is not about reverence for the past, present or future; it is about the pursuit of timeless and eternal things.

Thirdly, ancient-future worship does not fear spiritual intimacy. That is to say, it is an “incarnated” spirituality rather than a form of "worship" which encourages a spectator response. It insists that worship involves physical movement, emotion, and one’s full and focused intellectual attention. It defines worship as the process of directing one's entire being toward the risen Christ in praise of the Creator, through the power and presence of the Holy Spirit. It is a type of “work” rather than a form of leisure. In ancient-future worship, one is consciously digesting words, attitudes, concepts, (and even the physical elements of bread and wine) into one's being. In other words, worship is a part of one’s deliberate and conscious pursuit of God. The product of this “work” (the New Testament word “ liturgia,” often translated “ministry” literally means “the work of the people) is the personal transformation, or sanctification of the worshipper. That is to say, authentic worship brings a person who has trusted in Christ under the governance of Christ, which over time results in the formation of the character of Christ within him or her.

In worship, one deliberately leaves secular space behind and intentionally enters sacred space. He turns his attention from all that is the world, not because the world is evil but because it is incomplete. Indeed, when the worshipper leaves that sacred space, he or she deliberately reenters secular space, as an ambassador of heaven and as a priest of God appointed to serve a dying world.

Why is it important to remain mindful of the past or to envision the future in our worship? Because our faith teaches that we are timeless beings and that when we worship we gather with the saints of all ages and places. We are small parts or a great spiritual movement that stretches through time and space.

Ancient-future worship is an acknowledgement then of the presence of both past and future within the present moment.

We are mindful of the past because we follow an ancient faith; one that offers us the accumulated treasures of practices and thoughts of those who preceded us. We use this inheritance to learn how to express our own devotion to God.

We acknowledge the future because we are steadily moving toward the culmination of God’s work in the world, namely the summing up of all things in Christ, the Redeemer and Lord of Creation.

We are also mindful of the present moment, that is to say the contemporary culture.

Ancient-future worship may employ video or the latest praise chorus but does not chose such things because they are new and cool. We use them because they are the offerings of God’s people who are alive in this moment.

At the same time, ancient-future worship may draw upon practices from the third century, not because the practice is old or spooky but because that practice may offer a way to root our awareness of God to something other than our present mood or contemporary fads.

Ancient-future does not revolve around a “seeker.” It does not discard the need to connect with a person who is new to the faith. Neither does it eliminate authentic worship in order to evangelize. The presence of God can be disturbing to one who has lived his or her life within a secular time and space. The very notion of “sacred” is strange to contemporary man or woman. Nonetheless, it is an encounter with the presence of God that awakens the soul. Therefore, comforting or not, God must be experienced.

It is quite different to view worship as something God has defined (and the ages have confirmed) rather than something believers create and continually adapt to meet their own needs.

To say it again: Ancient-future worship is primarily about drawing people into the experienced presence of God rather than about gathering seekers into church by demystifying the experience of worship.

What we hope for in the practice of ancient-future worship is not that people will leave the church saying, “that was the best music and preaching I ever experienced,” but rather, “God is surely in that place.”

In the Book of Ezekiel, God says that he has this against the priests and prophets, that they have eliminated the difference between that which is sacred and that which is profane (secular).

I have heard Christian leaders say passionately that we need to stop viewing things as either “sacred,” or “secular’ because in the New Testament, everything is sacred.

But everything is not sacred! If everything is sacred (set apart, holy), then nothing is really sacred. And if nothing is sacred, then there is no place in this time or space where I can go that is not under the control of the world, the flesh and the devil. Everything and everyone bows the knee to the spirit of the age, including the saints. Without sacred times and places, there is no “tasting of the powers of the world to come.”

Secularization of worship is a self-inflicted spiritual impoverishment. It produces a generation that no longer knows the ways of God nor recognizes the presence of God.

It is the wrong way.

It doesn’t lead to a good place.

I have decided to walk another way; on the path the saints have walked.

Why? Because time is running out for me I want to become a saint.

So I don’t have any more time for cute.

I need God.

And so do the seekers.

In my opinion, this is precisely what they are seeking.

The Presence of the Future

2011-10-10T13:56:00.000-07:00

Religion is rooted in habits of thought and action developed and maintained by generations of adherents and transmitted to each succeeding generation by formal and informal means. Although it is popular now to claim that Christianity is somehow unique in this regard, and in fact should not even be defined as a religion, our faith, like others, is based upon beliefs and practices that we did not invent but which were faithfully transmitted to us from the past. Furthermore, this was done intentionally; not only by our parents but by each generation before them, since the days of the apostles.

St. Paul certainly intended for this to happen. He pointedly instructs Timothy to train faithful teachers, capable of producing yet other teachers. That was the beginning of Christian catechism, which effectively taught the hearts and minds of believers to view the world through eyes of faith. Through the 1,500 years of history in which Holy Scripture was not available except to a handful of literate souls, this structure of instruction successfully transmitted our faith from the past and into the present.

In those centuries, one learned bits and pieces of scripture, memorized prayers, internalized the movement of corporate worship, and developed habits of piety. Thus our faith, in a manner not unlike that of other faiths, come to revere its past and to speak in hushed tones about the foundations of its spiritual life. The reverence was born of an appropriate gratitude for the priceless gifts of spirituality and civilization we had received from antiquity.

Such reverence and gratitude is a godly response.

I have the deepest contempt for our modern attitude toward history and tradition. We seem to expect no consequences as we foolishly keep sawing off the limb of history upon which we are sitting. Nonetheless, I assert that respect for sacred history does not make our faith unique. Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims and Sikhs also revere their histories and heroes. They too pass on to their children the habits of mind and action that they have received from the past.

The uniqueness of Christianity lies in the way it envisions the future.

Christianity does not view the past as superior to the present, nor dread a future it believes grows increasingly dark and godless. Our faith is not propelled from a holy past into a degenerating future. It is pulled from a dark past into a holy consummation in which, at last, evil will be destroyed and redeemed humankind will become the eternal companions of God.

We do not believe that our God is in the past so that each step into the future carries us further away from His presence. No, we believe that God is in the future, continually pulling us toward Himself and each step into the future carries us toward Him. The New Testament calls that moment ahead, when we see God face to face "the eschaton," which is, for a Christian, much more significant than Eden or the origins of heaven and earth. Holy history demonstrates how, since the very beginning, the universe has been moving toward that inevitable consummation for which it was designed and toward which it was intentionally aimed. History tells us that time is God's instrument and that it performs at His bidding and on our behalf. However, it is the future that we celebrate because that is where He awaits us.

Our eyes are on the eschaton because the golden age is before us, not behind us.

In Christ, sacred future made its first bright appearance. In Him, the future state of the universe (and the future state of all who belong to Him) became visible and tangible. In him, the past, even the holy past of our faith, found its purpose and explanation.

Two lines from a beloved Christmas carol sums up the essentials of Christian eschatology:

"Long lay the world in sin and error pinning, till He appeared and the soul felt its worth.
A thrill of hope, a weary world rejoices, for yonder breaks a new and glorious morn."

Full steam ahead!

Why then all this anxiety and fear among Christians? Why all the angst about our lost past and the deplorable nature of the present? Why all the fear about the anti-Christ, and obsession with our evil and powerful enemies?

What are we to do about this foolish Christian pessimism, through which our ancient past is judged as insignificant, the future viewed as a source of unbearable anxiety, but our recent past -- especially the decades just preceding our birth -- some sort of golden age of faith and spiritual life?

Have we lost the bright light of the eschaton? Have we forgotten the moment towards which we travel and for which our ancestors so diligently prepared us?

For anyone who has fixed his eyes upon the eschaton, the future is not dark. A beacon shines from a place just beyond our years. In its light, the shadows of our present are undone and the mysteries of the past are fully illuminated.

Crisis

2011-10-01T07:10:00.000-07:00

A crisis is a fork in the road of life. It is a place of decision; an inescapable shift in one’s direction. Most of us do not like such moments. We would much rather maintain the leisurely pace of habit and routine. We would like to keep doing what we’ve been doing. Be who we’ve been. Believe what we have believed.

Crisis requires a reevaluation of things we would rather just take for granted.

A medieval peasant for example, did not question his piety or his view of reality. He lived life and approached death with the security that “as it was from the beginning, is now and shall ever be, world without end.” He knew that the world ended somewhere beyond the straits of Gibraltar, and that somewhere beyond lay the boundaries of human habitation. Great dragons and monsters guarded that boundary and terrorized those foolish enough to venture toward the edge. He knew that there were four corners of the earth. The sun and moon rotated around the planet to give humankind light and heat. The stars sprinkled the skies to help us navigate the seas and, could, if properly studied, give directions about whom to marry or when the hour of death would come.

Then Copernicus and Columbus shattered the way the world worked. They shook the foundations of Europe’s faith. After them, how could a man still believe that the sun once stood still in the valley of Ajelon and gave Joshua more time to win the victory over his enemies? How could one still believe that the sun runs his daily course across the heavens like a bridegroom processing to his wedding?

Well, most peasants just dismissed the news about a round earth and the discovery that we inhabit a heliocentric solar system. So if pressed, they responded to such information with amusement, indifference or anger. Why not? There were crops to plant. There were babies to conceive. There were old people to bury. Abstract intellectual ranting in big cities was not worth the normal person’s concerns.

That’s why phrases like “the setting of the sun,” and “the ends of the earth,” survived, even to our own times. Common people ignored the implications of important discoveries for a very long time.

So, in time the old phrases became poetic forms of speech. Gradually, the knowledge sank in and the words shifted their meaning. People who still believe in a flat earth now become wards of the state and are forced to wear funny jackets.

The crisis in cosmology that ended the medieval world, and turned the word “sunset” from a description about reality into a poetic metaphor, took centuries.

We don’t get centuries to process our intellectual revolutions. Since 1901, we have absorbed the equivalent of a Copernican revolution every five years: the theory of relativity, quantum mechanics, continental drift, the double helix, the digitalization of records, translation software that promises to make all data accumulated in all times and in all places available to all in their own tongue - need I go on?

We simply have not absorbed what all this means. However, we will not have the luxury of living as though the world is the same as it was in 1880.

In one sense, we haven’t done that, of course. For many generations now we have been using nifty new gadgets produced by all these discoveries. The point it though, we have been doing our best to ignore the radically different view of reality that these discoveries have made possible. Nonetheless, the world has been shifting as we have fought our wars, made our money, raised our children, and yes, said our prayers.

Now the explosions of new information have become impossible to ignore, even at the popular level. All sorts of global crises in a number of fields are forcing us to the crossroads. Furthermore, by the time we adjust, new pieces of information make our adjustment obsolete. We find ourselves required to adjust again.

We are just not built for this. It is like constructing a house in an earthquake.

So, if our faith is in a system, dogma or protocol; we are going to treat new information like sea monsters. Our terror will grow. Our rage will increase. Our grip on sanity will become ever more tenuous. The center will give way.

As we approach the crossroads, we will decide to take the right fork, only to encounter another crossroads. We’ll stumble through that one and find ourselves facing yet another. At each turn, we will only be able to guess about where to turn because we have no maps for this new territory.

What we do have though is a friend who knows the way.

It was a Person who guided our ancestors across the horror of their collapsed system of medieval thought. That person delivered our ancestors safely into the modern age. That is why it is difficult for us to understand why the changes were so excruciating for them. We are so adjusted to modern thought that the medieval systems of thought, so carefully constructed on a foundation of faith, seem to us bizarre and alien. The crisis forced a new way of thinking about the world and about faith. Yet, we do not experience that shift as a loss of faith, although our ancestors certainly did at first.

The same Person is with us that was with our ancestors. Of course, he does not override our idolatrous obsession with systems and protocol. So if we refuse to trust Him, we may miss the turn, all the while clutching our terrors and mumbling our clichés and slogans.

These are times that try men’s souls. The crisis is painful and disorienting.

The crisis is also unavoidable.

Our old world is not coming back.

Unfortunately, many of our maps are inaccurate. They describe the territory of that old world, like those maps everyone loves with the sea monsters at the edge of the earth.

Since we don’t have a map, we need to listen carefully to our Helper.

Otherwise, we will have to wrestle with the monsters, even if they are not really there.

We will not win that fight because we will be fighting our own heads.

There is only one way through this crisis: we must cling to the Christ.

Image of a DNA helix

What Do We Need From Church?

2011-09-22T19:43:00.000-07:00

I called my last blog “a snapshot. ” Like a snapshot, it expressed the frustrations and questions of a single moment of my life. Photographers will tell you that a snapshot often reveals more than film. However, it also expresses less.

I have heard from a several pastors. They say that my blog expressed their experience: that the way they understand church work and pastoral leadership seems increasingly at odds with that of many of the people they serve.

Of course, many –perhaps even most -- pastors begin their career with a romantic view of both the church and pastoral ministry. Our idealism is akin to our courtship with a person. It’s not entirely wrong. It is a kind of whitewash that momentarily covers up the blemishes and faults of the one with whom we have just “fallen in love.” Marriage quickly dispels those illusions. We then get on with learning how to love when not intoxicated by the heady hormonal cocktail of romance. We may also seek to rekindle the high that comes from romantic enthrallment by flirting with someone else, or even by having a full-blown affair.

How we are personally wired has a lot to do with how we handle fallen reality. Our ideology also has a lot to do with it.

There are those who expect little from marriage and who are thus able to adjust to a life partnership that is little more than a contractual agreement to stay together to raise children and share chores.

There are those who keep trying to take the relationship deeper and make of it an inner penetration of souls.

Our satisfactions with life and relationships have much to do with our expectations.

The Buddha famously taught that our desires and expectations are the cause of our pain. In that case, if we surrender them the pain will also disappear.

The problem with that is that Christian faith teaches that we ought to expect and seek transformation of our character. The Bible doesn’t teach that we will follow Christ and be forgiven of our sins and then go to heaven but that in this life we will pretty much remain as we are. We are called to be a different kind of people, and to be different now.

Furthermore, our faith teaches us that worship is a transcendent meeting with the living Christ; “tasting the powers of the world to come,” as the writer to the Hebrews puts it.

Evangelism is the sharing of good news, through word and deed (and through the demonstration of a changed life.)

The transformation of souls is the result of hearing the Word, internalizing the word, living out the word within community, acting out the word among unbelievers, and sustaining this process of life-transformation by a continual worship of God in which the soul is reawakened and reoriented by grace.

If this is true, then the role of the pastor is to study the word, proclaim the work, model the word, and create worship opportunities for the community he services to meet the risen Christ.

There is no pastor alive who is not aware of his inadequacies when it comes to this high calling. Nonetheless, pastors are expected to accept this calling and to then work through our immaturity, insecurity, faults, pride, and all that hinders our own spiritual journey. Before the community we serve we must become “living epistles, known and read by all.”

If we don’t care whether or not others (or we ourselves) grow in God, our task is easier. We can just grow our church, collect our money and mind our own business. The role of the pastor is simple in this case: manage the stuff and keep the nickels and noses in the pews.

If we do care, we will realize that we are both responsible to keep the noses and nickels in the pews and to grow the people in God. And, we must discover, train and release new leaders. And, we must settle disputes. And, we must be there when people die, divorce and go bankrupt. And, we must remain cheerful and energetic Sunday mornings as we preach – or during the week when we blog. We must listen as those who believe that the earth is only 6,000 years old tell us that any other view is rank heresy. On the other hand, we must resist what the Bible calls “damnable heresies.” However, we must do all of this with grace and tenderness. And, of course, we must know how to manage money and people well. Otherwise, our Bible teaching will fall flat.

No one can do all of these things. That is why a pastor must grow – or allow others to grow – a system of people equipped to do the things he is not gifted to do. However, as he delegates, he cannot appear to be aloof and unavailable. Nor can he allow the church to appear institutional and cold. The result of delegation must be an organic body rather than a cold machine.

A few years ago, most people remained a part of a single church for most of their lives. They squabbled and fussed in that church. They loved and lived there. They died there and were buried out back. If the church had some issues, they weathered those issues. Sooner or later they found a solution. After all, it was their church. The pastor could preach a few bad sermons, make some mistakes and gradually grow in God before the people. He was the father of a family rather than the CEO of a corporation.

In the new church consumer environment, churches compete for people and money just like any business enterprise. Pastors learn to market, take polls, create events and produce programs that will attract people and keep them coming.

I don’t know how pastors can escape sometimes struggling with the thought: “is any of this really about meeting God? “

Well, the truth is: a lot of it is not about meeting God. But people meet God anyway, in spite of all the frantic distractions of modern church work. And gradually, a pastor must decide to locate that place where God is at work within his congregation and lovingly ignore all the voices that would distract him from his real calling – from those responsibilities for which he will give an account to the Lord at the day of judgment. He must then accept the consequences of his choice, knowing full well that he is going to make some bad calls along the way.

The truth is, there is a lot of people who could care less about the Christian crowd that churches are competing over. The people on the edge – those with serious questions, those that hurt, those that come from places where Christ is unknown, those who are addicted, and those whose souls cannot be satisfied with good lights, good sound, great programs and a comfortable seat. Those who hunger to meet God and be transformed by Him will always want a church where these things remain a priority.

Pastors who really want that should stop whining and just get on with it.

And if the camera takes their picture on a difficult day?

Well, it just does.

That’s what snapshots do.

Mama Maggie

2011-08-15T07:29:00.000-07:00

Willow Creek Church is not known for its mysticism, theological concerns or Charismatic piety. It gained its reputation from modeling church growth techniques, promoting leadership theory and demonstrating an interesting, media-driven post-modern Christian aesthetic.

I have never been attracted to that model.

Last week however, I found myself at a Willow Creek event. It was sponsored by People's Church in Franklin, Tennessee. While this is a community I respect, I actually attended the event because my friend, Bruce Grubbs, (who pastors a great church in Gladeville) invited me. He is a great guy. If he asks me to do something, I try to do it.

Anyway, there were several hundred people at People's Church when I arrived, all staring at the video feed from Willow Creek. I sat down and began watching the screen. After a short worship set, Bill Hybels, senior pastor at Willow Creek, began introducing the morning speaker.

"When we were planning this event, it was the following session that made me the most nervous," he said. "Leadership at high levels usually is packaged in highly driven and self- assured people. But Mama Maggie Gobran just doesn't fit that picture. I finally conceded because I believe I may have received a sign from God about it. She is often called the Mother Theresa of Cairo. Please receive her."

As the people clapped, a middle aged, fair skinned woman, dressed from head to toe in white, came to the podium. She paused, looked out over the crowd and bowed in prayer.

She then spoke for about thirty minutes. She said some marvelous things that you can find easily enough on the internet. But it was not words that began creating a sense of awe among those who heard her. It was presence. Something was pouring out of her, through her, and into those who were listening to her.

When she finished speaking, she said, "I don't know about how you work for God here. So I would like to end my presentation by blessing your church. I want to ask the Holy Spirit to fill you and your church." She then bowed to the ground, touched her head to the floor and lay there prostrate for some time.

As she lay there, the congregation at Willow Creek (and at the People's Church) slowly began to rise to their feet. Soon, we were all standing silently, bathing in the holiness of the moment.

Bill Hybels finally spoke, trying to control his emotions. His words were wonderful. It was obvious that he had experienced what we had all experienced in those few moments.

In my last blog, Does God Exist, I asked whether it was fair that unbelievers should expect to observe some quality in those who believe God, and in those societies where believers predominate; that is different than in people and societies that do not believe. I asked if there was any other real “proof” of God’s existence.

The morning after writing that blog, I prayed for guidance and help with that question.

Maggie Gobran was my answer.

She is very smart. But that is not the answer. She also helps people but that is not the answer. The answer to my question is holiness, the "whatever-it-is" that radiates from a person who decides to walk in humble submission in the ways of God. Mother Gobran did not scold or condemn, and certainly did not force her way. Nonetheless, when she finished speaking, everyone watching her suddenly wanted what she has and wanted it more than anything else on earth.

"I was a very unlikely choice for this calling," she said. "I was wealthy, educated and loved high fashion. When my aunt told me that she thought God was calling me to ministry, all of my friends laughed out loud. So I decided to do two things: I would read the Bible from start to finished and then read it again, over and over, for the rest of my life. And, I would seek the presence of God. As I did these two things, I began to experience the Lord's guidance."

"As you learn God’s Word, learn to enter the silence. Silent your body to hear your thoughts. Silence your thoughts to hear your heart. Silence your heart to hear your spirit. Silence your spirit to hear God."

In the end, we must accept the fact that spirituality is either a way of comforting ourselves with fables and mythology or it is the core of reality. What cannot be true; what must be in fact utterly false; is a flirtation with spiritual things while living one's life as if spiritual knowledge and experience makes no practical difference. That path is increasingly repugnant to me. It may even be evil. It certainly bears bad fruit. But that is the path of much too much of the church stuff we Christian people experience.

Our moralizing, programming, politicizing, power-playing, cliché-uttering, church-as-corporation stance offers nothing to the world but the same sort of thing people already experience in any theater, rock concert, bank or political rally. So learning to do what we already do, but better, is a bankrupt path. I don’t want any more technique that will help me do what I am doing, but better.

What I want to know is if any of this is real. And I want to have the courage to either give it up if it is not real or thoroughly embrace it if it is.

I want to stop “halting between two opinions,” as the prophet Elijah puts it.

If the Bible is to be believed, we are amphibious creatures, sort of like frogs. We are made to live in this natural world. We are also made to live in a spiritual world, to periodically breathe the air of eternity. What we call that eternal atmosphere is “holiness.” When people breathe in holiness, whether saint or sinner, they become enchanted. It is the “what-I-have-been-looking-for-all-my-life-but-couldn’t-name-it” stuff and everyone recognizes it when he or she encounters it.

But back to the question of my previous blog: Does God exist?

Yes, I saw him last Friday, peeking through the eyes of a beautiful Egyptian woman. He looked at me through her and then I looked back at Him. And I fell in love again with that other time and place that surrounds my early life.

This holy enchantment is not meant to be an escape from this world; it's meant to be an orientation to true north as we navigate our journey through this world. It teaches us to delight in this world and make a meaningful contribution to it as we reach beyond it.

It's a glimpse of reality, a remembrance of all that matters.

Cairo, a city of fear, oppression, poverty, rage and persecution of the saints; houses a secret. There is a woman there who represents a people in whom the God of glory shines. They are the children of another unlikely saint: a failed missionary once fired by the apostle Paul, never-do-well floundering young leader who let chance after chance go but who finally became the writer of the second gospel and gave his life on the streets of Alexandria.

One of his daughters is doing it again. Through her life, the same Lord who peeks through the pages of St. Mark’s gospel, is touching the poor of Cairo.

Thank God, He doesn’t forget those of us who are poor in spirit.

This week he spoke through a woman from Cairo and said, “Come closer. Closer. Yet closer.

Now take a breath and live.

Does God Exist?

2011-08-12T07:05:00.000-07:00

Could I have possibly asked a more provocative question?

“Yes!” says the believer.

“No!” says the unbeliever.

Then each begins accumulating evidence to support their conclusion.

For the most part, the argument between belief and unbelief does not advance much beyond this point.

I am a believer; I see evidence of God’s presence everywhere.

I can comfort myself that my view is decidedly the majority one. Probably, the percentage of people who have lived on this planet and who have believed in some sort of superhuman intelligence, force or Universal Being is over 99%. We seem hardwired to believe in God, or something like God.

However, I happen to be a member of the Western World. I also live in the 21^st century. In the small subset of human civilization in which I live, the percentage of people who disbelieve in God’s existence is quite high, relatively speaking. Furthermore, this group occupies the fields of human inquiry that require the greatest amount of raw intelligence and focused theoretical development: paleontology, neurology, physics, biology, and the like. They are really smart and informed.

Alarmingly for believers anyway, many people in such fields find no evidence for God’s existence.

I am not as intelligent or as learned as many of those people. However, I am learned enough and intelligent enough to realize it is not data alone that has convinced them there is no God. Like all human beings at all levels, these intelligent people have made an interpretive choice through which they now view the data.

Of course, believers do the same thing.

There is no scientific test or experiment which can prove or disprove the existence of God. That is a fact.

For example, scientists working on the genome project have come to different conclusions about God from the very same data. All of them have concluded that DNA is a complicated language constructed from four simple “letters.” These “letters” carry the blueprint of all living creatures. Language implies intelligence. Just as binary language (two numbers) is the root of all computer computations, DNA is the language for all biological development. Binary is a language humans developed. But who or what constructed DNA? Some say Random Natural Selection; others say “GOD.”

Some believers are unhappy with either conclusion. After all, the believers who worked on the Genome project still insist that the earth is not young and that biological evolution is no longer a hypothesis. But we will leave that for now.

If I were to develop a test for the existence of God, it would be this: do people who know God flourish and develop in ways that those who do not know Him don’t? Do societies that contain large percentages of people who follow God’s ways flourish more than those that don't? Does this flourishing include all parts of life? Are Christian societies, or Jewish ones, or Muslim ones; more just, kind, intelligent, wise, well-ordered, or developed than humanist or agnostic societies?

In other words, if the data of neurology, biology or other fields of human inquiry is inconclusive where faith in God is concerned, then should we not see in the societies developed by believers a different sort of quality, some sort of “cant-put-my-finger-on-it-but-this-is-better” quality? And wouldn’t that quality suggest the presence of some agent that is missing in other societies?

And yet, what do we see? In our country at least, we see believers avoiding more and more fields of human inquiry. We even see hostility among many believers for those fields. We experience reluctance among many believers to even converse about the possible implications of DNA, quantum mechanics, relativity – indeed for much of the discoveries of the twentieth century.

If God exists and wishes to be known, then there is no field of human inquiry that is not a godly vocation. And, there is no discovery made in those fields that are in opposition to God. If continental drift occurred and is a clock by which we can measure the passing of geological time, then the discovery of continental drift is something our Creator wanted us to discover. If DNA is a language and we have found the signature of “the Word by which all things exist,” then a believer ought to rejoice. If molecules are constructed from sub-atomic particles that have only potential existence then we should laugh at discovering that we have been mistaken about the nature of reality. Such a discovery moves us to humility and awe. It also indicates that we are growing up and ready for such knowledge.

And if all of this forces us to take another look at the lenses through which we read scripture, then this too is something God meant to occur. He surely doesn’t mean for us to force ourselves to grit our teeth and live in the eighteenth century while using technological gadgets made possible by discoveries we are not allowed to acknowledge.

In fact, if I were an unbeliever, I would conclude from observing the reactions of believers to science and human advance a proof for the nonexistence of God. I would also conclude that since many places that believers dominate do not flourish, this too points toward a proof for God’s non-existence.

I began this reflection by claiming that the arguments for and against God’s existence are not much more complicated than “yes He does,” and “no He doesn’t.” For too many of us, the next step of the discussion is simply to yell louder or, if possible to pass laws that will keep one another from offering our different opinions in public.

But the argument is really simple: what difference does a belief in God make in the lives of those who serve Him? Is that difference positive or negative?

If Christians don’t face this argument head on; if we keep on entertaining ourselves by sending out louder and louder emails and dumber and dumber sermons; if worship is really a rock concert with a good light show; if a political party is the same thing as the kingdom of God; if we insist that dinosaurs lived at the time of Nimrod, about 5,000 years ago; if poor people are poor mostly because they are lazy; if it is God’s plan that my church have one race and one socio-economic group even though my church is surrounded by other kinds of people; if it’s OK that some of our most Christian influenced counties are the poorest and most intellectually backward counties in the nation: well, we are going to finally help settle the argument about whether there is a God.

We will have conducted the only experiment that is capable of proving the old argument one way or the other. We will then present our evidence: there is no visible sign of God’s presence anywhere, even among those who follow Him.

He is just a concept that comforts people who are too frightened to face reality.

Betwixt and Between

2011-08-09T06:26:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago, Trish and I had lunch with Judy Merwin, a delightful character who exudes energy and optimism. She intended to take us to a Korean restaurant but it turned out that every Korean establishment in Nashville is closed on Tuesdays. (I don’t know if Tuesday is a Korean holy day of some sort or every Korean establishment in our area have made an agreement to be closed the same day. Perhaps there is no explanation.) Anyway, Red Lobster was her second choice and so that’s where we ended up.

When we were seated, Judy pushed a book into my hands and said, “My children said that you need to read this.”

I quickly looked at the cover.

THIRD CULTURE KIDS: The Experience of Growing Up Among Worlds; by David C. Pollack and Ruth E. Van Reken.

I looked up at this woman, a widow now for many years, and veteran missionary to Korea. She and her husband spent twenty years in that nation. They sold their car to pay for passage on a freighter and arrived with fifty dollars and no promise of income.

That sounds crazy to most people now but I’ve know folks like that all my life. Missionaries used to go abroad with a one way ticket and a suitcase or two. Contrary to the way movies tend to depict them, most of these faith-based missionaries were adventuresome, broad-minded people who believed their faith could change the world. In most cases, they were less narrow-minded than their counterparts at home. Most learned the language of the country in which they lived, became well-read in its literature and history, and very often married their children to the people of their adopted country.

There are not many of them left and when I meet one of them, I listen. I have the very highest respect for them and their work. I know their story has not been depicted well by either religious or secular people. They are not the angels the religious press makes them out to be. They are not the crazy bigoted fools the secular press makes them out to be. They are just believers who like adventure and who are fascinated by other cultures.

“Read it!” She said laughing. “You’ll understand yourself better.”

So I did. I stopped reading everything else on my list and read Third Culture Kids, cover to cover, just because she asked me to.

A third culture kid is someone who grows up significantly affected by two or more cultures. They can be missionary children, military brats, adopted into a family that is racially different, or have two parents of different nationalities or race. They often speak two languages or more.

They feel rather at home in more than one culture but not fully at home in any.

Check. Check. Check. I am definitely a third culture kid.

I am a patriotic American. My ancestors were all here before the revolutionary war. I love American history and am continually fascinated by the genius of the American political system. (Until this past month, when I began to ponder the advantages of a parliamentary system or perhaps even the return of the monarchy!)

My English is flavored with a slight Appalachian lilt. Who would suspect that sometimes I am searching for an English word that corresponds to the Spanish one that popped into my brain first?

There is no current word in English for example that can replace “asi.” “Thus” is somewhat an equivalent, but sound ponderous in spoken English. Also, there is no current word for tu. “Thou” doesn’t even make it past the spell check!

And what does one do about a craving for ceviche or for the smells of eucalyptus on a cool Andean evening?

The trouble is, when I was living where all that was available, I missed hot dogs, rhythm and blues, and traffic lights.

Both the richness and the challenges of my life have come from being betwixt and between.

When I returned to live in my native country at age thirty one, I was delighted. This is my home. I love it here. I had no idea that my sojourn in Quito, Managua, Iquitos, and Montréal would never be over, that every part of my life there would live on in relationships; my tastes in food, music and architecture; and the way I experience and proclaim my faith.

I speak three languages in dialects Europeans find amusing because I learned them from farmers, taxi drivers and fellow church members in various parts of North and South America. These languages fight in my head like children: “choose me, no me; I was here first, and so forth.”

I have had the distinct feeling that sometimes people who believe nearly as I do about politics and religion still think I am not quite coming clean with everything. I see it in their eyes: I am holding back; not quite on board with all the things they are absolutely certain about. Something doesn’t seem quite right about the way I fit into a wide variety of worship styles and feel right at home in all of them. Why is it that I like the parts of town where there is a little bit of everything from everywhere?

I’ve grown to like my globalized culture. Loren Cunningham once laughed at my depiction of feeling “betwixt and between,” and introduced me to the word glocal to ease my frustration. I looked it up. Glocal describes a globally minded person who is rooted in a local culture.

That’s much better than the word I once used to describe myself. A therapist once asked me to sum up my life in one word. Back then, I chose the word “exile.”

I explained that I had always choked up when hearing the 137st Psalm, “How can I sing the song of Zion in a strange land.” I also explained that when I read that Psalm, I hear Bob Marley singing: By the rivers of Babylon.” (If you haven’t heard it, stop reading this blog and go download the song! Goodness gracious, let’s keep our priorities right.)

I have decided that following Christ makes anyone into a third culture kid. We live as loyal citizens in our nation and participate in its culture. However, we are slowly acclimating ourselves to another culture altogether, one that does not always fit neatly into the political and social categories created by our native land. We fit and sometimes don’t fit. We belong and yet don’t belong.

Betwixt and between is the condition of all who take the gospel seriously. Gradually, our loyalties to that other country rise higher than our loyalties to the one in which we live. Some people are OK with that, others not. And that’s just the way it is.

Ceviche, by the way, is raw fish soaked in lime, garlic and delectable flavors. It can only be properly mixed by a Quecha-speaking person in a bamboo hut as pork sizzles outside on a charcoal fire while a lady wails a melody from a loud speaker about “amor, alma and la vida amarga. “

This just doesn’t mix well with hot dogs covered with chili and slaw, consumed to the sound of Willy Nelson singing To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before.

Add Crêpes de Brittany to the sounds of Les Amants du Saint-Laurent and you will have committed a culinary crime that will make the papers in Paris.

But it’s what makes people like Judy Merwin interesting. And me. And all the wondering nomads and their children and children’s children who make up our fascinating and sometimes difficult-to-navigate way of life.

Exile is not quite the right word. Oh, I found it! It’s E Pluribus Unim.

What is a Pastor?

2011-08-03T09:43:00.000-07:00

For two decades or so, American churches have been undergoing a dramatic shift. As a result, they are more effective than before, both in how they present their message and how they manage their corporations. As one who remembers the haphazard manner in which churches were often managed in years past, I applaud those improvements.

This shift has cost us, however. What we have gained in efficiency we have lost in spiritual awareness.

It is the sort of loss one notices in a translation of a great piece of literature. The metaphors, jokes, play on words -- the sort of mysteriously inexplicable stuff that makes a language alive and delightful -- must be sacrificed in order to convey the story to people who speak another tongue. While a great translator may be able to find similar figures of speech, or depict a conversation between two people of different classes in a way that feels similar to the conversation recorded in the original language, a translated story is, in some sense, a new piece of literature. One might even say, the more successful the translation, the more that translation becomes a work of art in it's own right.

The King James Bible is a good illustration.

One can fault the King James Version from a technical standpoint but the translators succeeded in creating an English Bible. Their work allowed English speaking people to hear God speaking in their own language. That’s why the King James Version became "the Bible" for nearly four hundred years in most of the English-speaking world.

(Whether any translation has done this since is another subject!)

The recent shift in the church culture reminds me of our newer Bible translations. We have eliminated the old, mysterious mumbo jumbo of "propitiation," "forbearance" and “long-suffering" from our Bibles because the "language of Zion" had become a foreign language even to our children. In fact, many churches eliminated public Bible reading altogether once we discovered that post- moderns were "visual and nonlinear" learners. In doing so, we lost much of our ability to discuss theology with our parishioners.

But those issues are not the central focus of this reflection.

What I want to know is how the shift of church culture has affected the role of the pastor.

Is it even worth asking: what is a pastor anyway?

The Biblical model for pastor is the shepherd. Indeed, in many languages, there is no separate word to distinguish the shepherd of a church from the shepherd of sheep.

Along with the word “pastor” comes a biblical picture. “The Lord is my shepherd. He leads me beside still waters. He restores my soul. He prepares a table for me in the presence of my enemies.” And so forth. If the Lord is my shepherd, and the leader of my church is my shepherd, then I will naturally expect that the leader of my church will try to lead my church as he would care for a flock.

This was the way churches viewed their leaders in times past. A pastor's central concern was the spiritual development of the people in his flock. A pastor was responsible for teaching, in word and by example, the structures of thought, the way of living, and the management of attitude that molded people into disciples.

Sometime before the Reformation, the model for “pastor” shifted toward the professor.

Well before the Reformation, spiritual leaders emerged (like Thomas Aquinas) who were first class philosophers. These gifted thinkers taught Christian doctrine in ways that stretched the intellect of their students and helped launch the artists, writers and even secular thinkers who created the modern Western world.

Although the Reformers often challenged the ideas of these spiritual philosophers, they developed ministries along similar lines. The Protestant pastor thus became primarily a teacher whose teaching was focused on helping people interpret the Bible.

Wesley and the early Methodists broadened the Protestant model for pastoring by including emotional formation as part of the process of becoming a disciple. So the early Methodist pastor focused on awakening the parishioner's soul rather than merely forming his intellect.

Still, the focus of Protestant pastoral ministry remained primarily the exposition of scripture until the twentieth century.

By the end of the nineteen sixties however, the model of pastor as shepherd or teacher had been overshadowed by pastor as marketer, businessman, or even entertainer. For the first time since the reformation, many believed that a theological background was at best superfluous and, at worse, detrimental for pastoring a dynamic church. Theology was now ridiculed as, “much ado about nothing.” Even a superficial knowledge of scripture could be tolerated if the pastor's presentation was clever enough to keep his people's attention. Spiritual formation dropped off the list of pastoral responsibilities altogether.

Protestants had become pragmatists.

The bottom line became a pastor's ability to attract nickels and noses.

In such an environment, it is little wonder that a pastor would soon become primarily either a CEO of a religious corporation or a great entertainer hired by a corporate board. Pastoral work had become about expanding the campus, securing the corporation and managing the capital of the enterprise. Preaching became inspirational entertainment. “Shepherding” became a churchy name for corporate leadership.

To be fair, pastors in every age and in every culture have needed gifts and interests beyond that of Bible exposition and spiritual formation. Good pastors of great churches have always needed to know how to manage resources and people, or to at least know how to appoint those with such gifts to responsible positions within the church. And, many of the greatest pastors of history have been very entertaining. The sermons of John Chrysostum, third century bishop of Constantinople, are still entertaining; he wasn't called "golden mouth" for nothing! But management skills, or the ability to entertain, have not been considered the primary gifts of a pastor until recently. These “marketable skills” have been viewed as helpful means by which a pastor might achieve his primary end: shepherding his flock by growing the spiritual life of his people.

We are often told that gifted shepherds can be hired by "pastors" who are actually CEOs, and, that in fact, this is a superior arrangement. This corporate model supposedly allows the senior pastor of a great church to maintain his inspiring vision rather than get bogged down by the petty business of tending a flock.

I think otherwise.

After a couple of generations, the corporate church model has been weighed in the balances and found wanting. If the pastor is primarily a CEO, then doctrine, prayer, worship (by which I mean much more than music or dramatic performance), and the spiritual formation of the people of God become products and programs. Spirituality becomes a secondary interest (if it survives as even that.) Church attendees replace converts. Eternity disappears. The presence of God grows dim. When the felt, experienced sense of God’s presence disappears altogether, it is hardly missed. A CEO is not judged by such things. He does not evaluate his work by such things. Therefore, if the pastor is primarily a CEO, spiritual life will, not may, diminish or even disappear.

My point is not that the pastors of the past were all saints or that the pastors of today are not real pastors. What I am saying is that the role model for pastoral work has been changing pastors into something other than shepherds. I am also claiming that the result will be churches that are something other than spiritual families.

In the end, I'm not really sure what the purpose for either pastor or church will be.

There is now much confusion within our churches about what a pastor is supposed to do. As a result, many pastors are struggling with an identity crisis. They once felt called to do things they believed were important but discovered that the churches they served did not value those things. Since many pastors are not interested (nor trained) to do the things congregations now seem to expect, they either leave the ministry or try to play the role they are paid to play. However, they have lost their heart for the work and no longer respect themselves nor the office they hold.

This is probably not the place to explore another model for “pastor,” suggested to me recently by evangelist Luis Palau.

Over breakfast one morning, Palau said he believes many pastors now believe they are called to be social engineers. (We were in France at the time and wondered if either liberal or conservative churches could ever engineer a culture more impressive than France, which apparently feels no need for pastors at all!)

The irony about this model of pastoring is that effective pastors have often changed cities and nations. However, the ability to transform individuals has always grown from a pastor’s spiritual influence and is a by-product of simply caring for a flock.

In short: Church as business and pastor as CEO, are unproven means to advance the gospel of Christ. These models can “grow churches” but in many cases will leave one wondering how much of a “church” the resulting corporation really is.

I for one have decided that the corporate model is an unproven oxcart. Corporate life was not constructed to carry the altar of God. I think it cannot do it. In the end, the means molds both the message and messenger into things the saints would have found unrecognizable.

The bottom line is that the world needs the church and its leaders to be "other than" rather than "same as."

If they are not, both the world and the church may soon ask "what is the point of either?"

Is There a God in Avignon?

2011-07-01T08:30:00.000-07:00

France is nearly a country without a God. It is as nearly a humanistic state as can be achieved. And yet, it is not at all an unpleasant place, as we Christians often imagine a humanist society to be.

It is a nice place to visit, and by all appearances, a nice place to live.

As I travel through this beautiful country, I find it impossible not to ask "what difference does it make to believe in God?" "What difference does it make for an individual?" And, "What difference does it make for a society?"

Here in France, if a person becomes a Christian, he is making a serious commitment: emotionally, intellectually and socially. He cannot simply drift into faith. He doesn't just go to church because that is what good people around him do. If he becomes a Christian, he is deciding to learn how to think differently than his neighbors. He is accepting the fact that many of his fellow citizens will think him strange. He is deciding to become a new person.

As I imagined what sort of analogy to use to describe French reaction to Christian conversation, the closest I could come to was this: to become a Christian in France is like joining a club where everyone believes in Bigfoot and spends hours talking with his friends in that club about proofs of Bigfoot's existence. No one is angry at you for believing in Bigfoot, they just think it a bit odd. Of course, they get irritated if you make a big deal about your private obsession in public.

The fact is, most French people do not feel a need for God. They have culture: an impressive culture. They have great food, a profound intellectual life and a truly impressive social infrastructure. Even though cathedral spires pierce the sky in every city and town, these are the artistic achievements of past ages. Modern French culture preserves them as relics, although small groups of worshipers do indeed continue to gather there. They are memories, not present realities.

And yet, life goes on. One hears a lot of laughter, good conversation and, of course, encounters great food at every turn.

What are we to say about this? Can we claim that belief in God makes a practical difference in our lives? Does our faith really impact our intellectual lives; and is that impact positive or negative? What about our social lives? Are we better friends and neighbors than non-Christians? Do Christians form more mature, more peaceful or more prosperous societies than humanists?

What are we to say about France? Or about the future of our own country?

This is an especially crucial question for Christians who are politically active. Whether they come from the right or the left of the political aisle, if they seek to transform society according to a social vision they believe derives from their faith, they must tell us what that look like once they succeed.
Will their society be a more just, moral, cultured or prosperous place than France?

The history of Europe requires us to approach this question humbly. Here, Christians have actually led countries, cities and empires. We have a track record here. And if we are ignorant of this record, I can assure you that the humanists are not.

The humanist know that past theocracies helped produce the present humanistic European states; (and helped form the present attitudes of American intellectuals toward religion, for that matter.) The miracle-working charismatic priest, Rasputin, provoked seventy years of Bolshevik rage against the church in Russia. The excesses of the Puritan governments in New England produced a hundred and fifty years of mockery in American literature and a culturally embedded cynicism toward religion in that part of The United States. An Anglican monopoly in Great Britain fused crown and crozier and provoked an outrage from the lower classes that left a bitter taste, in both religious circles and Marxist ones, for theology and liturgy of any sort.

Shall I go on?

The examples are many. They also represent most major expressions of Christianity. In fact, the only example I can think of where Christians dominated a state with good results over the long term is colonial Pennsylvania. There, Quaker governors shocked the world by actually behaving like disciples of Jesus. There are other examples surely, especially of short-term bursts of cultural advance under Christian governments.

I might even offer European Medieval society as an example of cultural advance under Christian leadership. Of course, that would provoke howls of rage and mockery from unbeliever and Christian alike, but that is because of the way the history of that era has been written as much as it is because of what actually happened during that period. Still, humanists can find plenty of material in Medieval history to make their case.

Christians make no better rulers than non-Christians. That is my point.

When in power, we tend to govern like anyone else, even if we pray fervently and quote a lot of Bible passages. In fact, overtly religious people can become terribly oppressive if they internally justify their cruelties and prejudice by wrapping their actions in authentic piety.

Christianity can be easily misused in ways that undermine its message and power. That has happened here. I sat among its ruins in Avignon.

The power of Christianity is first of all the living presence of Christ. Not our morals. Not our rules. But the felt, experienced, living presence of Jesus. Next, it is the teachings of the faith that gradually transform the human intellect and which molds human perception and judgement in ways that differ profoundly from secular ways of thought. Then, it the courage to put the teachings into action, in a spirit of humility and forbearance.

Without the intellectual formation of Christian teaching -- which does not occur without a battle with sloth and the embedded evil of our darkened minds -- without the sense of the living presence of Christ, and without the courage to actually live the values of the faith, Christianity becomes a pretext, an excuse, for controlling others. If such "Christians" rule, "Christianity" becomes a dead morality, an imposition of life-denying rules, validated and enforced by the soldier's gun.

Humanists with long memories resist Christian influence in society largely because of this often repressed scenario.

Many American Christians now call us to "take back our country." When the righteous rule, they say, the people rejoice. But who are these righteous people we want to govern our nation? Are they the leaders of our denominations? Which one? Are they our pastors?

Before we think about governing society, we should ask whether American Christianity is currently producing people whose intellect has been formed by a Christian way of thinking. Do such people have the necessary knowledge of the world to govern? Have they looked through their Christian lens at the world or used their faith as an excuse to retreat from it? Can they interact peacefully, respectfully, and knowledgeably with people of other persuasions?

If such people exist, will their fellow believers allow them to function in their area of knowledge without frying them alive with rumors, slanderous emails and half-baked conspiracy theories?

I am thinking about these things, here in the beautiful surroundings of Avignon. I am thinking of all the things that occurred here. A papal schism. St. Bartholomew's massacre. A bloody revolution. A restoration. A return to religious monopoly. Wars. A humanistic pacifism that is weary of all religion, nationalism or anything else that stirs public passions. Better to eat canard avec aubergine and drink Chateauneuf-du-Pape rouge. Better to make love. Better to ride a high speed train to Paris and go to the Louvre.

Then I read Les Miserables, arguably one of two truly successful Christian novels in world literature. I read about the godly bishop Bienvenu who led a criminal to Christ. That criminal became a successful business man. Then a mayor. He keeps his head through the revolutions and raises his daughter. He prays for the people and helps them find bread. All around him, the cultured and crude alike, wallow in their various forms of misery. Some take to the streets to make the world a better place. Some fight back and kill the Reformers. All are miserable and without a real purpose for which to live.

Meanwhile, the real reformation of the world unfolds in the work of a nearly invisible man named Jean Val Jean, who once one a wretch, lost and blind; was found, healed, and set free to serve. He walks through France like a Gallic Christ, silently pleading for the soul of his nation.

I think, sitting here in the Provence region, that when Victor Hugo wrote Les Miserables, he was begging for the church to appoint at least one Christian as a bishop, or perhaps for the bishops to please become Christians. He was begging for shepherds who did not desire to become despots. He was longing for Christians to understand what it means to be the salt of the earth, a city on a hill, and the light of the world.

Even today, if such people arise, they will not need to win an election or to wear a crown. They will be given a hearing, even here in France. Because a day comes when one has had his last taste of exquisite cuisine or has his last discussion about Voltaire, Sartre and Diderot or has had his fill of rides on high speed trains. There comes a day when he wants to know: " If a man die, shall he live again?" " And, " Why am I here?" "Why do I delight in conversation and well prepared food?" "Why do I love buildings that touch the sky and cause me speak in whispers?" "What am I that I should care about such things?"

When one finally tires of the questions, he longs to meet a truly good man or woman; someone who carries in their being the balm of Gilliad that makes the wounded whole.