Wading through life

There’s a magazine out there called Relevant that I had a subscription to a while back. The magazine’s Web site used to be my home page and my MySpace page used to apply their theme. The magazine and its Web-equivalent was, last I checked (which has been a while), all about a Christian slant on pop culture . They review and reflect on music, news, movies, media (some of it “Christian”, some of it not), etc… through a supposed Biblical filter. I liked the concept of the “relevant” Christian and found it to be a good resource.

Well, over the years, I’ve decided that Relevant and the whole myth of culturally-rooted, relevant Christianity is actually quite irrelevant—both to the world and in the pursuit of Christlikeness.

This topic came up on blog I subscribe to and I took the opportunity to voice my thoughts. I’m not sure I’ve shared them before on this blog, so here’s a link to Boundless.org’s: Trend Management or Transformation?, where you can read them. Depending on where the comment conversation goes, I might be posting more on there.

(As I indicate in my comment, which is the first one below the blog, I really liked what Gary Thomas has to say on the topic, though I haven’t read his article in its entirety yet. On another topic, I also really liked what Thomas had to say in his great book “Sacred Marriage: What If God Designed Marriage to Make Us Holy More Than to Make Us Happy, which was required reading at the Focus on the Family Institute. I highly recommend it.)

In The Sacred Romance, Eldredge quotes and then reflects on a piece from Frederick Buechner’s Telling Secrets:

“Starting with the rather too pretty young woman and the charming but rather unstable young man, who together know no more about being parents than they do the far side of the moon, the world sets in to making us what the world would like us to be, and because we have to survive after all, we try to make ourselves into something that we hope the world will like better than it apparently did the selves we originally were. That is the story of all our lives, needless to say, and in the process of living out that story, the original, shimmering self gets buried so deep that most of us hardly end up living out of it at all. Instead, we live out all the other selves which we are constantly putting on and taking off like coats and hats against the world’s weather.”

Think about the part you find yourself playing, the self you put on like a costume. Who cast you in this role? Most of us are living out a script that someone else has written for us. We’ve not been invited to live from our heart, to be who we truly are, so we put on these false selves hoping to offer something more acceptable to the world, something functional. We learn our roles starting very young and we learn them well.

If God’s current role in our lives is anything, it’s Restorer. His pursuit after us has the goal of restoring the relationship to what it was in Eden. A fringe benefit of this is of course eternal life; what makes this intimate relationship possible is forgiveness of sins; a proper response from us is holy and obedient living. But all of those stem from His great desire for fellowship and intimacy with His lovers.

And when we get that, our mourning is turned to dancing. Our weeping is turned to laughing. Our sadness is turned to joy. The stress and pressure lift and performance is no longer necessary. For where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. In His presence is fullness of joy and at His right hand are pleasures forever more.

And that, my friends, is why laughter breaks out when a bunch of Jesus-obsessed crazies get together to fellowship and worship God.

I’m not really sure where to begin this blog, or where it be in the middle, or how it will end. So, I may as well just dive in with how I got here.

It all started with this post on Boundless.org’s blog site: Seeker Sensitive Equals Stunted Growth. In it, we learn that Willow Creek Community Church, unofficial granddaddy of the modern mega-church movement, has released a book that summarizes three years of research they did among the people of their own congregation and those of 30 others. The take on the book is that Willow Creek more or less “repents” of pioneering unfertile frontier—meaning they aren’t seeing the spiritual growth they had hoped to see occur in the lives of those who attend.

Willow founder Bill Hybels confesses:

Some of the stuff that we have put millions of dollars into thinking it would really help our people grow and develop spiritually, when the data actually came back it wasn’t helping people that much. Other things that we didn’t put that much money into and didn’t put much staff against is stuff our people are crying out for.

It’s with an honest and a repentant spirit that I confess that as part of a rather non-seeker sensitive ¹ congregation, I caved to a spirit of competition and found myself being a bit self-righteous. For a moment, I picked up an entirely demonic “us vs. them” mentality, thinking Willow Creek had somehow just confessed to being a wolf in sheep’s clothing—that they were somehow “the Others”.

After being convicted of the error of my ways, I got excited. I got excited not that Willow Creek was admitting to making a mistake (though, I do hail the courage and transparency of Hybels and their leadership in doing so), but that in this moment lies opportunity… opportunity for the Spirit of God to reorient the giant that Willow Creek is and get her on track to advance the Spirit’s preparation of the Bride. Certainly any “mistakes” they’ve made over the years are not beyond God’s redemptive hand.

Interested in learning more about this book and the blogosphere’s take on it, I read a few more articles on Townhall.com and Christianity Today’s Web site (and part 2 of CT’s). Most interesting of all were reader comments to the articles, which ranged from mirroring my initial “I knew it!” mentality to the more Christ-like “Let’s not relish in another’s failure.”

Willow Creek isn’t among “the Others.” We wrestle against principalities and powers, not flesh and blood—and most certainly not against others in the body of Christ. Willow Creek is full of God-loving people who genuinely want to win the lost for Christ. And they genuinely want to see those people move from “saved” to disciples. Now, in getting so (self-labeled) “seeker-obsessed”, have they drifted in their understanding of what it means to be a true die-to-self disciple of Christ? Possibly. But I’m in no position to judge. I’ve never been there. And I’m not terribly familiar with Hybels’ theology.

But do any of us fully know what it really looks like to suffer as Christ did? Hardly. We all need to grow in revelation of God and His Word.

I really appreciated a comment in particular, from one Dan Bergstrom. It reflects fairly well some of my thoughts on this whole thing:

I know that Jesus came to seek and save the lost, but he did that on the streets, on their turf, in the world (but not of it.) Search the scriptures. God’s people gather to be GOD-OBSESSED, not man-obsessed. There is nothing wrong with doing body-evangelism (programs to present the gospel) but that is not worship… that is evangelism. Jesus told us to make disciples “as we are going” into the world, not to try and attract the world to a religious service. We can do all the “trunk or treats” and “Men’s Golf Tournaments” we want to, but we MUST gather together to declare God’s praises and to delight in his presence through the word, worship, sacraments, prayer and fellowship.

And yet, I remain thankful for Willow and Saddleback for reawakening the church to the lost world around us, and for caring about the lost. Jesus wept over the lost. Do we?

I love Rick and Bill’s heart for the lost. I want a heart like that. I love John Piper’s heart for God. I want a heart like that. I love John McArthur’s love for the Word. I want a heart like that. I love Chuck Swindoll’s heart to feed the sheep. I want that. I love Chris Tomlin’s passion for worship. I want that.

Let’s learn from the strengths and weaknesses of these “model churches” so that our congregations can become the beautiful spotless bride that Jesus is soon coming for.

I’m convinced there is no one “perfect church.” But there is going to be a perfect Church. Just as small, local congregations/bodies are made up of many parts and all members need each other to be whole, the Church itself is made up of many parts (local congregations) and needs each one to be whole. It will be a great day when we’re more united in our mission to fulfill His.

So, I’m now seizing this opportunity and putting to practice what I’ve been learning in Frangipane’s In Christ’s Image Training. I’m praying about it and asking you to do the same. Petition the Lord to move mightily as Willow Creek carries out more self-assessment and searches the Scriptures for discipleship solutions. Pray that they would be sensitive to the Holy Spirit’s prompting, revelation and conviction. Ask the Lord to redeem any lost time and resources devoted to programs that were good ideas but not God ideas. Request that His Kingdom come and His will be done through Willow Creek—and the thousands upon thousands of local congregations that look to them for leadership on how to communicate Christ’s gospel in the 21st Century.

And pray that for my congregation and yours while you’re at it. We all need the support and strength to handle what lies ahead.

Footnote:¹ I could go off on that term for a bit, because it assumes that what seekers want is a “relevant God” when I tend to think people really want a God who’s a whole lot bigger than a pop-culture-savvy savior

I’m not planning to post my sermon notes, mostly because it ended up being pretty Real Life-specific. So, for those of you interested in getting the notes to supplement your own, let me know and I’ll e-mail them to you.

I’m teaching at church Friday night (Oct. 26), so it’s always good to have prayer. I was feeling a little unsure of things earlier this afternoon, but I pushed through that and the Lord’s really been bring things together. I’m very excited.

I’ll post a PDF of it Saturday, for those of you who’d be interested in checking it out. Seems I prepare differently every time I teach. This time, I’m pretty much writing it all out.  So, you’ll be able to read it like a giant blog post