Good Catch, Murr: Clearer Thinking on Israel and Gaza

 

Sometimes your kids point you in the right direction. 

The following is from a text exchange with a thoughtful middle daughter who wanted to make sure I'm reminding good church folks to pray for the entire Israel/Gaza situation, and not just part of it. Her comments (not published but answered here) helped to clarify a few things for me. Good catch, Murr.

Here's the thing: people aren’t grasping that, this time, there won’t be any winners.  Still, they insistently choose a side and get rabidly, predictably angry when others choose differently. For all concerned, especially Jesus' followers, it's another adventure in missing the point.

What’s also missed is how destructive it can become here. The anti-Semitism on display around the country and at a prominent intersection in our fair city is starting to look like Kristallnacht to me and Jews are justifiably scared. Some homegrown gutter savages, aping Hamas gutter savages, have concluded they’ve been anointed and empowered to attack and kill Middle Eastern looking Americans. Little ones even. I say ‘savage’ because I don’t believe they’re deranged kooks. They are Eric Hoffer’s truest True Believers with a twist of old-style godless nationalism or the new and less improved Christian nationalism. The banality of evil is running our streets with a high-powered weapon under its jacket.

Currently, both political parties are in almost complete disarray and appear to be nearly non-functional and unequal to the hour. I can foresee the Chicago convention next summer being a much uglier replay of the 1968 convention with the summer of 2020 as dress rehearsal. I’m listening to smart people on all sides saying pretty stupid things and I’m really getting worried.

Iran, Russia and China are watching - all very bad actors - and the likelihood of international blundering hasn’t been this high since the lead up to the War to End All Wars that ended nothing and unleashed decades of suffering. I’m telling anybody who will listen that prayer - extraordinary prayer - is the only way out because I see a high likelihood of a demonic element in all of it. The confusion level is a leading indicator.

 "Oh, that You would rend the heavens and come down!"  Isaiah 64:1

Christians who can’t see the need or won’t pray Isaiah-like prayers and prefer to jump on a meme team are lazy and beyond reprehensible. They are in gross dereliction of duty and rival gods have replaced their first love.

Christian nationalism, tribalism, maniacal Islamic terrorism and some strains even of Israeli grievance revenge are all motivated by a hidden but very nasty brand of evil. Without playing the equivalence game, I’m strongly convinced there are doses of spiritual darkness in all of it. With delight, the principalities and powers fiends, who are very real, are working overtime.

When people take strong, exclusive, my-side-is-the-right-side stands, it’s always informative to notice what they won’t talk about. To varying degrees, this time around, everyone has a reason to hang their heads. Again, no winners and plenty of losers who didn’t ask to be included. In Thomas Merton’s phrase, most of us are guilty by-standers with much to confess.

The whole thing is a horror show and I’m having trouble seeing Jesus in any of it: women and girls of all ages anally raped while tied to trees or their own beds, babies crushed under buildings, thousands on both sides of the barrier forced to leave home. Dozens of hungry, frightened old people in suffocating confinement as bombs collapse their tunnel prison. Intentional targeting and regrettable accidents makes for a slaughter of innocents even Herod couldn’t have envisioned. The weeping agony of thousands of fellow image bearers is tough to process. If Christians, Arabs, Jews, protesters, counter protesters and at least ten thousand apologists, columnists and talking heads could once see it for the unwinnable horror show it is, they’d realize picking sides is pointless because no one will win. Just stop it. I keep thinking of Mark Twain’s War Prayer.

Thanks again, Murr. After all this texting my thinking is a lot clearer. But I don't feel better.

 

 

No Virginia, Religion Isn't Dying

 The increasingly frequent announcements that the church in America is declining come with hand wringing and pearl clutching for some and thinly veiled glee for others. It's rare to hear a dispassionate religion-is-dying report because nearly everyone has a stake in it. Insiders are distressed to see loved and valued institutions and practices degrade and lose influence. Outsiders are happy to be done with the one unacceptable people's opiate we have left.

Religion is dying. It's a silly claim.

It's silly, but it's not a new prediction. A ton of intellectual heavyweights have been sure that religion, especially Christianity, has run its course (several times) and is on its way out. The list includes Nietzsche, Marx, Weber, Oliver Wendell Holmes and novelists too many to mention. The death of religion theme even worked its way into a Matthew Arnold poem that pictures faith as an ocean with its "melancholy, long, withdrawing roar." No surprises with Arnold because you can't have a decent 19th century English poet without a club membership, interesting facial hair and a dose of delicious melancholy.

Mark Twain observed, "Man is the religious animal." Religion can't die as long as humans survive, but it can change - radically and perhaps suddenly. Could it be that for some, Christianity, God, text-based religions and institutional faiths are being replaced by other religions - rivals? 

Religion isn't being abandoned really. It's more accurate to say that in America, historic, traditional faiths are being replaced by rival religions. Nationalism? Ethnic loyalties? Political identification? By one definition, religion is whatever gets your final, highest allegiance. One trend that is prominent, popular and perhaps seminal and may qualify as a rival religion is the path to self-improvement. Many claim to be searching for the better or best version of Me. Jesus, Torah, Yahweh, the Gospels and especially the viability of local faith communities are no longer satisfying or worthy of serious consideration when compared to the pursuit of self-fulfillment.

In the current telling, three thousand years of Judeo-Christian bedrock is crumbling beneath our feet and losing out to the promise of Future Self.

I see replacement coming from the outside by those who, disaffected or disappointed with religion as institution, have abandoned it. A different disaffected set, those who still consider themselves on religion's inside, also want change things and appear to be signing up for a massive deconstruction project. A different and more violent kind of replacement. The whole religion thing or large parts of it has got to come down. Riddled with favoritism, systemic racism, longstanding sexism, aligned too closely with the wrong kind of politics, it simply must go. Detonation first, then rebuilding. Only when there are ashes can you have a rising Phoenix. If the Phoenix is a hen, then it's a broken eggs and a better omelet thing.

It may sound hysterical to ask if the lazy French monarchy was really so much worse than the bloody Reign of Terror. Still, deconstructionists should always swing the hammer slowly. The replacement church and Christianity may be worse, much worse than the things torn down. Once level the city to make room for improvements and there's no turning back. "Oops" doesn't earn a pardon or restore what's lost nor reclaim the damage done to the lives and well-being of good people shoved aside for the next new thing in church life.

If the highly imitative, market and production driven, eye candy approaches that are currently favored by too many church planters and innovators is indicative of where the tearing down is leading, we may be in for a very big and unsatisfying "Oops!" from today's bright lights when their project to make all things new unravels.

Last Things

One last thing: All I'm saying to those who've abandoned religion in general and Christianity in particular is that your disaffection may be coming from a position of unearned cynicism, and it could lead to merely chasing a Future Self chimera. That's a poor substitute for discovering a Savior God who desperately wants to make Himself known and who is inviting you into the Great Dance of a Trinitarian relationship. Don't forget also, the original Chimera was part snake.

One more last thing I say to insiders: Be careful what you tear down. Be careful too to mind the speed with which you deconstruct the things you don't currently like or appreciate. A guard dog with no teeth and a muffled bark will be unable to protect you or your family. The last thing you want in a religion is easy demands, no rigor, no teeth. When personal preferences and tastes - especially in my faith - become the loudest voices I hear, the bad guys will get in and take all my stuff.

Religion isn't dying. We will always be religious and always display allegiance to something or someone. Dylan was correct in saying we have to serve somebody. If the bright kids are right and current trends are away from Jesus, church, the text of Scripture and traditional approaches, any pale alternatives will be discovered to be tasteless and unworkable substitutes soon enough and by enough people. 

Maybe there's a new Great Awakening around the corner.

Post Covid Questions From Beat-up Pastors #3

It was a small lunch meeting of a few experienced, thoughtful, regular guy pastors. 

No long-bearded whiz kids. No visionaries, empire builders, trail blazers or trend setting, careful dressing innovators at the table. These are the guys that actually answer their phones when people call at odd hours. They make middle of the night trips to the hospital to visit the sick, know how to sit with a grieving family, can talk with a mixed-up kid and because he seldom listens the first time, can get the little knot head out of jail a few days later. They dedicate babies, make a difference when officiating a funeral, juggle budgets and answer questions. Lots of them. All day long. 

Just regular, dependable church leaders whose real specialty isn't sermonizing or saving the world, but problem solving. They've heard the unoriginal jokes about preachers working one day a week hundreds of times and haven't once kicked anybody. These are nice guys.

Though hailing from different backgrounds and traditions and ministry approaches, all had surprised themselves by living through and limping out of the lockdown upheaval and messy aftermath with only bruises and lacerations - none of them yet fatal.

Banter, banter, banter, then light talk turned serious church talk. The unrelenting grind of it all the last three years was mentioned, as was lagging and maddening post-Covid attendance. We poked at the higher profile churches use of money, splash and prominence to 'corner the market', imposing their 'brand' on the community while other churches curtailed activities attempting the thankless juggling act of following public health protocols while keeping a church alive. A lot tumbled out: the law of diminishing returns that weirdly dictates making greater investment in media and digital presence that results in weakening loyalty to our churches. We marveled at the popularity and hard to explain attraction of copycat services by trendy churches that merely sell eye and ear candy with the thinnest sliver of a gospel lite nougat. We worried over the increasingly indispensable need for ever more tech savvy approaches to . . . well, everything.

Then, the unanswerables: Is traditional ministry shifting? Where do regular pastors fit in anymore?

A lot of voices are calling and cultural winds are ever shifting. While the trends may be new, the phenomenon isn't. Since Ecclesiastes at least, things have been in constant flux. 

Here's the thing - people will always need caring, competent shepherds. Human guilt will still invite agony, grief won't take a holiday, the lost will always deserve finding and, as always, the wounded will never wait. Ministry will never change and neither will the Solution.

The reasons the good ones get into church ministry remain worthy reasons. Serving Christ and serving hurting people whom He loves intensely will never go out of vogue. Those are timeless things that pastors do.                                                    

Here's my idea of traditional ministry - 

1. Caring for the poor and neglected and teaching others how to see people the way Jesus sees people  

2. Making followers of Jesus so effectively that they make followers who make followers                                               

3. Showing people how to have a longer than life conversation with a Relationship God who has already included them in His dance

Our God will always make room for called men and women who are willing to do these things well and you don't need a coffee bar, black ceiling tiles or muted lighting to make it happen.

Post Covid Questions From Beat-up Pastors #2

For church leaders, the post-Covid waters are treacherous. Bombarded with frequent reports of universal church decline, the rise of the 'nones', a loss of interest in organized religion and the exodus of millennials, tens of thousands of good pastors are treading water. Many pre-Covid attenders have not returned, having filled their weekends with sports, shopping, get-aways and maybe the occasional peek at the Sunday livestream. Some have made deals with the devil that will come due in unforeseen ways, possibly in the lives of their children, their children's children and their communities some years off. 

An unexpected threat from trendy, blandly tagged, over logoed start-ups, big box churches and wannabes has appeared. Dangling legs of vulnerable church leaders attract an especially rapacious predator: the nearby barracuda pastor is circling, sniffing for blood. With the latest copy of Fast Company on the nightstand, these t-shirted and single-minded visionaries eagerly impose their brand by building on the losses of discouraged brother and sister pastors.  Bleeding churches across the country, helmed by the walking wounded, struggle to survive Sunday to Sunday. Large numbers of exhausted, diminished churches and leaders, wearied from three long years of flailing and blood loss, slip unnoticed into the deep. No grave markers for these losers. 

Beat-up pastors are asking some really hard questions 

Is God pruning the church? Is He pruning the pastorate? Where do regular, average pastors fit in anymore?

If this is pruning season, God's shaping of His church is nothing new. Neither is the idea that the visible church should be always reforming and refining. Ecclesia semper reformanda, popularized by super theologian Karl Barth, goes back at least to that 5th century stalwart and father, St. Augustine.

It may be that average pastors are being pushed and molded by the Spirit, but not to be a better version of themselves or to build character in the churches they lead. There's a misconception here. According to the more radical parts of the New Testament, trials come not to improve our character. They are the vehicle by which Christ is formed in us. As Oswald Chambers observed, the evidence of genuine spiritual formation is a strong family resemblance to Jesus Christ. A best version of me has nothing to do with it. It's all about Jesus living His life in us and that's a mind-blowing concept. Current trials may be a tool in the hands of the Master.

So, perhaps the current shaking will allow Christ to be formed new in some good and longsuffering leaders. 

But what about those predator pastors? They happily point to numbers as permission granted by church planting gurus, denominational leaders and the Holy Spirit to inflict injury on struggling churches and fellow pastors. Buoyed along by marketing strategies, algorithms, social media manipulation, denominational approval and confirmed by an appealing, very American but cynical, pernicious view of success, they are blind to their cutthroat church building tactics.

However, what they are building is no more durable than what they are building on. Lasting structures can't have poor foundations. Much of the current American church profile is confirmation of Rene Girard's insight that human behavior and most human desires are simply imitative. 

The tragedy will not be in the eventual collapse of copycat predator churches but in the lives of hundreds of thousands now sitting in cookie cutter services, enveloped in the essential blue haze, coffee in hand, eyes locked on the very bright stage, who will slowly or suddenly become disillusioned with it all. Once the overconfident pastor steps in it or the hype becomes tedious, they will quit. Wounded like so many before them, they will find the emotional and psychological barriers to knowing a God who desperately wants to be known much higher and harder to navigate. 

"An appalling and horrible thing                                                                                                                  Has happened in the land:                                                                                                                            The prophets prophesy falsely                                                                                                                    And the priests rule on their own authority;                                                                                           And My people love it so!                                                                                                                            But what will you do at the end of it?"                                                                                                                                              Isaiah 5:30-31

Overstatement? What if it's not and what if God meant it? Take heart good pastor. You're not the one being pruned.

Post-Covid Questions From Beat-Up Pastors #1

Making a case that churches and church leaders got an especially brutal pummeling during pandemic and lockdown would be a snap. Even in the long post-lockdown era the beating continues for many pastors. During the worst of it, criticism was of the unanswerable variety - "damned if you do, damned if you don't". Bruise-free quarterbacking from armchair safe spaces - always a favorite spectator sport of the ill-informed - slopped over into unlicensed amateur postmortems from every in-print and online publication, highbrow to low, loudly sacred to proudly secular. All children of Nostradamus confidently predicted, and sometimes welcomed, the certain decline and death of the deficient, deflated, defective American church. 

Led by smart kids in lofty think-tank high places, generously lotioned TV talking heads and cautious officials in shiny, tastefully decorated denominational low places, rising ranks of screeching church quitters, like all good mob members, grabbed pitchforks and muskets on cue, and in the best call-and-response tradition, laid all failures, declines and missteps of the American church at the feet of tired local pastors. 

After three years without much R&R or any hazard pay, this now punchy bunch, already carrying most of the baggage while dodging a slew of slings and arrows with no fortunes, outrageous or otherwise anywhere in sight, started cracking up. Sagacious pipers deafened by their own loud tune and their armed child followers predictably shooting their own eye out, somehow managed to unhear and overlook a lot of decent pastors and families in deep crisis. The same decent ladies and men dedicated to warning them of the unforgiving cliffs ahead.

Budgets and attendance took a hit and many shell-shocked church leaders haven't seen a bounce-back even close to pre-Covid levels. As former church attenders, now out of the habit, stubbornly stayed away, many pastors walked away. Some who still remain live with the daily near nausea of fear and self-doubt that's part of going down with a sinking ship. Many more would quit if they could and tens of thousands will end up quitting even if they can't. Walking away from a life's work will exact a crushing emotional and psychological toll on good people who've been lifelong learners, acquiring specialized and often undervalued skills, typically at great personal cost. The ripple effect on families and communities is not measurable. The loss of spiritual capital and plain old know-how will likely have a crippling effect that can't be contained within church walls.

This is the very real backdrop to questions beat-up pastors are asking each other. I know because I talk with them. 

• Is God pruning the church?
• Is God pruning the pastorate?
• Is traditional ministry shifting or is it dying?
• What will happen when many pastors, like many attenders, simply quit?
• Can the American church survive? Should it?
  

In a few posts, Toto will join me as we grip the curtain with our teeth, pulling it back so you can see something important you're probably missing and may be contributing to - the frantic flailing of the little wizards who are trying to hold things together at the church down the street.

On This Compelling Environment I Will Build My Church

Popeye said "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em", and so I will.

I'm giving up disciple making, hospital and shut-in calling, crisis counseling, fasting, preaching, extraordinary prayer, mentoring and spending lots of time with people. I'm also backing off study time, reflection, journaling and anything else I incorrectly imagined was part of pastoring.

I'm a church consultant now.

I'll be advising leaders to backlight the stage, using plenty of muted blues while darkening the room so everyone is blind as a bat, terrified that any shifting could put them on the floor and knock out a row of chairs. I'll be careful to point out the value of selecting an indeterminate, geometric design for the backdrop that has only the meaning you give it. I'll advise they get a band and install suspended speakers cranked loud enough that nobody can hear themselves singing except the musicians with those little thingies in their ears. I'll sell them on the idea that vocalists should know how to moan convincingly and stop at just the right time to deliver extemporaneous remarks carefully worked out in the previous week's nightly two-hour rehearsals. It ain't worship until it's perfect. 

I wouldn't be worth my chips if I turned an up-and-coming church loose in the highly competitive, barracuda infested marketplace that is contemporary worship without advising pastors to invest in heavily wrinkled, high dollar catalogue clothes appropriate for a camping weekend. Rips that give the appearance of a wolverine attack are a plus. Be original, man!

Strike out on your own is what I always say so I'll do them a favor by selling them pre-made, sure-fire sermon package subscriptions (always in a series and always automatically renewing for the customer's convenience). Included is a slightly inspired, word-for-word manuscript written by some of the most anointed seminary drop-out turned advertising wizards anywhere. It's all ready to be loaded onto video monitors seen only by the pastor so he/she never misses a word. They will even be coached about where to pause and gesture for effect and the best times to pace the stage with head lowered and how fast. It'll look so easy that anybody could do it! Song lyrics, take home coloring pages and snazzy graphics are included. It's essential in today's church to keep all eyes glued to the big screen so the folks don't miss the worship producer's cut-away twelve-foot-high close-up shot of the same people standing in front of them.

It won't be enough to tell them to serve coffee. Everybody knows you'd be stupid to have church without it. I'll show them the proven wisdom of having a coffee team. These serious folks will research the best cup sizes, sleeves, stirrers, ministry logo, team t-shirts and of course the trendiest, earth friendliest, hard to get coffee along with obligatory flavored creams and additives. Everything is ministry, you know.

From time to time I get questions about the expense of fog machines in making things especially spiritual. I do have some thoughts. But this blog is free and that sort of thing is reserved for my upper tier customers. Those select pastor/leader/visionaries who understand that in creating the compelling environment we're all chasing that money is a minor consideration. Special effects are high-level stuff among us church planting consultants.

Move over Apostolic Fathers, Azusa Street, Martin Luther, the gates of hell and good church people, pastors and martyrs of the last two thousand years. The church consultants, the cavalry you've been waiting for, have arrived and they're ready to show you how to do Jesus' job for Him and build the church on the cheap. 

You just gotta create a compelling environment.

What the Pandemic Has Taught Me . . . So Far

 Observing the sluggard's formerly lush vineyard now a neglected field of weeds, thorns and broken walls, the compiler of Proverbs 24 tells us "I received instruction from what I saw".

Having observed the pandemic, the lockdown, the politicizing of mitigation measures, all the fallout, and too many hours of expert analysis, I've also received some instruction. It's very likely there are multiple lessons for me to learn, and I may miss some, but so far, from my vantage point within the church, I am seeing one feature of the Covid reality with startling, disturbing clarity.

It was intended as a dress rehearsal for the church.

I'm not sure what the Covid experience was supposed to have signaled to governments and public health officials, but I think God was telling people in the American church world that things will not always be as they've always been. We're crazy if we think we will be able to do church along the lines we've always been. Could the lockdown and shuttering of churches and church activities been God pushing us to explore new ways of doing church? Seriously. 

Most institutional models of the church experience in the west are built on large group gatherings, property ownership, professional clergy, church loyalty and predictable giving patterns. For some time those models have been hemorrhaging, showing signs of unsustainability. The high rate of church closures and clergy resignations more than suggest as much. Leaders, understandably anxious to preserve their families, health and sanity, are quitting in frustration and exhaustion. The notable big box success of some churches is simply a refinement and honing of a church growth model from an earlier and much different era. You can only double down on a declining strategy for so long and some of the successes appear to be fading. The bigger the box, the more unsustainable it will become.

During lockdown some churches experimented with different ways to do church, some resisted and others just whimpered and waited. Maybe God intended us to use the time to prepare for the next thing. Will a future pandemic close us down again? It's more conceivable than ever. Could we be swamped by a different, unforeseen public health crisis? Nobody saw Covid coming. Persecution? There's plenty of precedent for it. Loss of tax exempt status would result in loss of church properties. A faltering economy would drive operating costs and insurance beyond the reach of many congregations. Things could change really fast, rendering church as we conceive it impossible.

Something else is coming. It won't always stay the same for church leaders. Those who've been at it awhile know change is the name of the game. They could tell you the dozens of ways church life has changed since they began. Bigger change is coming and what different, untried ways of doing church could be learned and adapted while we wait? House churches, small groups, prayer chains, work based prayer groups, live stream forums, podcasting, chat rooms, Zoom counseling and Bible studies could all prove sustainable options if our preferred way of doing church were no longer open to us. 

The earliest church thrived without most of the trappings needed for our current institutional, centralized 1952 approach. An explosive first century Jesus movement had plenty of vicious opposition. It also had no designated church space and no large group gatherings. The Book of Acts cites almost seventy cases of first generation believer's use of public space - free space - to spread the message of good. Is a better, cheaper, untapped way of doing church staring us in the face?

Commanded by the resurrected Jesus in Acts 1:8, those who heard were reluctant to take the message to the wider world if it meant leaving the familiar, predictable pace of established Jerusalem church life. Persecution became the catalyst for them to scatter to Judea, Samaria and the ends of the earth, living the words of their living Savior. They discerned a meaning and message in the discomfort. 

If God intended lockdown to be a dress rehearsal in finding new ways to be the body of Christ in our broken world, many churches squandered the opportunity, absorbed in tangential dust-ups over violated rights and government overreach. Some wasted it sitting in courtrooms and cozying up to politicians. Others just sweated the thing out. Once again, it looks like it was His friends who missed the voice of God. It's enough to make you cry.

Rather than end on a note of crippling morosity, let me see if I can't salvage something worthwhile with this message to church leaders:  it's not too late to try something new that's not dependent on a building or a big budget. 

The wise person in Proverbs wasn't instructed accidentally. Instruction only came after he reflected on the broken walls and unproductive fields. Reflection on the last 20 months tells me it wasn't a one off. We're crazy if we think there aren't more surprises coming. 

There's time to rethink the church. Now.