Heaping Burning Coals

At work not long ago, a large group of us were having a luncheon meeting to discuss an upcoming marketing campaign. Part of the campaign involves talking directly with the public, which is something of a leap for a non-consumer business.

This has been building for months. And on this day, the discussion is around the company’s “persona” or voice, and what it should sound like, what language should be used and what language to avoid, and possibly even what movie actors in various roles might suggest for the effort.

The discussion reaches a point where it’s noticeable that I’m not participating. So I’m asked for my opinion.

“When did we forget how to talk with people?” I ask. “When did forget to put ourselves in others’ shoes, hear what they’re saying, and find a way to respond to their concerns? Why do we think we have to script everything? We’re talking about being authentic when it sounds like what we want is to control the conversation.”

The conversation takes a turn, and in a good direction. Not everyone agrees with what I say, but it’s not easy to argue that authenticity may be the antithesis of what’s being proposed. But at least this issue is out on the table, recognized, debated, and, if not resolved, at least understood.

I’m passionate on this subject. The people around the table hear it in my voice. I hear it my voice.

This is one of those days I feel like a dinosaur. This is not generally the way the company is going, nor is it generally the way the world is going.

Afterward, alone in my office, I think about the church. And I understand what has been troubling me for almost the last 15 years. The business conversation we had at lunch applies to what I’ve experienced at two churches for the last 15 years.

Here’s what Francis Chan says: “We’ve created a whole brand of churches that do not depend upon the Spirit, a whole culture of Christians that do not depend on the Spirit, a whole culture of Christians who are not disciples, a new group of ‘followers’ who do not follow.”

I read those words in Chan’s Forgotten God: Reversing Our Tragic Neglect of the Holy Spirit, and I feel burning coals being heaped upon my head.

Been there, done that.

When did we forget to depend upon the Spirit? When did we decide that Willowcreek is the model, or Mars Hill is the model, or “one church / multiple campuses” is the model? When did we start applying the notion of “success” to the church and defining and measuring success by size and numbers? If it was about numbers and size, why didn’t God start with the power and size of Rome instead of some fishermen in an empire backwater?

Perhaps it’s the effects of getting older and more curmudgeonly. Perhaps it’s heard one too many church transformational plans. Perhaps it’s walking into too many church meetings or seminars and being ambushed with a great new revitalization proposal to “bring millennials back to the church.” Perhaps it’s singing one too many repetitious praise songs in worship services.

Those heaping coals are burning.

“God is not interested in numbers,” Chan says. “He cares most about faithfulness, not the size, of His bride. He cares about whether people are lovers of Him.”

And big buildings, big music, big attendance, eclectic services, church planning consultants, fundraising programs, new communications technology and coffee bars can’t do that. None of these things can do what God cares most about. These things come from man.

Only the Spirit can do what God cares most about.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been reading Forgotten God. To see more posts, on this chapter, “Supernatural Church,” please visit Sarah at Living Between the Lines.

Photograph by Petr Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Navigating the Gray

One of the movie critics in our local newspaper always provides guidance for us in how we approach movies.

If he likes a movie, we know the film will be generally edgy, with some violence and an “anti” kind of message, as in “anti-establishment” or what the critic (and the movie) had determined to be “anti-establishment.” Like Pulp Fiction.

If the movie is about values (family and otherwise) or is life-affirming, we know the critic will usually pan it. Like Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln.

In other words, his movie reviews often if not always reveal more about the critic than the movie, and that may be true of most criticism in the arts. It’s not that our local critic is always wrong, but I’ve read enough of his reviews to understand his worldview, and I know how and when it differs from my own.

What’s clear is that, in his writing his reviews and my reading them, we are both engaging in the business of culture.

In my own writing, and people’s reading and responding to it, we are all about the business of culture – making it, consuming it, understanding it, becoming part of it. We Christians, says Brett McCracken in Gray Matters: Navigating the Space Between Legalism and Liberty, tend to have one of two responses to culture. We see it as godless, heretical, blasphemous, and abominable. Or we saturate ourselves in it to get as far away from our Christian upbringing as possible.

Few of us, McCracken says, attempt to understand it. Discern what if anything is worthy, and celebrate the beauty of what is good in culture. Man is created in God’s image, and he made us to be creators, and that original impulse can be found across humanity.

What we have largely done is to wall ourselves off from popular culture, even as we embrace (and often unwittingly embrace) many of the forms that popular culture takes – art, rock music, radio, television, movies magazines, novels, self-help books. We have Christian versions of virtually every form of popular culture available.

What we have not done is to ask whether these forms of culture change what we try to say and communicate. The reality is that they do change the message, and often in profound ways; some messages are better suited to certain forms rather than others. And they change what we say in exactly the same way they changed what is said and communicated in the popular culture.

For the next four Mondays in December, TheHigh Calling will be discussing Gray Matters. McCracken examines four manifestations of how popular culture manifests itself – food, music, film, and drinking, and he considers each from the perspective of both creation and consumption. Each Monday the discussion will focus on a different manifestation. Check out The High Calling to see where the discussion is going. It promises to be lively.

Related:

Jonathan Merritt at Religion News Service interviewed Brett McCracken earlier this year.

Photograph by Petr Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Grace is Downright Un-American

I’m reading Andy Stanley’s The Grace of God, and a thought keeps forcing its way into my mind,  or perhaps it’s rising from somewhere within my mind.

Stanley puts grace in its proper context, and that’s the context of creation and the fall. Without understand the place of grace in both, and especially the fall, we inevitably all into the “mean God” of the Old Testament versus the “loving God” of the New Testament trap (and it is a trap). The fall changed everything, as Stanley points out, and with it came shame, impaired judgment, pain, sin – and our tendency to blame God for our troubles..

The thought that keeps recurring is how un-American this all is.

“In American culture,” Stanley writes, “we’ve substituted the term mistake for the terms wrong and sin. We aren’t sinners; we are really just mistakers…A mistake is something you make while balancing your checkbook. A mistake is an accident.

People who make mistakes in American public life often say they misspoke, if it is something they said. Or public figures (including celebrities and movie stars) will start a public apology with the word if: “If I offended anyone, I’m sorry.”

Any apology that begins with the word if is not an apology. That two-letter word is a statement: “I’m saying this because my press agent says I have to, but I didn’t really do anything wrong.”

We Americans have this philosophy. We pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. We work hard and get ahead. We are special, and we are exceptional.

You can see where sin and wrong fit into that philosophy. They don’t. And if they don’t, then the concept of grace doesn’t either.

We Americans don’t get things unless we deserve them. At least, that’s how it’s supposed to be. We work hard and do right and by golly we’re going to do well and get to heaven one day.

It’s easy for Christians to conflate Christianity and patriotism. Evangelicals, rightly and wrongly, became famous for it in the last two decades.

This idea of grace – that we receive something simply because of the generous outpouring of God – is not an American idea, although our history is chock full of examples of it. It is a Biblical idea, and has been with us since creation.

And all we have to do is receive it.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’re reading The Grace of God. To see more posts on chapter 1, “In the beginning, grace,” please visit Jason at Connecting to Impact.  

Photograph by Julie Gentry via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.