life after life after death

Christianity Today has an interesting article on what resurrection means.  What does life in the next consist of?  What is “living with Christ”?  What do you think?

attractional church

“God, bring people in; when they’re driving by the church, guide them in.”

I hear this prayer often. I sense this mentality even more. In fact, I embody it on a fairly regular basis. But it is a misguided request.

This idea, these words come from genuine hearts – people dedicated to a relationship with God, Christians concerned about people who are “outsiders”. And there is a lot that seems right about the statement. Shouldn’t church be a place that attracts people? Shouldn’t the thought of Sunday service stimulate (rather than repulse) people? Isn’t it good to be thought of as a relevant, happening, attractive church?

But this idea of an attractional church, one that asks those outside to come inside is misguided. Misguided, because it encourages the opposite mindset than should be characteristic of the Church, of Jesus’ body:

Mission.

Mission implies outward movement, direction, purpose; attraction indicates inactivity and wishful thinking (and not Frederick Buechner’s idea of wishful thinking).

Mission-oriented Church is people who purposefully live out their life as their relationship with Christ.  Everything is included:  work, recreation, family, neighborhood.  It is holistic in nature.  Everything touched is sacred because the Sacred has touched the Church.  Mission-oriented (missional) people don’t necessarily seek to invite people to church, but instead to meet them where they are, loving them simply because they yet contain the faded Image of the Divine who created them.  Missional people embody Christ in their worlds, seeking not to separate things into “sacred” or “secular” categories.  They are the Church in the world.

Missional people go outside the church building walls; missional Church is seeking people, living in relationship with those inside and outside of Christian faith.

Attractional Church is unfortunately just that:  hoping to attract the outsiders to something going on inside.  How we think reveals our understanding of church: it it something to which people will be attracted?  In that case it’s them coming to us.

But it should be us going to them.

judgment day

I generally consider myself a forgiving person. I’m easy to get along with. I usually let things roll of my back.

But the other day as I was driving with my wife, I realized that I’ve recently appointed myself as a judge.

You know what I mean. Chances are, you’re in that illustrious company of judges. You might even be really good at it. I’m sure we have good reasons for it – sometimes I’m an idiot; most of the time, it’s the other people who are.

Like the other day in the car. My family and I were heading home, less than a mile away. In the span of a half-mile or so, three people cut in front of me. One guy had the audacity to slowly turn in front of me (from his red light), look me in the eye, smile and wave – like we had this psychic communication – and that I had somehow, in the deepest crevices of my mind, invited him to take his place in front of me…while I was in the middle of the intersection!

I was ready for him, though – and those other three car owners (I hesitate to use the term “drivers” as it implies they are competent humans). And then I remembered that my lovely wife was in the front seat; that meant my two-year-old daughter was in the back. So I said it out loud, pointing with a grandiose, gracious sweep of my arm, in a Charlton-Heston-type-Moses voice, “I forgive you.”

I half meant it as a joke. Then car owner #2 placed his own shiny metal four-wheel ego booster in front of me – the nerve! This time it wasn’t as funny as the first, but I had already “forgiven” the other guy out loud, in front of my wife and daughter, so I had to do the same, this time with slightly more authenticity and less Moses-like intonation: “I forgive you, too.”

There.

Done.

That felt even better. I was actually starting to mean it!

By the time idiot number 3 consciously ignored the four-way stop a half-mile from my house, I was on a roll. This time with even less of a righteous voice and deeper intention, “I forgive you.”

Then I laughed. Three people! In a half-mile! What are the chances?

prayer failure

In reading Brennan Manning’s Ruthless Trust, I was particularly drawn to a quote from Trappist Monk, Thomas Keating:  “the only way to fail in prayer is not to show up.” (p.130)

I often struggle to pray, especially for extended amounts of time.  I struggle to “listen” to God as I do not consider myself a great discerning person.  Sure, I pray often, but in attempts to avoid platitudes and triteness, I trip over my words, have long and sometimes awkward pauses (I imagine what others listening must be thinking, “Is he finished yet?  Should I pray now?  Is he ever going to start?“).

Which brings me to another flaw that Manning exposes:  the tyranny of the approval and disapproval of others.” (p.132)  This is completely me.  Too often I find myself catering to other’s supposed thoughts.  In my stillness I create conversations in their heads.  Of course, this removes my focus from God, from being quiet, from listening and onto what others must be thinking about who I am, what I’m doing, how I’m praying.  It’s a vicious cycle.

But according to Thomas Keating, I’m not a failure!  Trying to pray and getting nowhere isn’t the point.  It isn’t failed prayer.  If he’s right, then there is no failure in prayer.  Or at least not in attempting to pray.  The only way to failure is to refuse to show up.

So, I’ll show up.  I’ll be there.

Thank you, God, for being so gracious.

partial faith II

I mentioned in Partial Faith I that belief can never fully define faith:  while belief is often the entryway to it, faith encompasses so much more – loyalty, trust, etc.  Having a “belief-alone” faith is partial faith.  And partial faith is dangerous because it can easily degenerate into moralizing:  Christians can too quickly become “belief police”, snooping to find if others have “correct” theology.  If the investigatee is found to have identical beliefs to the “belief police”, they are regarded as a Christian brother or sister, because right belief equates with relationship with God.  Sadly, stopping here nixes the vibrancy in trusting – really trusting – God; it allows us to be loyal only to ourselves and to what we individually think the Bible teaches us.  So, “belief-only faith” is partial faith.

But I covered this last week.

However, we are also in danger of living out our lives in partial faith by how we talk about the Bible.  The very language we use to talk about spiritual things can lead us down a path we were never intended to travel.

Language is what we use to communicate, be it body or spoken, and the way we describe things can either inhibit or enhance the object we describe.  One might notice a country field full of wildflowers and exclaim, “Look at the beautiful flowers!”  Riding along in the same car, however, another may see the same field and think, “Ugh!  Look at all the weeds.”  We communicate everything with language and yet language limits us.  So it is with how we regard the Bible.

We often speak of the Bible as “The Word of God” or “The Final Authority on Faith”.  While these definitions have a place, and are, to an extent, accurate descriptions of the Bible, such lofty praise can become a slippery slope never intended.

We’ve all heard people say (perhaps we have ourselves) things like, “The Bible changed my life.”  But is it really the Bible that did the changing?  Does language like this perpetuate the idea that knowledge transforms us?  I have not doubt that these things are said by devout Christians.  They truly have been changed.  But were they changed by the Bible itself?

I know it seems like splitting hairs, but language translates things.  Speaking of the Bible in this way implies that the Bible – the words themselves – have power.  This is much too superstitious for me.  The words in the Bible are just that – words – unless the Holy Spirit makes them alive in our lives.  Reading the words for information and superstitiously imposing power on the ink and paper is essentially in the same category as believing that belief alone is necessary for a relationship with God.

Certainly, Paul said that the gospel (the good news) is the power of God unto salvation for everyone who believes.  Doesn’t this imply that the words of the Bible have power?  If we look closely at what has power, the gospel has power for those who believe. Believes what?  In the words?  No.  It is power for salvation for everyone who believes in the one to whom the words point.

Unless the Holy Spirit guides us towards the God to whom the Bible’s words point, we miss the point.  The Bible is not just to be read to find moral ways of living – not even to find ways of being righteous.  It’s certainly not to be used as a weapon wielded against others, Christian or otherwise.  The Bible before is nothing without the God behind.  It is not God who leads us to the Bible, but the Bible that directs us to God.

Treating the Bible as that which changes us elevates words to godhead.  The Bible is no fourth part of the Trinity (or Triune Godhead, whichever language you prefer).  To give such status is to create an idol.  And God will not tolerate idols – though they be His words!

I don’t just want to know words of or about God; I want to know the God to whom those words point.  Anything short of that is partial faith.  And partial faith misses the point.

presuming intervention

As usual, Brennan Manning cuts right to the chase in the purpose for trust in (and prayer to) God: “Trust in God does not presume that God will intervene.” (Ruthless Trust, p.117)

Everything in me begs to believe the opposite, that God does act on our supplication (there’s christianese for you), that God is moved by our hearts’ pleas. But while I believe this – and trust – this about God (that He does hear us – that He is affected by our cries), there is for me, more often than not, the agony of silence and the disappointment of prayer unanswered waiting after the “amen”.

I am surprised at how freeing reading that one sentence became: “presum[ing] that God will intervene.” I don’t have to come up with excuses as to why things do not turn out like I ask if they do not; no longer need I gamble my trust in God based on whether He answers my prayers in the way I think I need. I can stop presuming. This is what I have been doing! I can stop expecting God to appear how I want Him to appear. He is not a tame lion.

Again, I am surprised at how comforting this is to me; I can trust Him regardless of how my prayers go.

He’s still God,

and He’s still here.

favre is going home

As a loyal Green Bay Packers fan (at least for the five years I’ve been married to my amazing wife, Niki, the most die-hard Packers fan ever), I’m taking a few moments of silence for Brett and the Pack. 17 years, 253 consecutive regular-season NFL games (275 with playoffs included – holy cow!), and numerous other records…dang.

It’s a sad day for Green Bay, and my house certainly isn’t joyful. Thanks, Brett, for turning a nice quiet midwest girl into a Packers-crazy wife. I’m the better for it!

partial faith I

We’ve all heard it before, the Evangelical Christian explanations of faith and salvation and the Bible and inspiration: that faith = belief, salvation comes once we confess a belief in Jesus, that the Bible has changed our lives, that sola Scriptura means that all we need for living is the Bible, and that salvation theology is all that is necessary for a relationship with God.

Don’t get me wrong: this is not an attempt to dismantle any of these thoughts, but to uncover the inadequacies inherent in the simplicity of the explanations. Now, I’m a proponent of simple, in fact I’m in the middle of a book entitled Simple Church. What I’m not a fan of is partial.

So, for the next few blogs I want to try tackling what I see as partial faith in Christianity of late.

First, the question of faith and belief and how they’re related to partial faith. Here we go…

As I have written before, many, many, Evangelical Christians have equated faith with belief, belief with faith, and salvation with belief. I imagine other Christians have also, but since I’m an evangelical, this is whom I address.

The equation faith = belief is a partial view of faith and potentially destructive endpoint. When faith is boiled down only to what one believes or gives assent to, this gift can too easily lose it’s transformative power. When right belief is what we seek to attain above all else, when a quest for faith ends in right belief, faith becomes nothing more than a mental exercise, an intellectual agreement with certain statements. We can believe all the “right” things and believe that we’re saved and still live unaffected lives. This waters down faith and devalues salvation. Jesus’ disciple James even taught that “even the demons believe, and they shudder” (James 2:19)!

What, then, is the opposite of partial faith, in which we equate belief with faith? The answer is at least this: belief is the launching pad, the ignition switch, the mere beginning of faith. What follows this shows, becomes, proves our faith. Faith is trust; faith is loyalty; faith is a way of seeing, both God and the world. Faith in this manner colors our view of God; it enhances how we see God and his creation. It moves beyond the boundaries of believing a set of statements, from believing words about God to trusting in God.

Do we trust our beliefs? Or do we trust the God beyond our beliefs? Which is greater, words spoken or written or believed about God or the God to whom those words and beliefs point? Belief sets us on our way, but we cannot travel the trail of faith without trusting in Something greater than a creed, without being loyal to Someone deeper than a statement. When the writer penned, “walk by faith and not by sight”, he/she was not encouraging us to close our eyes and hope and believe Something was leading; rather to trust and be loyal to That which does go before us.

Belief begins the adventure. Faith is not simply beginning, but setting out on that great adventure that is a relationship with God.

uninvited dinner guest

In her book, Picturing God, Ann Belford Ulanov writes, “we always must come up against the hard fact at the center of the Gospel: we do not get to God by our own efforts. God comes to us.” I don’t know about you, but I’m grateful for that truth. Normally, I try to get to God through a variety of tired old inventions:

…attempts to convince God to come to me, forgive me, give me one more chance

…baiting God with promises as if He were nothing more than a hungry fish

…figuring the best phrase, speech, formula to get a prayer answered favorably

…conjuring up emotions that should catch His attention

 

all with a misunderstanding of who actually comes to whom.

It is He who comes;

He who seeks.

And as both Rob Bell and Charles Conniry, Jr., write so succinctly, God is not angry. Jesus is not waiting to smite us, to catch us in our wrongs to weigh us down with shame. Instead, Jesus is searching for us like He did Zacchaeus in Luke 19.

You see, Zacchaeus was a morally deficient man: he was a legitimate-yet-thieving tax-collector.

And what does Jesus do? Does He confront Zaccheaus with his obvious sin? Does He tell him to get straight and stop depriving people of their wages? No. What does Jesus do? Does He preach a sermon about tithing? About giving money to the poor? About repenting of sin and turning to God? No?

I have a sneaking suspicion that Jesus’ mode of evangelism would be denounced by a lot of evangelical Christians as pandering, of “not speaking the truth in love“, of bypassing the “important” things like sin and confession and guilt and rebelling against God and the need for a personal savior and would-you-just-pray-this-little-prayer-so-that-you-can-go-to-heaven stuff.

Instead, Jesus invites himself over to Zacc’s house for dinner (how great would it be to invite yourself over to someone’s house for dinner and still be welcomed?). Instead of confronting Zacchaeus in his immorality, Jesus confronts the crowd in theirs – the hypocrisy of casting judgment. Jesus indicts His own followers, the adoring throngs, with a simple offer of friendship to a broken, unrepentant sinner.

And the transformation from thief to disciple is instantaneous: “I will give half my wealth to the poor” (vs.8).

What changed Zacchaeus was not the admonition to repent, not the chiding of a morally superior being – not even a call to follow Jesus. Jesus surprises everyone – and it should surprise us as well – and offers what God offers to each of us:

Salvation through friendship. Deliverance through friendship. Transformation through friendship. No strings attached, no obligations to meet. Pure and genuine friendship.

Who came to whom?

What changed Zacchaeus? Nothing but an uninvited dinner guest.