Everything is Backwards

I recently came across a blog post that quotes Kevin DeYoung’s book, Why We Love the Church, with some of the typical complaints leveled against the church. We need to love the church, warts and all, because the church is people.

I have tweaked DeYoung’s quote a little into a list of favorite church complaints.

1. The church is lame. The ‘church-is-lame’ crowd hates Constantine and notions of Christendom, but they want the church to be a patron of the arts, and run after-school programs, and bring the world together in peace and love.

2. The church is too-programmatic. This crowd bemoans the over-programmed church, but then think of a hundred complex, resource-hungry things the church should be doing.

3. The church is too hierarchical. This crowd doesn’t like the church because it is too hierarchical, but then they hate it when it has poor leadership.

4. The church needs to be more diverse. They wish the church could be more diverse, but then leave to meet in a coffee shop with other well-educated thirtysomethings who are into film festivals, NPR, and carbon offsets.

5. The church needs to feel more like family. They want more of a family spirit, but too much family and they’ll complain that the church is ‘inbred.’

6. The church needs to be a better witness. They want the church to know that its reputation with outsiders is terrible, but then are critical when the church is too concerned with appearances.

7. The church needs to be more involved in social justice. They chide the church for not doing more to address social problems, but then complain when the church gets too political.

8. The church is too divided. They want church unity and decry all our denominations, but fail to see the irony in the fact that they have left to do their own thing because they can’t find a single church that can satisfy them.

9. The church needs better community.  They are critical of the lack of community in the church, but then want services that allow for individualized worship experiences, or are quick to head for the door when conflict heats up.

10. The church needs visionary leaders. They want leaders with vision, but don’t want anyone to tell them what to do or how to think.

11. The church needs to care for people better. They want a church where the people really know each other and care for each other, but then they complain the church today is an isolated country club, only interested in catering to its own members.

12. The church needs to reconnect with its history. They want to be connected to history, but are sick of the same prayers and same style every week.

13. The church needs to be less judgmental. They call for not judging “the spiritual path of other believers who are dedicated to pleasing God and blessing people,” and then they blast the traditional church in the harshest, most unflattering terms.

I can see myself in a lot of these. What criticisms are you most prone to?

I wonder how many young men would choose to enter the ministry if they knew, from the very beginning, that their churches would never exceed a few dozen people, their salary would always be meager, their church budgets would always be tight, and all their labors would be scarcely noticed by anyone outside of their faithful few?

Carl Trueman writes along these lines at his reformation21 blog in a recent post. In a world that is driven by larger than life celebrity personalities, it is no surprise that the church has a few of its own, leading large churches, writing books, and posting podcasts for listeners around the world.

Trueman notes that these celebrity churches are led by celebrity pastors who have one-in-a-million type gifts and it is unreasonable to try to replicate this into other churches.

Enter new Calvinism. Time Magazine recently pegged new Calvinism as the third most influential idea that is changing the world right now. And many of the celebrity pastors are staunchly Calvinistic, leading very large and influential churches in unlikely places, such as Seattle, NYC, or Minneapolis.

Here is the concern: new Calvinism’s ’success’ can turn it into a church growth fad. As more and more people become disillusioned with the spiritual fluff and high-tech frills of seeker driven ministry, new Calvinism offers depth and Bible meat to chew on.

Trueman writes:

Much has rightly been made by Reformed people of the problem of an understanding of Christianity that is driven by pragmatism as exemplified by the Joel Osteen `be a Christian and be a better you’ mentality; much criticism has also been lodged against the church growth movement because of its tendency…to find out what they like, and how they like it, and let them have it just that way.  But the dangerous thing about pragmatism is that it does not necessarily reject the truth; it merely renders it subordinate to the desired end.

To be precise, pragmatism evaluates means in terms of impact and results; and the implication of this is that even means that are intrinsically true can still be co-opted by pragmatism simply because they seem to be achieving the desired results at some particular point in time.

Now the gospel has always been true, in the good years and the lean; and we need to be certain that the current enthusiasm for Reformed theology is rooted in an acknowledgement of its intrinsic truth, and not simply in the fact that, at this point in time, Calvinism is cool enough to pull in the punters.

Who in the world would have ever thought, in our pluralistic time, that Calvinism would actually become hip enough to be reduced to a church growth strategy? What lies behind its popularity, however, is the power of the gospel which remains hidden in many other church growth strategies that promote self-help and feel good fluff.

There is a disillusioning danger for pastors here. On the surface, it appears that people are just flocking to churches because of the gospel, and to preach it hard and bold only swells the masses. But if Trueman’s observations are true, people may actually be flocking to Christian celebrity personalities who are on the forefront of new Calvinism, while other faithful men who are preaching the gospel faithfully, but lack the star appeal of these celebrities, cannot reproduce the same results.

What we need to pray for and prepare young ministers for is this sobering fact:

In the real world, many, perhaps most,  of us worship and work in churches of 100 people or less; life is not loud and exciting; each Lord’s Day we go through the same routines of worship services, of hearing the gospel proclaimed, of taking the Lord’s Supper, of teaching Sunday School… [We] keep going, giving, and praying as we can; we try to be faithful in the little entrusted to us.  It’s boring, it’s routine, and it’s the same, year in, year out.

Therefore, in a world where excitement, celebrity, and cultural power are the ideal, it is tempting amidst the circumstances of ordinary church life to forget that this, the routine of the ordinary, the boring, the plodding, is actually the norm for church life and has been so throughout most places for most of the history of the church; that mega-whatevers are the exception, not the rule; and that the church has survived throughout the ages not just – or even primarily – because of the high profile firework displays of the great and the good, but because of the day to day faithfulness of the mundane, anonymous, non-descript  people who constitute most of the church, and who do the grunt work and the tedious jobs that need to be done.   History does not generally record their names; but the likelihood is that you worship in a church which owes everything, humanly speaking, to such people.

Amen. Humbling words, these.

My prayer is to be willing to toil away in obscurity, and to be faithful to the end.

Divided by Faith, by Michael Emerson and Christian Smith, offers three lenses (page 74) through which white evangelicals typically perceive racial issues.

1. Racial problems are caused by prejudiced individuals, resulting in bad relationships and sin. This is the most common feature of white evangelical perception of race. Along with this is the notion that the best remedies are also individualized. For example, white people and black people should focus their reconciling energies on building relationships with one another, and through this process the divide will heal.
2. Racial problems are caused by other groups, usually African Americans, who try to make race problems a group issue when there is nothing more than individual problems. Since white evangelicals put a great amount of emphasis on individual accountability, some attempts to address racial problems that deals with entire groups of people will be met with resistance.
3. Racial problems are actually a fabrication of self interested people (such as Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Jeremiah Wright, or some other lightning-rod figure) and exacerbated by “the media, the government, or liberals.” In this view, the profit motive of high profile black activists or sensationalized race baiting in the media and politics is the real culprit, but most people don’t experience these sorts of problems.

Divided by Faith attempts to let white evangelicals walk a mile in the shoes of other people and see things from their perspective. Racial problems do indeed stem from prejudiced individuals, but there are also social and economic systems in America that dole out rewards based on race. These problems may be exaggerated by celebrity activists, but that does not negate them.

Absent from their [white evangelicals] accounts [of racial problems] is the idea that poor relationships might be shaped by social structures, such as laws, the ways institutions operate, or forms of segregation.

Emerson and Smith conclude that racial problems are caused by sinful individuals and broken systems, and dealing with racial problems needs to encompass repairing relationships and repairing systems.

Two factors are most striking about evangelical solutions to racial problems. First, they are profoundly individualistic and interpersonal: become a Christian, love your individual neighbors, establish a cross-race friendship, give individuals the right to pursue jobs and individual justice without discrimination by other individuals, and ask forgiveness of individuals one has wronged. Second, although several evangelicals discuss the personal sacrifice necessary to form friendships across race, their solutions do not require financial or cultural sacrifice. They do not advocate or support changes that might cause extensive discomfort or change their economic and cultural lives. In short, they maintain what is for them the noncostly status quo. We thus have a common problem. White evangelicals want to see an end to race problems because both their Christian faith and their faith in the American creed call for it. But they are constrained by at least two forces. First their cultural tools point them only to one dimension of the problem. As Stokely Carmichael and others have noted, when problems are at least in part structural, they must be addressed at least in part by structural solutions.

These are strong words. What are your thoughts? Do you agree or disagree with the authors on this?