Fragmentation and Humility

We’ve reached the last chapter of Michael Spencer’s Mere Churchianity: Finding Your Way Back to Jesus-Shaped-Spirituality. He calls this chapter “Some Help for the Journey,” and answers various questions and makes some suggestions for those trying to decide to leave church-shaped spirituality and instead find Jesus-shaped spirituality.

In response to a question as to whether he’s taking evangelicals to task while giving Catholics and the mainline Protestants a pass, Spencer says this:

“I see the Christian world like this: we’ve inherited a divided map of the truth, and each of us has a piece. Our traditions teach us that no one else has a valid map and that our own church’s piece shows us all the terrains and roads that exist. In fact, there is much more terrain, more roads, and more truth for us to see if we can accept and read one another’s maps, fitting them together to give us a clearer picture of the larger Christian tradition.”

He goes on to say that he calls himself a Reformation Christian, and he states clearly that he is not giving mainline churches a pass in the areas where they’ve engaged in serious biblical compromise.

I was raised as a Missouri Synod Lutheran (the “correct” Lutherans as opposed to the “heretical” ones). I’ve belonged to a Reformed Presbyterian Church (later part of the Presbyterian Church of America), a couple of independent churches that both leaned to the fundamentalist side, and an Evangelical Free church, before landing at our current church, part of the Evangelical Presbyterian Church. My oldest son attended public and Catholic schools, and graduated from a Catholic high school. My youngest son attended a Catholic school from kindergarten through sixth grade, and then a Christian school through high school. My wife was raised in a charismatic church. I’ve been reading the Anglican Book of Common Prayer (the 1928 edition; not the “heretical” revision that came later). One of the people who has most inspired me in my writing is Greek Orthodox.

As a result, we’ve been exposed to a number of Christian traditions, and the important point for me is that they were (and are), first and foremost, Christian. Spencer is right, I think – we all have a piece of the map and not one of us has the whole map of truth. That doesn’t mean we have to compromise and deny the divinity of Christ as some have done or regard the Bible as “inspired” as opposed to “inspired by God.”

And it doesn’t mean that we have to embrace all traditions in some kind of ecumenical kumbaya, even though there is something important about tradition that evangelicals and fundamentalists tend to disregard – tradition, as Scott Cairns told us at our writing workshop in Texas, teaches humility.

But this idea of fragmentation does mean that each tradition has truth, each has errors, and we should approach each other with the humble understanding every church, every denomination and every tradition is comprised of people who are broken.

And that brokenness means that we must be constantly on guard against church-shaped spirituality replacing Jesus-shaped spirituality. It happens. It happens to the best of churches; the history of Christianity is chock full of the evidence. And it will continue as long as human history continues.

Nancy Rosback over at Nance Marie has been leading us in a discussion of Mere Churchianity. Also see Fatha Frank’s posts at Public Christianity and Melo’s posts at Humming Softly.

The Disciple’s Life, Lived

“The Christian’s life as a disciple is lived in the world.”

So writes Michael Spencer in Mere Churchianity: Finding Your Way Back to Jesus-Shaped Spirituality.

Of everything I’ve read through almost all of Spencer’s book, that one sentence is, for me, one of the hardest.

I’m reminded of just how hard the disciple’s life is.

I’m reminded of just how far I’ve fallen short.

The key word in the sentence is “lived.”

I have to ask myself how much I’ve lived as a disciple, and how much I’ve floated, just treading water, simply and mindlessly staying in place.

Spencer says this about Jesus-shaped spirituality: it is personal and communal; it is mentored; it is saturated in the Scriptures; it grows in the context of service and the gospel; and it’s found in relationships.

Introverts read that, and we immediately feel the pain in “painfully shy.” Four of the five require the presence of others.

We’re not good thrown into a situation where we know virtually no one. We can’t start a conversation about sports or fishing or camping because we don’t do or follow those things. (For me, biking comes the closest, but it easily lends itself to being a singular sport.) Our worst nightmare: attending the cocktail hour at a professional conference where we don’t know a soul. It’s easy to spot us – we’re the ones who have something to read in our hands, usually the conference agenda, so it looks like we’re doing something (anything!) but only kidding ourselves that others don’t see how shy we actually are.

Many times, people see the shyness and think aloofness or superiority.

People wouldn’t believe how hyper-sensitive we are.

We do know how to do a lot of things people need, especially at church. We can participate in work days and paint and pull weeds and mow and edge. We can set up tables. We can wash dishes. We can take the minutes at board meetings, and people will marvel at how much we can report.

But to say Jesus-shaped spirituality is found in relationships is to run a cold knife of fear right into our guts.

This is not uncommon. Just this year, there’s been a book published about it: Adam McHugh's Introverts in the Church: Finding Our Place in an Extroverted Culture. (I haven’t read it. I’ve thought about reading it, and I probably will.)

It doesn’t mean we avoid relationships. If anything, we hunger for them; we just don’t know quite how to do them. And we notice and sense things far more quickly than the extroverts; that’s why a lot of seem to have similar kinds of gifts in the church, like helps, and encouragement.

But the absence of deep relationships can become normal, except it never feels normal normal. Familiar does not necessarily equate to normal. We know something’s off.

We know something’s truncated or distorted. Something’s missing.

We’re not created for loneliness.

We’re created for that Jesus-shaped spirituality.


Nancy Rosback over at Nance Marie has been leading us in a discussion of Mere Churchianity. Also see Fatha Frank’s posts at Public Christianity and Melo’s posts at Humming Softly.

Are We Fans or Disciples?

“When the New Testament was written,” writes Michael Spencer in Mere Churchianity: Finding Your Way Back to Jesus-Shaped Spirituality, “it was dangerous to be a fan of Jesus. It wasn’t wise to wear a Christian t-shirt. The latest Christian music wasn’t playing on anyone’s iPod. Christian gift stores and book nooks couldn’t be found. Christian conferences didn’t fill ancient stadiums with first-century believers who came to hear celebrity Christian speakers.”

The reality, Spencer says, was far different: the constant possibility of being arrested, you and/or your relatives imprisoned. Your last pastor was likely martyred. You were accused of political treason. You faced economic ruin. You were a target and blamed for everything from assassinations to earthquakes. And there was no New Testament read.

One might say that the believers of the first century were closer to the believers in the illegal house churches in contemporary China than they are to the Christian consumer culture we live and breathe in North America.

Spencer entitled this chapter “The Evangelical Sellout,” and the sellout he emphasizes is the sellout to consumerism, American style. The “menu” he describes for believers in a consumer culture is a demining one: Christian music and concerts, shopping for the coolest megachurch with the “celebrity communicator they’ve hired as pastor,” the Christian conferences and festivals, Christian magazines and movies (and books), Christian radio, the vast array of specialized Bibles, Christian self-help classes. Reading this chapter is an exercise in heaping burning coals on one’s head; my own hair feels more than slightly singed.

Why this matters, and matters urgently, is that, appearances notwithstanding, the evangelical church in North America is in serious danger. And the danger doesn’t come from the neo-atheists in academia, the ACLU, MoveOn.org, George Soros, Planned Parenthood, the New York Times or Nancy Pelosi.

The danger, the real threat, is within.


For some weeks now, Nancy Rosback at Nance Marie has been leading us in a discussion of Mere Churchianity; her post on chapter 16 can be found here. Also see Fatha Frank’s posts at Public Christianity and Melo’s at Humming Softly.

Those Pesky Individualists

I got hit right between the eyes this week.

“Individualists who are bold enough to make their own approach to life and faith known upset the church’s status quo,” writes Michael Spencer in Mere Churchianity: Finding Your Way Back to Jesus-Shaped Spirituality. “People who have a distinct identity break the unspoken, agreed-upon group rules. The individualists ask the wrong questions. They don’t buy into the accepted assumptions. In short, they don’t do what they are supposed to do.”

Oh, my goodness. I didn’t know my problem was being “an individualist,” but there’s much in that paragraph that describes my own church experiences for almost 25 years.

I was once on a church officer nominating committee. It wasn’t something that I’d sought out but I was nominated and elected so I determined to do the task. Two or three meetings passed before I realized that I was expected to nominate compliant people for the offices of deacon and elder, people who would not rock the boat, not ask obvious questions, and be willing to be led by the pastor and two or three key elders.

At one meeting I suggested an individual who loved the church like his own family, and was more qualified than just about anyone else, including the current officers. There was a silence from the other members. Finally, one of them, a sitting elder, said, “If he’s nominated, I will quit the board.” The silence became profound. Then another member of the committee quite innocently asked, “You mean he’s not a team player,” and heads vigorously nodded, grateful for an acceptable reason to hide personal animosity.

For all subsequent meetings, the head pastor attended. I had become a problem. Prompted by nothing except this man’s reputation in the church, I had suggested a name that had shocked the committee. From then on, the pastor suggested or commented upon all of the names proposed.

I didn’t personally suffer as a result. But a few years later, the church paid an enormous price for the value placed on compliant, unquestioning officers. These were good people, believers and servants all. They truly believed in what they were doing. They were not trying to be ugly and would have bristled if anyone had said they valued compliance above everything else. And they eventually understood – and accepted – that they were responsible for what had happened. They did learn.

There were other places, other contexts that taught me I was not doing things in the expected way. I questioned the wisdom of an ill-considered building program. I asked (politely) about the influence of certain mega-churches. I suggested to a church committee that if the Elder Board wanted the congregation to change, and to do something differently, then the elders themselves had to be the change and lead it by example. I asked why was there such a deliberate attempt to become a “seeker church.”

I also told my wife she had permission to shoot me if I was ever asked to be on an Elder Board and I wanted to consider it seriously. I’ve been on a deacon board for the last three years, and I’ve truly enjoyed working with the people who’ve served with me. We focus on keeping stuff running – that the grounds are maintained, and funds distributed to needy people, and the chairs and tables are set up for special events, and ushering during the worship services (of everything I did as a deacon, I think ushering was the thing I enjoyed the most). I’m rotating off the board at the end of this year, and it’s a good time for me to do that.

On Thursday over at The High Calling, Gordon Atkinson posted an article entitled “Prayer in a Season of Wandering” that managed to capture my thoughts almost exactly. It’s worth reading, and worth reading several times.


Nancy Rosback over at Nancy Marie has been leading us in a discussion of Mere Churchianity. Also see Fatha Frank’s posts at Public Christianity and Melo’s posts at Humming Softly.

"Do You Really Want to Know?"

I was 24, working in Texas. I was walking to my office when I passed a new colleague in the hallway. “How’s it going?” I said causally as I walked by, more of an acknowledgement than a real question.

“Do you really want to know?” she asked.

The question stopped me cold. Simple politeness had become an opening into something else. I turned back and said, “Well, sure.” I was embarrassed.

And she proceeded to pour out a story that was stunning. She had become the guardian for a dearly beloved aunt, who would today be diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. The aunt was wealthy, and the adopted son was none too pleased that my friend was the guardian, because he was trying to have his mother institutionalized, which terrified her. So he was, in effect, stalking and following my friend, attempting to frighten or threaten her into walking away.

To make matters worse, in going through her aunt’s papers, she learned why her aunt was so afraid of being institutionalized, because she had gained a lot of her wealth form a lifetime of having elderly friends committed after gaining control of their estates.

All of this came out in a torrent of tears. I did the only thing I knew to do. I listened. I asked questions. It was hard to imagine that what I was hearing was true, but it was. She became and stayed a good friend of mine and my wife’s for the next four years, until we moved to St. Louis.

In Mere Churchianity: Finding Your Way Back to Jesus-Shaped Spirituality, Michael Spencer talks about all of the formulaic statements (“How’s it going?”) that we use in the place of honesty in the church. And it’s more than what we say to each other when we are in Fellowship Hall between services or chatting briefly before Sunday School starts. “Social conventions, corporate culture, and the customs of casual human relationships all require that we sacrifice a good deal of honesty,” he writes. “We’re expected to smile, nod, and utter glob and meaningless comments every day.”

As Spencer indicates, that applies across the board, not just to churches. But he goes on to point out that this is perhaps why religion is so appealing to so many.

“Religion provides a blanket of insulation for those who are happy to go along with the superficial social conventions,” he says. “Religion tells us how to act sand what to say at life’s difficult moments. Religion often provides a script of polite, stoic, pious, and acceptable behavior to insert into moments of great questioning, pain, and disappointment.”

Then comes the challenge: to pursue an unscripted, honest life. This is what we were made for, and this is what each of us actually longs for. If we don’t find it in our churches, we will look elsewhere.

“Church has done one thing that has helped us,” he writes. “We now feel the emptiness in our souls, and we have realized that we need to find the real gospel, the honest Savior, and the promised life of the Spirit.”

And if someone asks us “Do you really want to know?”, we should say yes because we want to, not because we’re caught in an embarrassing moment.


Nancy Rosback over at Nancy Marie has been leading us in a discussion of Mere Churchianity. Also see Fatha Frank’s postings at Public Christianity and Melo’s post at In Silence, Humming Softly.

Wither Discipleship

“One of the saddest realities I’ve experienced,” writes Michael Spencer in Mere Churchianity: Finding Your Way Back to Jesus-Shaped Spirituality, "is the large number of people who have no concept of discipleship apart from what their church and its programs offer. Their concept of the Christian life is no more Kingdom oriented or Spirit filled than a meeting of the local women’s club or a Thursday night bowling league.”

The words are rather harsh. Spencer might say the reality is rather harsh, too.

A few years back, so many churches seemed caught up in what could only be called a “seeker craze.” Part of it was driven, I believe, by the numerical success of churches like Willowcreek in the Chicago area and Saddleback in California. It seemed like a huge new industry – consulting services, seminars, training sessions, facility redesign (don’t forget the latte bar), building programs. The leadership of so many churches seemed to distill all questions down to two, which were actually one: how to appeal to “seekers,” and how to grow. Numerical growth – membership, attendance, and giving – became the “measures of success.”

Group think became standard operating procedure. No one was allowed to question. There were even some adult Sunday School materials (from best-selling authors – teaching the Bible seemed rather quaint and old-fashioned) that had sections on how to deal with the “theology police” – people who raised questions about the Biblical soundness of the book being studied.

A lot of churches cracked wide open. Relationships were destroyed. Mistrust prevailed. People left.

For many, a major reality check came from – of all places – Willowcreek. A couple of years ago, Willowcreek published an extraordinary statement – that its multi-decade emphasis on “seekers” had shortchanged what the church was supposed to be about in the first place – discipleship, the making and equipping of disciples.

It was only Willowcreek where that had happened. Willowcreek happened to be among the very few churches that admitted it.

Here’s Spencer on how Jesus taught discipleship:

First, “Jesus made disciples through relationship and as a result of observation.”

Two, “Jesus made disciples out of these followers through their constant exposure to his teachings.”

Three, “Jesus put his disciples in a variety of situations that took them far beyond their comfort zones.”

Four, “Jesus allowed his followers to experience the power of the Holy Spirit for themselves.”

Five, “…for Jesus, participation in institutional Judaism – the church of his day – did not equal discipleship or participation in the movement he was making.”

Six, “Jesus created disciples by the power of the Holy Spirit illuminating the gospel in retrospect.”

And seven, “Jesus created disciples who were called and centered in the gospel announcement of war God was doing at the time.”

I read this, and I tremble.

I don’t know this discipleship.

I haven’t seen it for along time.


Nancy Rosback over at Bend the Page has been leading us in a discussion of Mere Churchianity, her post today is "Are you looking at me?" Also see Fatha Frank’s postings at Public Christianity, including "Of Sandlots and Cathedrals," and Melo's "Where We Meet."

Weakness: Faith Makes It Harder

“Faith, alive in our weakness, looks like a war,” writes Michael Spencer in Mere Churchianity: Finding Your Way Back to Jesus-Shaped Spirituality. “It’s an impossible war waged against an untiring adversary: our sinful, fallen nature. Faith fights this battle.”

That’s about as un-American statement as you can make. The way this is supposed to work is – gain faith, grow, be victorious – just like the whole self-improvement thing tells you. And America is not anything unless it’s the “land of opportunity” for self-improvement.

America is that. Or it has been that for most of its history. That idea is a very powerful part of our national DNA (and one reason why the Tea Party has been upending established politicians of both major parties).

But self-improvement – always getting better – always reaching newer and higher and better – is not exactly how faith works. That a lot of us think that way is an example of how culture can infiltrate faith. What we face with faith is decidedly different. Like Spencer says, “What does this fight look like? It’s a bloody mess. There’s a lot of failure in it. It is a battle where we are brought down again and again.”

Nobody tells you this when you become a believer. Often, you’re told just the opposite. You might be told about the process of sanctification lasting a lifetime – but it is usually described in terms of progress as opposed to process.

What no one tells you is that life will often become more difficult. “If anything,” he writes, “it’s a life that is far more uncomfortable than one’s life before encountering Christ.”

And what Spencer describes here has been precisely my own experience.

You study, you pray, you learn, you start doing things differently and thinking things differently, and one day without realizing it you’re suddenly doing what you always did. Bad habits. Addictions. Anger. Holding grudges. Teaching your children to do the same stupid things you do.

Brokenness.

It often seems easier to chuck the whole thing because it always seems so hard.

And then someone comes alongside and gives some encouragement, or you’ll read about others struggling the same way, or someone will come to you and ask for help and guidance. And you realize that all of us are broken, the mending will take our entire lifetimes, and it will never be completed.

So why bother?

Because the alternative is brokenness without hope.


Nancy Rosback over at Bend the Page has been leading us in a discussion of Mere Churchianity. Last week she discussed Chapter 11; this week she writes on Chapter 12. Also see Fatha Frank’s postings at Public Christianity, and his post last week entitled “Label Me, I’ll Label You.”

Adjectives

Michael Spencer doesn’t like adjectives. In Mere Churchianity: Finding Your Way Back to Jesus-Shaped Spirituality, he takes on all those adjectives we Christians – we American Christians – clutter our lives with.

Like in worship. Traditional worship. Seeker-sensitive worship. Emerging worship. Spirit-led Worship. Ancient-future worship. Dynamic worship. Extreme worship.

Or the victorious Christian life.

Or good Christian witness.

Or faithful church member. Or spiritual Christian. Carnal Christian. Reformed Christian. Fundamentalist Christian. Progressive Christian. Pentecostal Christian.

How about, totally confused Christian?

After experimenting with every kind of adjectival Christianity there was, Spencer finally came down to one question: could there be a gospel without adjectives?

The answer turned out to be yes. but a lot of stuff had to be cleared out of the way first. And then he heard a lecture on Martin Luther, and it knocked him flat. Spencer learned what Martin Luther had learned almost 500 years ago.

“For the first time,” he writes, “the truth that Jesus is the One Mediator between God and human beings knocked me to the floor and suspended me over the truth that God had done all things necessary for my salvation. I could stop looking for the secret key, and I could ditch the quest to demonstrate that I was a Christian hero. I was humbled as I looked at a universe of grace that filled my empty soul with the love of God in Jesus.”

There is nothing else I could say to add to that.


Nancy Rosback at Bend the Page, Fatha Frank at Public Christianity and I have been having a discussion about Spencer's  Mere Churchianity. Check their blogs for some really good thoughts.

Thursdays - Pleasantly Disturbed

It’s another stupendous edition of Pleasantly Disturbed Thursdays, with our leader Duane Scott in command and leading the way through the darkness.

Speaking of Duane, he’s getting married Nov. 6. You might want to tell him congratulations at his blog or on Twitter -- @duane_scott .

I’ve been reading David Platt’s Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream. Add that to Michael Spencer’s Mere Churchianity, and I’m going to turn into a bomb thrower.

I didn’t post anything about when it was announced a couple of weeks ago, but I think the Nobel Committee did a remarkable thing when it gave the prize for literature to Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa. I was introduced to his writing in 1986 when I took a seminar on the Latin American Novel for my master’s program.

The first of his novels I read was The War of the End of World, which was based on a true story. And then The Green House, and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter. I did my seminar paper and presentation on Conversations in the Cathedral, which is simultaneously one of the most difficult and rewarding novels I’ve ever read. (William Faulkner is easy compared to that book – I thought I was going to lose my mind reading it until I realized how it was structured, and then I started it over again.) I’ve read virtually everything he’s written.

I’ve been mostly off the grid (i.e. Twitter and Facebook) this week, and there’s a reason, which I’ll explain in a few days. Because of that, I'll have a shorter edition of Saturday Good Reads this weekend.

And, last, but not least, what everyone’s been waiting for – a photo of Cameron Young and his grandfather. (I’m the one on the right.)

Bible Reading

The night I became a believer (almost 38 years ago), I was given a green padded-cover copy of The Living Bible. I had read portions of the Bible before, and even memorized scripture for catechism (King James Version), but I had never really read the Bible before.

I was told to start reading the Gospel of John. I had never read it, and it was like reading a revolutionary treatise. Yes, Jesus loved me. Yes, he had a wonderful plan for my life.

But Jesus was a bomb thrower.

I hadn’t met this Jesus before. He didn’t mince words. He could be loving and tender, but he could also be fierce. He didn’t duck confrontation. And he had this laser-like ability to cut right to what the real issues were.

This was a Jesus I had never met before, almost a complete stranger.

In Mere Churchianity: Finding Your Way Back to Jesus-Shaped Spirituality, reading the Bible and especially the gospels is what Michael Spencer says will change your life, and possibly change it radically. He also says that it is exactly this practice of “reading Jesus first-hand” that many in the church find so threatening.

I pondered that: the American Christian church would find reading the Bible to be radical and threatening? This sounded almost pre-Reformation.

I didn’t know what I thought this until I pictured Jesus showing up to turn over the tables of the moneychangers in the temple – and it could have been where the prosperity gospel was being preached.

Or showing up at any church that believed it had the whole thing figured out and theologically mapped. Or how he might challenge our own learned teachers and theologians. Or that we would likely find him in the inner cities and Third World ghettos instead of the typical American suburb. He would be wherever the hurting, the needy and the poor would be found.

Spencer isn’t advocating the overthrow of the church. “I believe in the importance of Christian community and the ministry of that community to provide boundaries and definition to our spiritual growth and healthy spirituality,” he writes. “I mourn, however, the loss of our openness to the voice of the Holy Spirit directing us in new and important Jesus-shaped directions…The natural conservatism of institutions is deeply rooted in the desire to survive, and that desire colors and limits the way they read the Bible and how they see God functioning in the world.”

I believe in the church. I believe in the local church. I believe I attend a solid, Bible-teaching, Jesus-based church.

But I still have that copy of The Living Bible. And I remember what it was like to “read Jesus” for the very first time.


Nancy Rosback at Bend the Page, Fatha Frank at Public Christianity and I have been reading Mere Churchianity. Check their blogs for more discussion. See in particular Fatha Frank’s post on “The Perfect Church?” and Nancy’s post on chapter 9 on the book.

Serial Church Joiners and Leavers

I grew up in the Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod. In high school, I attended a Southern Baptist church. In college, I didn’t attend anything.

After getting married and moving to Houston, we visited several churches and landed at a 12,000-member Methodist church (no one called them “mega-churches” back then). We enjoyed the people in our “young marrieds” Sunday School class, but doctrinally, well, let’s just say the Methodist Church was changing back then. We visited other churches and joined a non-denominational congregation called Spring Branch Community Church.

When we moved to St. Louis, we visited churches all over town; we discovered that churches were very different from those in Houston – more traditional, more denominational, less of the community we had at Spring Branch. We joined a Reformed Presbyterian congregation. A couple of years later, we found a small church similar to the one we had in Houston.

Then we bought a new house and the commute to church became a problem. So we joined a closer Evangelical Free congregation, and stayed there 15 years. Things changed, and we left. Six years ago, we joined the church where we worship now.

Except for the 15 years at the E Free church, we’ve been rather nomadic, following a similar path trod by millions of other American Christians. It’s a journey well recognized by Michael Spencer in Mere Churchianity: Finding Your Way Back to Jesus-Shaped Spirituality. His own path has been even more diverse, including checking into emergent churches, house churches, church renewal, church revival, media church, small groups and Catholic and Orthodox churches. (I’ll admit to having an attraction for the Catholic Church; I grew up a Lutheran minority in Catholic New Orleans.)

And if you ask what the next stop on the church tour will be, Spencer would say – there isn’t one. You’re not going to find what you’re looking for because it doesn’t exist. The perfect church doesn’t exist, and we serial church joiners and leavers can prove it.

“There is only one reliable constant,” Spencer writes. “There is God, who is moving people out into the world. This is a Spirit-led evolution of the movement Jesus started. It is a process of God moving Christians out of pews and toward the Kingdom that Jesus promised. And there is no predicting where that journey might take a person. But if it takes him or her outside organized Christianity, why would we argue with God about it?”

I may be wrong, but I don’t expect I’ll be moving outside organized Christianity. But I think Spencer is right, that there is a huge amount of ferment and change going on, and the future will look very different from the past.


We’ve been discussing Mere Churchianity with Nancy Rosback at Bend the Page and Fatha Frank at Public Christianity. Check their sites for more discussion.

Radical Inclusion

I was raised in the Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod. My mother’s family was Lutheran; my father’s family Southern Baptist. In high school, I started to wander. This was 1968, and pretty much everything institutional was being questioned. I wasn’t so much questioning my own church as I was trying to find one with an active youth group. And I didn’t wander far. For a time I attended a Southern Baptist church, the one a lot of my friends, including my best friend in high school, attended.

I sang in the youth choir (for some reason, the music leader always looked at me when someone sang off key at practice). The summer after my junior year, I went with the youth group to Ridgecrest, North Carolina, for a week with Baptist youth from all over the South. It was a great week; I even ended up with a new girlfriend.

Late that summer, there was a meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention. It took place in Texas, and there was one major controversy that was going to be resolved – and that was whether local Southern Baptist churches should open their doors to African-Americans. There wasn’t a rule against it, of course, but longstanding tradition had the force of church law. The vote went against the resolution to open the doors.

This mattered to the youth group. It mattered a lot. At the next Sunday morning service, after the pastor had returned, he explained during the sermon how the debate had gone, and how he himself had voted. “I could not, in good conscience, vote for the resolution,” he said. The adult members of the congregation nodded in approval.

Sitting in the balcony (church youth groups always seem to sit in the balcony if there is one), the youth group was stunned. We knew how the vote had gone, but we had assumed the pastor voted for the resolution. His two sons were in the youth group, and they had assumed their father had voted for it. But he hadn’t; he had voted the way the congregation wanted him to vote.

The ridiculousness of this was obvious. Even assuming an African-American wanted to attend the church, which was highly doubtful given the denomination’s reputation at the time, would they be barred at the door? Would a deacon or usher throw a body block? Would the church lock the doors?

The youth group fractured and broke up. My best friend stopped going to church, and told his parents he was finished. A really good friend of his and mine told her parents she was changing churches, and she did. Others stopped coming altogether. The youth choir disintegrated. I finally stopped going, too. And I didn’t attend any church for the next five years.

I was reminded of this story while reading “Accepting the Real Jesus,” chapter 8 of Michael Spencer’s Mere Churchianity: Finding Your Way Back to Jesus-Shaped Spirituality. Knowledge of who Jesus is, even the limited knowledge of who he really is, is not enough. Acceptance must come, too. And these are the things, Spencer says, that must be accepted about the real Jesus:

• That Jesus preached, taught, and demonstrated the presence and priority of the Kingdom of God.
• That Jesus practiced radical inclusion of those who were excluded (and thus my story about the youth group).
• That Jesus was constantly engaged in producing disciples.
• That Jesus is the only mediator between God and humanity.
• That Jesus’ movement proclaims the gospel, encourages disciples, and witnesses to the presence of the Kingdom.

It wasn’t that the church youth group possessed more wisdom than the adults. And there were undoubtedly some feelings of superiority directed at the adults and the pastor for such a colossal failure in judgment, understanding and faith.

But the youth group did understand something the church didn’t. Virtually all of us went to public schools, and the public schools had been integrated two years before. After a year of upheaval and even some violence, everything calmed down; the kids figured out how to go to school together. And we discovered that white students and African-American students wanted the same things, and they could learn to work together and even trust each other. In other words, we were all people with the same hopes, desires and dreams. And to keep the church doors shut to anyone was unconscionable.

And this is what the church youth group knew: Jesus wouldn’t have just thrown the doors open to all comers; he would have gone out and ministered to them and talked to them and lived with them as one of them.


Nancy Rosback at Bend the Page is leading a blogging discussion of Spencer’s Mere Churchianity. See also what Fatha Frank has been writing at Public Christianity.

Look at the Books: Something's Going On

Over at Internet Monk, Jeff Dunn posted a book review Thursday under the title of “Christianity’s Forgotten Man.” The book is Jesus Manifesto: Restoring the Supremacy and Sovereignty of Jesus Christ by Leonard Sweet and Frank Viola. As I read the review, I was reminded of another book I’m going to be reading soon: David Platt’s Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream.

And, of course, there’s the book we’ve been discussing (via Nancy Rosback at Bend the Page): Mere Churchianity: Finding Your Way Back to Jesus-Shaped Spirituality by Michael Spencer, the original Internet monk.

There are others. And there are a lot of blog posts on these and related subjects, like the one posted Thursday by author Ian Morgan Cron entitled “Christians in Exile,” about a meeting he has with someone in a coffee shop, and the reasons why the someone has left the church.

When you see a spate of books on a similar subject, that’s a good indication of (1) publishers are seeing some level of market demand or opportunity and (2) there’s something going on. In this case, it appears that people are seeking Jesus, and a lot of them are doing it outside the church, or at least outside what Michael Spencer calls “churchianity.”

This isn’t necessarily a new phenomenon. More than a century ago, the philosopher doctor Albert Schweitzer wrote a book called The Quest of the Historical Jesus, and he was by no means the first or the last to do that.

It’s as if there is an understanding that we keep letting culture get in the way of our understanding of Jesus. Sometimes we try to “reinterpret” Jesus and in the process end up projecting our own doubts, questions and cultural understanding on him. Schweitzer was criticized for doing something exactly like that.

In Mere Churchianity, Spencer stakes a rather definitive claim as to what we can actually know:

• Jesus really existed.
• He was Jewish.
• He didn’t operate within a democratic system.
• He accepted the Hebrew Scriptures, with conditions.
• And, most importantly, Jesus is (note the change in verb tense) the incarnation of the One God.

That is what we can know, Spencer says. Accepting that is another story (and the next chapter).


Nancy Rosback at Bend the Page is leading a blogging discussion of Spencer’s Mere Churchianity. See also what Fatha Frank has been writing at Public Christianity. Yesterday, Fatha Frank did a cool wrap-up of all kinds of related blog posts, and has a new post called Jesus Works. Today, Bob Spencer at Wilderness Fandango had a discussion as well: My Faith Walk...For Now.

Jesus and Gun Control

Some 17 years ago, I was a member of an advisory board for a congressman (I’m not trying to impress; it lasted for about a year and then stopped meeting). There were 10 or 12 of us, and we had one thing in common – we were Christians.

For one meeting, there was going to be one item on the agenda – a recent vote by the congressman that suggested he was in favor of gun control. He wasn’t at all, but there were a lot of people on that board convinced that he had gone to Washington and gotten brainwashed.

Most of the board members were angry, No, that isn’t correct. They were livid. Apoplectic. Spewing forth fire and brimstone. One of those members usually carried a small Bible in one pocket and the U.S. Constitution in the other, and he did that day. He whipped out his Constitution and read the Second Amendment to all of us. And then stared the congressman down. He was the most overt, but most of the board was right there with him.

Except for two members. One, a lawyer, said he often went to sleep at night hearing gunfire in the neighborhood to the north of his, and something needed to be done.

Icy silence.

Then I said I was actually glad the congressman had voted the way he did, because my then 11-year-old son had been in downtown area of our little St. Louis suburb, and directly across the street from a murder of an antique store owner. He had been riding his bike with friends, and he missed the murder by all of two minutes. (And then the killers had fled the scene and ran two blocks to our large city park, which is exactly where my son and his friends had gone on their bikes.)

If looks could have killed, I would have been a dead person. The woman sitting on my left deliberately moved her chair several inches away, as if to avoid contamination. The lawyer who had spoken before me, sitting on my right, smiled and said, “Good thing no one’s packing today or we’d be dead men.”

“Don’t be so sure,” commented one of the people sitting with us. That was a joke. I hope.

That was the day I learned that Jesus supported the Second Amendment and probably packed an AK-47.

The board I was on was not so much a Christian board as it was an extremely conservative board. But politics and faith were conflated.

Michael Spencer, in Mere Churchianity: Finding Your Way Back to Jesus-Shaped Spirituality, has a drum roll of all the ways we “culturize” Jesus – to fit our politics (right or left), our lifestyles, our buying habits, our stand on education, and even our religious views , what we believe about worship and church success, and theologies. We bend him to our will, almost as if we start with what we want anyway and make Jesus conform to it.

So what do we do? Where do we look to find the real Jesus?

Here’s what Spencer says in Chapter 6, “Jesus or Vinegar:”

“To understand Jesus and the god who comes to us in Jesus, we have to come to terms with the truth that Jesus is absolutely singular and unique. No matter how much research we might do, we can’t define him. He is remarkably exclusive compared to the phony versions of Jesus running loose in our culture.”


(Nancy Rosback at Bend the Page has been leading us in a discussion of Mere Churchianity. Check her place for the various links.)

A Word I Don't Like

There is a word, a religious word that is used today to the point of mind-numbing suffocation. That word is spirituality. It means anything and everything, a veritable one-word melting pot that can accommodate every religious faith and tradition every crackpot religious philosophy from rubbing magic crystals on your forehead to channeling 10 century Chinese emperors. You can be “spiritual” and be a Christian, a Jew, a Muslim, an atheist, a pantheist, a Wiccan, a consumer and even a sports fan (some sports – I’m thinking Southeastern Conference college football – have all the trappings of a major religious and spiritual movement).

It’s the word I’m having the most trouble with in Michael Spencer’s Mere Churchianity: Finding Your Way Back to Jesus-Shaped Spirituality. I almost wish he had used the word faith instead.

I’ll get over it. I’m actually he will, but the end of the book, enable me to rehabilitate the word in my own mind.

Spencer, having defined the problem the first four chapters of the book as one of church-shaped spirituality rather than Jesus-shaped spirituality, finally asks the question: What does Jesus-shaped spirituality look like? He’s going to spend the rest of the book answering that question, but he’s clear on what it is not.

It is not, Spencer says, a spirituality “measured by attendance figures, buildings and budget, all part of a spirituality that Jesus repudiated.” (That alone is enough to give every evangelical church in America great pause.)

It is not a culture-war spirituality, whose “kingdom is the eventual triumph of moral conservatism, and its spirituality is conflict and argument.”

It is not a spirituality of “emphasizing the Christian family as the central community in the Christina life.” Whoa!

And it is not a spirituality of worship experiences, of prophecy and seeking revival, of the “obsessive pursuit of doctrinal and theological precision,” or of health, wealth and prosperity.

Nor, I would add, is it a spirituality that equates Christianity with the United States and the Bible with the Constitution and Declaration of Independence.

If that’s what it’s not, which pretty well encompasses a lot of what we think Christianity is, then was it this Jesus-shaped spirituality that Spencer talks about?

He writes: “I’m looking for a spiritual experience that looks like, feels like, sounds like, lives like, loves like and acts like Jesus of Nazareth. It’s that simple.”

And starting with the next chapter, we’re going to see how Spencer begins to answer the question. And if it is, really, that simple.


(Nancy Rosback at Bend the Page has been leading us in a discussion of Mere Churchianity. Check her place for the various links.)

Words at the Well

For going on 40 years, I’ve made a living with words: stories, articles, news releases, scripts, speeches, web sites, tweets (I tweet for work), blogs, letters, announcements, emails, reviews, commentary, ads, songs, plays, skits, jokes. You live, breathe, eat and absorb words. You’re constantly aware of how words are used and misused, understood and misunderstood.

You're sensitive to the use and abuse of language, and you recognize how the culture and its various sub-cultures develop their own code words and languages. Even individual businesses have code words and languages. For example, when you see an announcement that says John Smith has elected to pursue career opportunities elsewhere, you know that John Smith has been given his walking papers.

So, too, the Church. The American evangelical church uses – and sometimes misuses – words and language. Or we use code words that we know the meanings for but anyone else might be mystified. For example, are you amil, premil or postmil? And some of us say “mainstream Protestant” when we want to say “those denominations who long ago abandoned the Bible and now embrace all kinds of crazy things.”

Michael Spencer, in Mere Churchianity: Finding Your Way Back to Jesus-Shaped Spirituality, knew how sensitive this whole business of language can be to faith and our understanding of God. He would tell his students that “vocabulary is education.” Language can be inclusive and/or exclusive. It can facilitate entry, and it can erect barriers to entry.

Jesus often used language and common understanding (like the parables) to communicate and to reprimand. The story of Jesus and the woman at the well (John 4) is a classic in this regard.

Traveling near Sychar in Samaria, Jesus asks the woman for a drink of water, and she responds first with statement of social separation – Jews don’t associate with Samaritans. He ignores her answer and goes deeper with a statement about living water. She appeals to history and precedent (“are you greater than our father Jacob?”). He ups the ante and tells her that he offers something far better than Jacob. So she says “let me have this water,” and that’s when he starts talking about her husband – or the man she’s living with. Then she says he must be a prophet, and he goes all the way to saying he’s the Messiah.

Do you see her drift? First the social, then the traditional and historical, then the theological.

It’s a fascinating account from a number of perspectives, and especially so from that of how the woman and Jesus used words and language – she to erect barriers and dodge the real issue and he to keep bringing her right back to it.

And I wonder – do we do that to dodge real issues? Do we focus on the social stuff, the traditions and even theology to keep us from getting to close to the real Messiah?

Spencer would argue that’s exactly what we do.

Related:

Perspectives and Abiding in Jesus by Nancy Rosback at Bend the Page.

A Letter to the North American Church by Chaplain Mike at Internet Monk.

Tear Up Your Notes

Back in 1993, I was leading a corporate communications team that decided to launch an email newsletter for employees. It sounds rather quaint today, but at the time, the only other company in the country that had one was AT&T. You could count on one hand the number of companies worldwide who had an employee email newsletter.

In spite of the best efforts of the IT department and my own peers to stop us, we launched a test newsletter in August with 100 people. Within four weeks, we had saturated the company’s email distribution system – and it was all by word of mouth. The newsletter was a hit for two reasons – it was new, and none had ever seen one like it before, and it had a personal voice. Because it started as a test, we didn’t seek HR or legal approval. We wrote stories that sounded like real people had written them. We didn’t censor letters to the editor unless a personal attack or profanity was involved.

It was plain text. No photos or graphics. A year later, the surveys showed it had the highest credibility of any communication vehicle in the company – and that included immediate supervisors and top management. Locations that didn’t have email would print it and post it on bulletin boards. Some locations translated it into the local language.

I had spent almost 20 years in organizational communications, and everything I had learned and been taught was suddenly outdated. I had to “tear up my notes.”

That’s the metaphor Michael Spencer uses in chapter 3 of Mere Churchianity: Finding Your Way Back to Jesus-Shaped Spirituality. Spencer reached a point in his faith where it was time to tear up his notes, when he realized that everything he had been taught about church just might have a lot more to do with American culture, or a version of culture, than with the God he believed in.

Here’s what Spencer concluded, and it’s incendiary.

“What I need is a personal transformation by the real Christ, not the one that is manufactured by organized Christianity. I need to be changed by the Jesus who never ceases to be quiet and cooperative. I also need a movement of culture-resisting, church-suspicious rebels and Jesus-followers who have taken the same view of religion that Jesus took in his scorching denouncements of religious phoniness.

“I’m swimming in a sea of mediocrity, worshiping in a church captivated by consumerism, and deeply affected by a skewed view of God that the Bible would call petty idolatry…”

I’ve read those words severalties. Each time I do, my ears burn. Is Spencer talking about me?

I think I have more notes to tear up.


Related:

Bend the Page, Chapter 3, by Nancy Rosback.

Pecan Pie with No Pecans

What’s called “the worship wars” has plagued the evangelical church for years – the arguments over traditional versus contemporary versus “ancient-future” versus just about anything else you can think of. Numerous churches have been torn apart over what kinds of hymns (songs!) to sing.

What if the battles over worship forms are only a distracting sideshow? What if a more serious problem is being masked by whether we have choirs or praise bands?

In Mere Churchianity: Finding Your Way Back to Jesus-Shaped Spirituality, Michael Spencer (the original Internet Monk) predicts the coming collapse of the American evangelical church. And a primary reason, he says, is that the church has become like pecan pie without the pecans – and Jesus is the pecans. Many of today’s churches have everything – lattes while you worship, sermons on prosperity now, scenes from R-rated movies within the sermons, instructions on sexual intimacy – but no Jesus.

I’ve seen a lot of things pass for worship, including a pastor doing a three-costume change during a sermon; a clip from the Russell Crowe movie “Gladiator;” and dancers in flowing gowns looking like they were trying to find the set for A Midsummer Night’s Dream. What any that had to do with the gospel message is unknown. And that’s Spencer’s point. We’ve got everything except Jesus in our churches.

Christians are voting – with their feet, Spencer says. I don’t have any demographic studies or surveys to prove that, but I suspect he’s right.

In the September/October issue of Modern Reformation Magazine, Dr. Donald P. Richmond of the Reformed Episcopal Church writes in “Worship Wars: Toward a Biblical Resolution” that worship has four inherent aspects: gathering; word-focused; communion-centered; and dismissal. (I’d provide the link but it’s not posted online yet.) The style of worship is less important than the substance -- each of the four has Jesus at its center. (Richmond does, however, raise the question of how we dress for worship -- that our clothing may be -- may be -- an important indicator of the expectations of our hearts.)

Talk about countercultural.


Related:

The Coming Evangelical Collapse, Michael Spencer’s blog post

Spencer’s article in the Christian Science Monitor.

Chapter Two by Nancy Rosback at Bend the Page.

Jesus-colored glasses by Fatha Frank at Public Christianity.

Do Church Signs Lie?

An executive for whom I worked for several years was fond of saying “policy is what you do, not what you say,” the corporate business version of “actions speak louder than words.”

Does the same principle apply to churches? I’d tend to argue that churches – or “the church” – should be the living embodiment of “doing” – and letting “doing” be the what and how of “saying.”

Michael Spencer, in Mere Churchianity, says that millions of people are leaving the churches because what’s on the sign outside the church isn’t matched by what is actually happening inside the church. I’ve lived through an experience like this, where the “do” became so disconnected from the “say” that it nearly tore the church apart.

It wasn’t on a sign (although the vision statement was displayed on banners) but this is what was said: “We are not trying to be the next Willow Creek.” The “do,” however, was just he opposite. And the “do” was taking the church down a very destructive path.

Relationships were damaged. Friendships ended. Founding members of the church were driven away. Teaching moved away from the Bible and toward books by John Eldredge and The Prayer of Jabez.

The canaries in the coal mine left first. What started as a trickle of departures was masked by an initial surge in attendance. The trickle became a flow, then a flood. We left at the tail end of the flood.

And we left damaged. I wish I could say something else, but that’s what happened. By “damaged” I mean hypersensitive to any kind of change.

When our current church moved to change the format of one of the worship services, we freaked – that’s exactly how it had started before. An elder acted tone-deaf when we asked a question – we had seen that glazed-over, “they’re not with the program” look before.

This has had the effect of building walls, avoiding any involvement beyond the bare minimum, a reluctance to get too close to people in the church because it could all blow up again and you want the freedom to be able to walk out – and immediately.

I was one of those people Michael Spencer wrote his book for.

Related:

My review of Mere Churchianity.

My article on the book for Christian Manifesto.

Bend the Page, a place to discuss Mere Churchianity.

When Church Signs Lie by Fatha Frank at Public Christianity.

Bend the Page

My online friend Nancy Rosback, whose pictures I use a lot on this blog, has started a new blog called

Bend the Page – a place to talk about books. The first book to be discussed is Michael Spencer’s Mere Churchianity.

I read and reviewed this book, and did a post on it for The Christian Manifesto. It had a powerful impact on me because I felt that author, the late Michael Spencer better known as the Internet Monk, was partially telling some of my own history – it was that familiar.

In her most recent post at Bend the Page, Nancy quotes Spencer talking about people who abandon the church. Here’s what I said in the comments section:

“There are two kinds of abandonment -- the abandonment of leaving a church (or the church) altogether, and the abandonment of limiting your involvement to the worship service. I've seen both and I've done both. I need to think about that some more.”

In my post for The Christian Manifesto, I talk a bit about the church we left some years back, and why. We’d been there for 15 years. We held on far longer than we should have. Actually, I held on longer. My wife – who’s definitely more intuitive and sensitive – was ready to leave about two years before we actually did. For me, the relationships we had made it difficult to consider leaving.

There was no event or situation; rather, it was an accumulation of changes in teaching, content, governance and emphasis that finally led us to leave. We were neither among the first to leave nor the last. The church bled members for several years until close to half the congregation was gone.

This experience left us with two things. First was the sadness, and it was profound and personal. We didn’t hang around with others who shared the same concerns and griped. We just walked quietly away. The second was a hypersensitivity to change. When the church we joined after this experience began making a few changes in what appeared to be the same direction as we had previously experienced, it was all we could do to keep from immediately bolting.

Mere Churchianity was written for people like me; for people who turned from the mega-church-entertainment-teaching-lite-let’s-be-relevant-bring-your latte-to-the-service approach that has so dominated the North American evangelical church for the last 25 years; and for people who find emptiness in an absolutist fixation on tradition at the expense of everything else. In other words, this is a book for the whole church to read.

I’m looking forward to the ongoing discussion at Bend the Page.