Follow Me – into Persecution?

Early on in my faith, I spent a fairly considerable amount of time reading church history. I was even able to take a seminar in early church history as part of a masters degree program at Washington University in St. Louis. While it was more than 20 years ago, what I remember most about the course was two things: the professor’s deep admiration for the late 19^th and early 20^th century church historian Adolf von Harnack (a leading proponent of what was then called “higher criticism”) and my research project on forms of government in the early church.

You can’t read anything about church history for very long without coming into the subject of persecution. I originally understood (likely thanks to a lot of movies) was that the Romans spent 300 years avidly persecuting the church before finally throwing in the towel. In fact, it didn’t actually happen that way. Persecutions tended to be local or at most regional, with a few notable exceptions, such as the empire-wide persecution under Diocletian about 300 A.D.

The major charge against the Christians wasn’t that they believed in Christ; it was that they wouldn’t worship the emperor as a god.

Not long after receiving my degree, I was among a small group of corporate speechwriters asked by a national PR association to write a short article on a speech I deeply admired. Most of the group selected speeches like the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, or “Blood, Sweat and Tears” by Winston Churchill. I selected Stephen’s speech before the Sanhedrin, the one that ended in his death by stoning and the persecution of the church in Jerusalem.

My article wasn’t used. I was asked to write on something “not religious.” I declined, pointing out that the articles that would be printed actually had religious underpinnings and even direct references to God, while mine didn’t refer to God. They declined to print mine, an indication of what was already happening in American culture more than 20 years ago. I don’t consider this a form of persecution, but it was an example of anti-Christian discrimination.

Things have not gotten better since then.

What I said in my article was that Stephen’s speech and death, and the persecution of the church in Jerusalem that followed, had actually resulted in the first great wave of Christian evangelism, scattering Christians from Jerusalem to cities all over the Mideast and perhaps all the way to Rome. Paul, a leader in the persecution effort, was on his way to Damascus to extinguish the church there when he had his roadside conversion.

This became a pattern for the next three centuries. Persecute the church – and watch it grow. In fact, whenever the church has experienced persecution, it has grown. Today, in places where Christians face imprisonment and often death for their faith, the church is growing.

“We often think persecution is horrible, and certainly in many ways it is,” writes David Platt in Follow Me: A Call to Die. A Call to Live. ”But persecution is often a sign that the gospel is progressing. As long as the gospel lies dormant in a country or amid a people, and as long as no one is coming to Christ, then no one cares about Christianity. It’s only when the gospel spreads and people are converted to Christ that opposition begins to arise against Christianity.”

Persecution is a terrible thing, but for Christians, it is also a sign.

We’ve been reading David Platt’s Follow Me as part of a book discussion at TheHigh Calling. Today Marcus Goodyear concludes the discussion. Please visit the site to see his comments and the discussion.

Has the Culture Captured the Church?

Who sits in the pews on Sunday in the United States? Americans or Christians?

Don’t answer too quickly. I did, and I answered it wrong.

The deeper I get into reading David Platt’s Follow Me: A Call to Die. A Call to Live, the greater my discomfort is growing. Not with the book; not at all. My discomfort arises from the growing certainty at how much American culture has captured the Church in the United States.

How much? A lot.

Two major strands of cultural influence have fused in the church today – American individualism and American consumerism. If we’re not toting around our focus on self and trying to discern “God’s plan for my life,” we’re telling ourselves that we’re not “into church” but we are “into Jesus,” and we go shopping for the right church to meet our needs (Platt and others refer to this as “dating the church”). Or we choose to abandon church altogether and stay at home on Sunday’s with our bibles and internet worship services.

It’s not about determining God’s plan for your life, Platt says. It’s about living each day expectantly, knowing that God is going to do something with you, and likely something surprising, and being open and available. A friend of mine (a young pastor) once scandalized older pastors and elders alike when he said that 90 percent of missions was simply showing up.

“So we go to him,” Platt says. “We spend time with him. We sincerely listen to his Word as we walk in obedience to it. As we do these things, God leads us and guides us according to his will, and suddenly we realize that the will of God is not a road map just waiting to be unearthed somewhere. Instead, it’s a relationship that God wants us to experience every day (emphasis added).”

And if you’re truly “into Jesus,” you’ll know that church is not optional. It’s designed by God, and we are all parts. It’s how the work gets done. God’s work. Not by people sitting at home by themselves, but by people in community, who come together with all their hopes and joys and aggravations and dreams and irritations and failures, and somehow God creates something beautiful out of all it.

Church is not about meeting our needs. We’re looking at this through the wrong end of the telescope. It’s not about us. It’s about what God wants us to do in the world.

The church is supposed to be countercultural – that what has given it its strength for than two thousand years. It runs into trouble when it embraces the culture, whether that’s culture left or culture right.

We’ve been embracing the culture for a long time. Too long. We need to stop, and be the church we’re meant to be.

We’re discussing Follow Me over at The HighCalling. Visit the site to see what today’s post is about and what’s happening in the comments.

The Risk of Following

I’m in the bookstore at Laity Lodge, near Kerrville, Texas. I’m here for a retreat, with a cross-discipline group of people who have come together to talk about work, faith, leadership, mental health, art, music, and digital media. An eclectic mix, to be sure, but there is a common thread: we share the thread of faith and a desire to live it in the world.

The bookstore is small, a quiet place. There are some fiction and poetry on the shelves – which my eye seeks first – but most of the books are about faith, devotions, prayer, theology and philosophy – matched to the themes that the lodge and the rugged Texas Hill Country inspire. You see names like C.S. Lewis, Eugene Peterson, Frederick Buechner, Madeleine L’Engle.

And the poet Luci Shaw. I pull a slim volume with her name on it from the shelf; I’ve read her poetry, and enjoyed it, but this isn’t about poetry. The title is The Crime of Living Cautiously: Hearing God’s Call to Adventure. At first I think it’s about leadership, but it turns out to be about how to live a life of faith.

Indirectly, though, it is about leading and following – following Christ and following the leading of Christ. Shaw uses the prism of her own outdoor adventures to examine why she considers living cautiously a crime. And her experiences include bungee jumping, a rowing expedition, a week’s sailing with a woman friend. She enjoys adventures with excitement and a thrill of fear and risk.

Without explicitly saying so, Shaw seems to say we tend to follow Jesus in a rather safe, orderly and secure way, but that we should be following him in order to dare, to risk, in order to truly live. Her physical risks stand as a kind of statement of faith and exhilarating test of self.

Physical outdoor risk (like bungee jumping) are less important to me; here at Laity Lodge, the closest I will get to risk are a hike (mostly upward) and the two scorpion traps in my guest room (for the record, I never see a scorpion on this visit; I’ve seen them before, however).

But I understand what Shaw says; my own sense of exhilaration comes (tinged with risk and fear) have come from taking career risks – risking everything to do something new, something important, something that changes the status quo, something that leaves people (especially me) never the same again.

I’ve taken career risks in two large areas. One is writing a series of corporate speeches that branded me inside the company as a “radical” but which permanently changed the company and the industry. The second is the area that I represent at this retreat – digital media. Interestingly enough, I’m not here to represent what I do at The High Calling (part of the same organization as Laity Lodge); I’m here because of what I do at work, and what I’ve done.

I look back and some of these career risks and smile, but I remind myself that, in their time and context, they threatened and upended the status quo, and there was always opposition, sometimes rather ferocious. An email newsletter for employees (it sound quaint in 2013 but in 1993 it was a revolution that I fought people for months to do and then realized I could do it without permission). Another battle: a corporate web site (“Waste your money if you want to, the web is like 8-track tapes. The future is Lotus Notes”). Then blogs. And then social media.

Did I succeed every time? Yes. And no. Sometimes, perhaps most of the time, a cost was paid. When people have a vested interest in the status quo, they don’t take change lightly.

But this is what happens trying to live a life of faith. Jesus is not status quo; what was status quo was sin, and he came to upend it as only he could do. To follow him, as Shaw explains in her book, is to live a life of risk, daring and adventure.

I buy The Crime of Living Cautiously. It turns out to be well-paired with another book I’m reading, David Platt’s Follow Me. It also turns out that Shaw wrote a considerable portion of the book right here at Laity Lodge.

Follow him and change the human heart, starting with your own. And then change the world.

Over at Faith Barista, Bonnie Gray is writing about “follow.” To see her post and those of others, please visit her site.

I knew it had always been true

I know the date, time, and place almost exactly.

Jan. 26, 1973, about 9 p.m., outside a room in a basement lecture hall at LSU in Baton Rouge.

I didn’t do the proverbial “ask Jesus into my heart as my personal savior.” It didn’t go quite that way. It was a silent prayer, but it went more like this: “I’m running into something here that I don’t understand, a standard that I can’t measure up to or even hope to measure up to. In comparison, everything I’ve known and wanted and desired is trash. I don’t know why you want me, but since you do, you’ve got me.”

I can’t explain this, but very quickly everything became brand new. I was not “madly in love with Jesus.” I had no mountain-top emotional experiences. But it was all brand new, and I was now seeing things with new eyes.

No one talked about worship wars, culture wars, politics, or the new building program. The church I started attending wasn’t a conventional church at all – it was a group of people who met on Sundays in a lecture hall in LSU’s law school.

I was introduced to a small Bible study group that met in a house off-campus on Saturday mornings. At my first meeting with them, the discussion was about the design of the tabernacle for the Hebrews during the 40 years in the wilderness.

I even went on what today would be called a short-term mission trip – a beach outreach during spring break at Destin, Florida. I remember having an hour-long conversation with a tourist from Germany.

I didn’t know it at the time, but those very early days of my new-found belief would shape my faith for the next 40 years – the way I thought about faith, the way I tried to live it, the way I understood it. It was never about institutions, denominations, or buildings. I encountered all of those things and more along the way, but I never confused them with the church or my faith.

Perhaps most significantly, I have never had doubts about Jesus, God, or my faith. I’ve had plenty of times, serious times, of asking “Why,” and not understanding, and getting angry. But I’ve never had a “crisis of faith,” although I know people who have. I’ve never gotten caught up in the evolution-versus-creationism debate.

In a very real sense, I have had the gift of faith. (If there is any of me in the main character of Michael Kent in my two novels, it is precisely this gift of faith.)

Last week, we followed David Platt as he jackhammered some of the concrete of American cultural Christianity. We’ve had some time to clear away the rubble and let the dust settle.

To the extent that it’s possible, in Follow Me: A Call to Die. A Call to Live, Platt has blasted away the “American cultural” part and is reaching to define what’s left – the “Christianity” part. He’s stripping away what we Americans understand about Jesus, and taking us to what looks like a very different place – the place where Jesus is.

What this is about, Platt says, is taking Jesus at his word. It’s not picking or choosing what we’re most comfortable with, but taking him at his word – his whole word.

And when we do that, we become part of a grand story. “So we go as disciples of Jesus who love his Word and trust his truth,” Platt says. “We got not simply as men and women who at some point decided to make Jesus our personal Lord and Savior, but ultimately as men and women who at every point are devoted to proclaiming Jesus as the universal Lord and Savior. We believe him as his disciples; therefore, we obey him and make disciples.”

That small group Bible study I joined right after finding faith? And that first study about the diagram of the tabernacle in the wilderness? What I remember most about it was the study leader showing how the lines intersected.

The lines took the form of a cross.

As soon as I saw it, I knew it was true. I knew it had always been true.

We’re discussing Follow Me over at The High Calling. Laura Boggess is leading the discussion, and various writers are posting each week. Today’s post is by Sheila LaGrand, and she’s covering chapters 4 and 5..

Related:

Here Come the Radicals. Christianity Today has something of a different take on David Platt, Francis Chan and other leading “radical” Christians.

David Platt Wants You to Get Serious about Following Christ. Christianity Today’s interview with Platt last month.

Last week’s discussion on the book at The High Calling.

Top photograph: the classroom in Lockett Hall, LSU, right outside of which I accepted my new faith in 1973.

Flounder or Follow

A week ago Sunday, and again this past Saturday, I posted about the church, what has been on my mind and heart for some time. I haven’t been completely specific about my concerns, and for a reason: I’m still thinking things through.

Marcus Goodyear posted first with The Uncertain Future of Traditional Faith Communities. But what he did was to prompt me to consider anew what I had pushed down and away.

David Platt is helping me, too.

At The High Calling, we’re starting a discussion today about Platt’s book Follow Me: A Call to Die. A Call to Live. And I will say this: three chapters in, I can tell you it’s not for the fainthearted, or easily outraged, or easily aggravated.

Platt is doing something radical here, and yes, that’s a play on the title of his earlier book, Radical. He’s challenging every notion, every understanding we American Christians have of what it means to be a Christian.

Such as: The notion that all you have to do is accept Jesus in your heart and you will be saved.

Platt says no, that’s not how one becomes a Christian.

And such as: What kind of lives do we really live in America – Christian or comfortable middle- and upper-middle class lives? Do we even know the difference?

Platt points to the original disciples and asks, why would we think that becoming a Christian means anything less for us?

He’s advancing his thesis from Radical – what passes for much of Christianity in America today is something more cultural and less spiritual. But this time, he’s taking a jackhammer to the bedrock.

It’s all rather unnerving. My first reaction is to argue, disagree, nitpick, and quibble with alternative explanations. But I stop, and I read on. My heart is telling me he’s on to something, possibly something big, possibly something right. So I read and be quiet (for now).

If I am troubled by the state of the church, so is Platt. And I think it’s for the same reasons. He’s just articulating them better.

From early on, I had serious questions about what we call today the “mega-church.” I attended one long before it was called that. It was a denominational church, some 12,000 members strong. The word was preached from the pulpit every Sunday.

But the life within the church was troubled. A sense of drifting pervaded. We joined a young adults class that had 12 people – 12 in a church of more than 12,000. The class wasn’t interested in studying the Bible.

In the 1980s ands 1990s, in the zeal for outreach and numerical growth, the mega-church, or many of them, zoomed right past a basic responsibility of the church – to make and grow disciples. Bible study was out; trendy books were in. For a time I thought The Prayer of Jabez had become the fifth gospel.

Eventually, even Willow Creek did some serious soul-searching and publicly admitted that it had fallen short on discipleship. But its influence had been such that a lot of damage had been done in a lot of churches.

Platt is right to start where he is – at the individual Christian level. This is where it has to start. And we need to challenge every idea, every piece of received wisdom, every conventionality of what we know as evangelical Christianity.

To show where this discussion is going next, one of Platt’s chapters for next week’s discussion is entitled “Don’t Make Jesus Your Personal Lord and Savior.”

I’ve fastened my seatbelt.

We’re discussing Follow Me over at The HighCalling. Please visit the site to see the discussion and comments. It’s an important topic and important book.