Everything is Backwards

The Acts 29 blog (Acts 29 is a church planting network of which I am a part), posted this summary of American Christianity from Ray Ortlund, Jr.

Ortlund describes our American idolatry, which not the real Jesus, but a shallow phony.

Our local deity is not Jesus. He goes by the name Jesus. But in reality, our local deity is Jesus Jr.

Our little Jesus is popular because he is useful. He makes us feel better while conveniently fitting into the margins of our busy lives. But he is not terrifying or compelling or thrilling. When we hear the gospel of Jesus Jr., our casual response is “Yeah, that’s what I believe.” Jesus Jr. does not confront us, surprise us, stun us. He looks down on us with a benign, all-approving grin. He tells us how wonderful we really are, how entitled we really are, how wounded we really are, and it feels good.

Jesus Jr. appeals to the flesh. He does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him. He is not able to understand them, much less impart them, because Jesus Jr. is the magnification of Self, the idealization of Self, the absolutization of Self turning around and validating Self, flattering Self, reinforcing Self. Jesus Jr. does not change us, because he is a projection of us.

It is time to tear down Jesus Jr. It is time to rediscover the real Jesus. Still today, even to us, his invitation stands: “Come to me” (Matthew 11:28).

Between Two Worlds has this summary of a blog post by Curtis Allen. Curtis Allen, a black man, offers some of his insights regarding black people visiting mostly white churches.

Of particular note are these four challenges to African Americans joining a predominately white congregation.

From Between Two Worlds…

Here’s an outline of part 1:

Bankrate.com has an interesting article about how certain things we deem “needs” more likely belong in the category “wants” or even “entitlements.”

Jay McDonald writes,

A lot of us in wealthy, overspending America are either born or raised with a tremendous sense of entitlement. We say to ourselves, ‘I work hard or, I work at a job I hate — at least I should be able to have a Starbucks coffee every day or eat out for lunch.’ But of course, those are not needs, they’re wants. They’re pleasures.

A more theological treatment can be found here.

Personally, about 10 years ago, I had been buried under a pile of credit card debt that took a lot of discipline to pay for. I wish I had this perspective during those childish years of plastic swiping foolishness.

McDonald lists 12 things many Americans feel entitled to that can be a big drain on your budget.

12. The Daily Latte; this costs about 100 times the price of a home brewed variety.

11. Cable TV. This costs up to $780 per year.

10. Manicure/Pedicure.

9. Botox.

8. Bottled Water. This is one of the funniest scams ever perpetrated on the American public. Honestly, planet earth’s most abundant resource is bottled and sold for more than the cost of a soft drink. Buy a Brita filter.

7. Second Car.

6. Cell Phone. This is a tough one, because certain professions require constant contact. But a teenager? No way.

5. Lawn Service.

4. Clothes (excessive)

3. Private School

2. Childhood parties

1. Pet Grooming.

This is just a start, but most American middle class people could probably find several places to trim the budget and be more frugal. I know I could.

So write Joel Kotkin, in The American.

In this article, Kotkin asserts that large metropolitan areas have become havens for the uber-rich while the poor insist on sticking around since they can be difficult to displace.

What he argues is that there is something missing in this equation: a thriving middle class. And a staple of the American middle class is strong, healthy churches. Without a middle class, cities become playgrounds for the rich and their “servants,” and are largely “without children, particularly of school-age.” Even though large cities boast about being places of great diversity, the lack of a strong middle class makes them “hip, dense versions of the most constipated suburb imaginable.”

Large cities should look beyond the “luxury city” and begin to work hard to attract middle class people with families. Of course, this isn’t as ritzy and glamorous as other alternatives, but long term, middle class residents are necessary for the viability and sustainability of large cities long term.

Kotkin adds,

the sustainable city of the future will depend precisely on commitment and long-term residents. It also will rest on the revival of traditional institutions that have faded in many of today’s cities. Churches—albeit often in reinvented form—help maintain and nurture such communities. Similarly, extended family networks will be critical to future successful urban areas. As Queens resident and real estate agent Judy Markowitz puts it, “In Manhattan people with kids have nannies. In Queens, we have grandparents.”

By any reasonable measure, the urban core of Cincinnati needs more of these “traditional institutions” to build into the infrastructure of the city. What that means is this: middle class families need to start churches in the cities, as well as revitalize old and dying congregations, by moving into the city and enmeshing themselves into local neighborhoods. This creates a bedrock upon which future generations can build.

According to this article on CNN.com, Cincinnati is one of the top destinations for recent college graduates looking for work.

George Yancey writes in One Body One Spirit that there are seven characteristics of multi-ethnic churches that are worth noting. Some of these were surprising.

1. Inclusive Worship. Music is so important to people that when they sing to God it needs to take on a form that is culturally meaningful for them. In the Euro-white culture, we have everything from Indie-Rock, to pipe organs, to Coldplay, to acoustic folk in our churches. But others prefer a keyboard and rhythm section driven sound. I suppose in India people would want a Sitar with Ravi Shankar sound. The point is that the musical style of the church must reflect the diversity of the people that come there.

2. Diverse Leadership. Yancey writes, “multiracial leadership is important because members of different racial groups desire to feel represented by the members of the church, especially racial minorities who historically have received a lack of respect for their opinions and perspectives.”

3. An Overarching Goal. Yancey observes that many multi-ethnic churches that he studied did not make racial diversity its highest goal, but rather a necessary component to achieving an even higher goal. He notes that “there is a certain amount of racial fatigue in our society. People are tired of discussing racial issues and trying to solve racial problems. But if members of a church are committed to another and higher goal – such as winning people to Christ or serving the community – then it becomes easier for those members to accept the importance of creating a multiracial environment.” This is right on point.

Another friend of mine who pastors a multi-racial church in Cincinnati recently told me that there is a generational element to this as well. Older people, who have long memories of segregation, bussing, and Jim Crow laws, need to have their racial prejudices more directly addressed. But it is the younger generation who grew up in the “Cosby Show” era and now the “Obama” era that grow fatigued, because they do not have these same experiences that were so difficult for their parents. There should be a sensitivity to where people are. But hopefully the days of addressing race will become less tense and emotionally charged.

In downtown Cincinnati, our goal is to reach the entire area, not just the white population. Thus in my context, we must build a multi-racial church to serve the unique needs of our diverse community.

4. Intentionality. Yancey writes, “it takes work to create and sustain multiracial churches. Their development does not just happen accidentally.” A church needs to know what they are trying to do and work to achieve it. Yancey notes that churches that became multiethnic almost by accident sustained the multiethnic environment by intentionally cultivating it.

5. Personal Skills. Some of this is simply having a well developed social IQ that understands the dynamics of relationships. Pastors especially have to have good personal skills since they are the ones who will be helping people to adjust to a multiethnic environment where conflicts arise from unexpected places. Specifically, Yancey identifies “sensitivity to different needs, patience, the ability to empower others and the ability to relate to those of different races” as key personal skills.

6. Location. You can’t create a multiethnic environment in a neighborhood that is almost completely monolithic. You have to be in a location that already has the diversity in the population. And all white or all black churches in all white or all black neighborhoods shouldn’t be regarded as inferior; they just reflect their neighborhoods.

7. Adaptability. Yancey says that “a monoracial church has only a single culture to adapt to. However, by definition, a multiracial church brings into it individuals from several different cultures. Learning how to blend these cultures together is an important part of adapting to the new social reality caused by the formation of a multiracial church.”

I would say that many of these fall into the biblical category of self-denial (Mk 8:34-35). We have to be willing to die to ourselves and our own cultural preferences and be willing to adopt, to some degree, the values and preferences of other cultures. This is the 1 Corinthians 12:12-15 vision of the church: we don’t merely tolerate one another, we need one another.

To do this not only requires spiritual maturity but it creates it as well.

Today is Good Friday, which is the day where we celebrate the fact that Jesus died for his people. To some, this notion that Jesus needed to die for someone else’s sins may seem radically absurd.

But John Stott wrote in The Cross of Christ that the cross reveals two things. First, the absolutely blinding perfection of God. And second, the deep sinfulness of human beings.

He writes,

If we bring God down to our level and raise ourselves to his, then of course we see no need for a radical salvation, let alone for a radical atonement to secure it. When, on the other hand, we have glimpsed the blinding glory of the holiness of God, and have been so convicted of our sin by the Holy Spirit that we tremble before God and acknowledge what we are, namely ‘hell-deserving sinners,’ then and only then does the necessity of the cross appear so obvious that we are astonished we never saw it before.

The essential background to the cross, therefore, is a balanced understanding of the gravity of sin and the majesty of God. If we diminish either, we thereby diminish the cross.

Tim Chester posted about different types of church communities and how the ethos of the group affects individuals.

Communities of Performance

• People talk about grace, but communicate legalism
• Unbelievers can’t imagine themselves as Christians
• Drive away broken people
• The world is seen as threatening and ‘other’
• Conversion is superficial—people are called to respectable behavior
• People are secretly hurting
• People see faith and repentance as actions that took place at conversion
• The gospel is for unbelievers

Communities of Grace

• People can see grace in action
• Unbelievers feel like they can belong
• Attract broken people
• People are loved as fellow sinners in need of grace
• Conversion is radical—people are called to transformed affections
• People are open about their problems
• People see faith and repentance as daily activities
• The gospel is for both unbelievers and believers

Jorge Sedaca, who is on staff at the North American Mission Board in church planting, posted an article recently about visiting churches and experiencing some thoughts on why people don’t sing in church. I’ve summarized his thoughts below, but the whole article is worth a read for those of you who are interested in engaging a congregation in corporate worship. It is interesting to note that he likes many of the songs that I can’t stand, but hey, to each his own.

Here’s his observations of why people don’t sing in church:

1. The congregation is unfamiliar with the songs being used.

2. The use of too many new songs week after week.

3. The songs selected are not suitable for congregational singing.

4. The overall quality of the songs is very poor.

Hey worship leaders, your congregations want to sing. If you ever find yourself looking out at a group of people while leading worship and find yourself thinking, “man, it’s dead out there. They don’t get it,” Maybe you don’t get it and need to tweak how you’re leading them.

No, racial reconciliation isn’t dead, but perhaps Christians need to talk about the topic differently.

God has put in my heart a dream of a multi-racial church in the heart of downtown Cincinnati. In that previous sentence, there’s about three things that people have told me are foolish ideas. I have been told that (1) Cincinnati is “rough soil” for church planting, and (2) downtown Cincinnati is especially difficult, but to be (3) multi-racial is just plain out of the question.

I believe that God can and will do it, however. And right now, God has answered my prayers of raising up a core group of Christian leaders who want to see the same thing happen downtown in Cincinnati. But I have been beating my head against a wall trying to figure out how to make our group more ethnically diverse.

Yesterday, I met Alvin Sanders, the Chief Diversity Officer for the Evangelical Free denomination. He recommends talking in terms of simply “reconciliation” rather than the more emotionally charged “racial reconciliation.”

He told me that the racial reconciliation conversation is dead. Christians should be talking about how God is in the business of reconciling all things to Himself, not merely races. I agree with him, as I have argued here.

He wrote about this recently:

So let me define racial reconciliation from my perspective. To begin, the Duke Center for Reconciliation defines reconciliation as God’s initiative, restoring a broken world to God’s intentions by reconciling “to Himself all things” through Christ (Colossians 1:20): the relationship between people and God, between people themselves, and between people and God’s created earth.

It is important to note that racial division is but one of many forms of brokenness found in our world that needs to be reconciled. Therefore, reconciliation in any form is the mission of God in our broken world.

The church is the only institution that has been supernaturally commissioned to practice reconciliation (2 Corinthians 5:16-21). In fact, Jesus told us that a blessing follows as we engage in bringing peace to divided situations (Matthew 5:9).

The only way reconciliation-whether racial or any other type-will become a priority within a church is if it is viewed as a mark of the gospel. Oftentimes, churches resist stressing reconciliation, offering up the explanation that they are focused on fulfilling the Great Commission.

My response is that it is impossible to fulfill the Great Commission without fulfilling the first and second greatest commandments-which, together, are a call to reconciliation (Matthew 22:37-40). Reconciling brokenness of all forms to a world dominated by political, cultural, racial, and ethnic conflict is a witness to the superiority of the authentic Christian life.

It is ironic that as I type this, many national news outlets are reporting that minorities as a whole will outnumber whites by 2043 within the United States. History has proven that with these demographic changes will come numerous racial incidents and ethnic tensions.

The church must have a uniquely Christian response to these demographic changes that reflects the love of Jesus Christ. Otherwise, we will be viewed as just another powerless institution.