July 30, 2008 by djackson.

Well there’s a rose in the fisted glove
and the eagle flies with the dove,
and if you can’t be with the one you love, honey,
love the one you’re with,
love the one you’re with,
etc. etc. etc.
Dit, dit, dit, dit,
etc. etc. etc.

Crosby, Stills and Nash released the above hit single in 1970. I see it as a landmark piece of music for several reasons. First, it invites us to ponder the philosophical question, “What in the world do they mean by ‘a rose in the fisted glove’?” Is is some sort of sadomasochistic reference? Or something to do with prostate examinations? Which of course opens up an important theological issue: Apparently it isn’t only Christian songwriters who will do anything with (or, more appropriately, “to”) the English language to get to a rhyme. In fact, dove-and-love is so very Amy Grant as to suggest plagiarism, except that the dates don’t quite work out. And then, naturally, one wonders how many hours Stephen Stills sat, sleepless, wired on coffee, deaf and blind to the world around him, perhaps locked in a darkened room, until his eyes lit with inspiration and his fingers moved reverently over the typewriter keys to tap out those immortal words, “Dit, dit, dit, dit, dit, dit, dit, dit.”

Most importantly, of course, the song puts forward an execrable bit of theology and geometry that we generally ignore because, to quote the ancients, it has a good beat and you can dance to it. The words call for an opportunistic approach to romance based entirely upon biology and geography. (Well it did emerge in a year that was essentially the excreta of the ’60’s; what did I expect - Charles Wesley?)

Still, perhaps under the heading of plundering the Egyptians, and following Paul’s practice of quoting pagan poets to Christian ends, I would like to see if I can’t find something redemptive in all of this. “Love the one you’re with”: is there anything to be said for that idea?

Peter C. Meilaender, Associate Professor of Political Science at Houghton College in New York, has an article in the current issue of Christian Reflection, an ethics journal published by Baylor University, that takes up just this issue. (Houghton does not, I should stress, quote Stephen Stills. I’d guess by his photograph that the whole era is relatively Jurassic to him.) Meilaender approaches the immigration debate in America from the standpoint of what he calls “preferential love,” the requirement placed on all of us to show more love to some people than to others and, indeed, at the expense of others. “I am obligated,” he explains,

to care for my own children more than for children in general. My friends reasonably expect from me forms of sympathy, attention, and assistance that those of you reading this essay do not. I have obligations toward my faculty colleagues and fellow parishioners that I do not have towards professors at other colleges or the members of other church congregations.

He makes the same point about the seemingly random conjunction of events that land us in our particular marriage, job, or neighborhood. “Seemingly random” because, as Meilaender stresses, those of us living from within the Christian worldview attribute these things to divine providence. Thus he argues we should “love the one we’re with,” not in violation of previous covenant responsibilities, but out of and in loyalty to them. This gives the believer a basis, then, to refute the advice of the pop song: we will not “love” (in the clearly debased sense of mere physical contact) the one we happen to find ourselves next to because we have prior and superior obligations to love those with whom we have been placed.

And he has a point. Labelling this position as selfish simply denies reality: we all choose to love within a given context or calling - an apostolate, I would venture. I don’t say we’re never called to go beyond it - clearly according to Jesus in Matthew 25 we are - but we need the baseline before we can ever define what it means to reach out. Mother Teresa felt called to serve Christ in the poorest of the poor, but that still doesn’t mean “in everybody.” My students who struggle to pay their seminary tuition cannot, so far as I know, apply for a grant from the Missionaries of Charity.

Now Meilaender applies his argument to the search for a “Christian” approach to the problem of immigration, especially illegal immigration, to America. I’d like to adopt his basic idea (well, perhaps “twist,” “torque,” or “hijack” would be more accurate verbs) and steer it in a different direction: our approach to the local church.

At one point Meilaender muses that he “might have produced many children other than the ones I did; but that God has gifted me with a particular son and these three daughters has led me (or perhaps better, invited me) to develop in some ways rather than others.” He denies the logical extreme of this view, that “God must wish everything to be precisely as it is” and makes the more humble point that “we should not regard the circumstances of our lives as mere biographical data of no moral significance.”

He’s right, you know - or else we have to reject Paul’s notion in Galatians 4.4 that Jesus’ birth as a Jew, an Israelite, one “under the law” (let alone, as Matthew stresses, in direct descent from the line of David with ties to Bethlehem and Nazareth) was not historical happenstance but the fulfilment of prophecy, indeed the culmination of time itself, and the platform for all of salvation. Jesus did not come to save only Israel (as he himself stresses in John 10.16) but he came first as a Jew to the Jews, enjoined his disciples to respect this fact (Matthew 10.5-6) and had his own ethical quandries about doling out the limited resources of his time and energy to those outside his immediate jurisdiction (Mark 7.27). Jesus could not just as easily have been born, say, a Baptist in Sulphur Springs in the 1920’s, though doubtless we’d've been just as happy to crucify him.

Summing all of this up, Meilaender claims that “human charity is necessarily filtered through the prism of time and place.” He goes on to quote Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s assertion that “we ought to find and love God in what he actually gives us.” And that’s where I want to make a sweeping grab that encompasses Meilaender, Bonhoeffer, Paul, Jesus, and Stephen Stills, weave them into a single cable, reeve it through the ringbolt of the local church and tie it to the Christian’s heart. My point is simply this: Christ died for the church, and that very probably means the one you attend rather than the abstraction that “church growth” experts carry around in their heads and PowerPoint slides.

I’ve pointed this out before but Paul repeatedly addresses his letters, not to “the Church,” but “to the church that is in . . . .” He corrals the Ephesian pastors for the first ever pastors conference and insists that they “shepherd the church of God,” the one, as he has just pointed out “among which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers.” This church - this very one - this group of Christ-redeemed bozos from whose midst rabid pitbulls (Paul’s warning a few verses later) will be bred.

To invoke Meilaender again, I do not wish to argue that everything in every church (or even - and this is an important point given the triumphalism of some congregations - in any church) is by definition precisely what God must wish. But I do want to encourage people, and especially pastors, to love the church that is. First of all, it is the church Christ died for and gave to you; secondly, it is probably better than you think.

I’ll close with two images that may help focus my rather diffused point. My first image is an ancient one: St. Francis of Assisi (before he got the initials in front of his name) praying at the ruined church of San Damiano and hearing Jesus speak from the crucifix and command the young man to “rebuild my church, which as you see is fallen into ruins.” What does young Frank do? He starts laying stone, literally refurbishing the crumbled architecture around him. We might sneer (especially we Baptists with all our very good theology about the church being the people and not the building, and all our hypocrisy about, say, what kind of clothes you can and can’t wear in “the sanctuary”) at this simplistic, literalistic response, but Francis’ immediate obedience led to his ultimate vocation. As G. K. Chestertson comments on the story, the best way to build a church is by building it. Perhaps, in the same way, maybe the best way to love the church is to love the one in front of you - one living stone at a time.

My second image is a little more contemporary: the movie “Jerry McGuire.” I refer to the famous line where Rene Zelllweger’s character says of her newfound love interest, “I love him for the man he could be, and for the man he almost is.” I think that’s how too many of us love the church. Oh, we need that sense of the apocalyptic, the bride of Christ descending from Heaven, spots bleached out, wrinkles plumped full of collagen. But so many pastors love our churches for what they could be and, perhaps, for what they almost are - and in the process never love the church that actually is. If this is the case, we end up chasing a chimera instead of loving a church, and I don’t think the devil cares a whit how much of Christ’s love we lavish on a non-existent fantasy.

Posted in General | No Comments »

July 22, 2008 by djackson.

Well, heresies are always personal, aren’t they? Actually, that might be a pretty good definition of heresy: a private theology not available to the Church at large. (It would also be a good definition of the key selling-point behind much of what passes for Christian preaching and writing these days - all those books about finding the “secret” to this or that. But that’s a rant for another day.) If, then, heresy is simply private or personal theology, perhaps we can better understand our inveterate tendency toward the smaller, or venial heresies that arise from our human limitations. Because no one person can encompass all that it is to be human (let alone all of God), we inevitably tend to favor one or another element of theology or practice - the classic divide of the preacher/pastor, scholar/practitioner, theologian/activist, boxer/puncher. This would explain why our sermonic trinities tend to go scalene - one steroid-enhanced leg dwarfing two stunted ones.

In a series of blogs reaching back across this summer, I have attempted to analyze preaching on the analogy of the doctrine of the trinity. (To repeat my disclaimer: the emphasis rests on the word “analogy.” I do not argue that the Idea, or “father” element of a sermon comes from God the Father alone, at which point Christ the Son goes to work on the “son,” or structure, of the message. Neither do I claim that one whose preaching lacks Energy, the “spirit” limb of the triad, is in fact unspiritual or not filled with the Spirit. I am simply positing that a sermon is a triunity that reflects certain realities seen in the actual Trinity. I do not even attempt, as Dorothy Sayers does in The Mind of the Maker, to adduce from this analogy an apology for the doctrine of the Trinity itself. That might be possible but it would require a better theologian and a better poet than I am. No; I’m just trying to construct a helpful rubric to analyze one’s preaching.)

In the initial blog I wrote that “at the end, if I’m feeling particularly bold, I will offer my view of my personal preaching heresy.” Well, I’m not feeling all that bold, but the statement reads almost like a promise so I feel somewhat obligated. A self-evaluation of something as personal as one’s sermons is always dangerous: confession tends to be left-handed boasting and outright boasting is so sickening. Still, I think I’ll run those risks because of the potential payoff. If I can do this with some validity, maybe I can provide a way that other preachers can use my “scalene sermonics” as a tool for self-critique and thus improvement. In fact, the more valuable approach might be to ask people who regularly endure my sermons how they would draw my triangle, but I’m not feeling THAT bold.

So (insert drum roll here), I believe my own sermonic heresy is in the direction of the over-sonned sermon. By this I mean that I tend to be too fluid (not to say facile) when it comes to manipulating the elements of sermonic form: outlines, images, word-play, that sort of thing. In keeping (I believe) with my Baptist heritage, I tend to gravitate toward the individual text more than any overall theological structure. I’m not saying we Baptists have no systematic theology; we do. I am saying that we (and most of us in the free church) have such a concern to draw truth from Scripture rather than reversing the process that we run the risk of letting any given passage speak too loudly. C. S. Lewis says that the talking dogs of Narnia share at least one trait with dogs in our world: they believe that whatever they are doing at the moment is extremely important. In the same way, I tend to hear as absolute whatever passage I have before me and sometimes fail to insist that it sing in harmony with the rest of the biblical choir. (Or bay in harmony with the rest of the biblical pack or something of that sort. I seem to have blundered into an under-sonned metaphor here and have no linguistic machete with which to hack my way out. There - a third metaphor! I’d better just pull my ripcord and . . . agh!)

I must admit that I now feel more vulnerable to this weakness than ever - now that most of my preaching is done as a guest speaker at many different churches. There’s nothing wrong, as far as I can tell, with this sort of “pulpit supply,” but it isn’t ideal because it deprives the son-element of sermons of one of their most important balancing father-features: an abiding, and even entangling relationship with a particular congregation. When a pastor stands to preach to his own people, he knows them and they know him. As she ponders what to preach, she has the opportunity to consider who these people are, what they need, and how they are likely to hear what she feels called to say. She must also deal with the fact that if her preaching outstrips her own practice (and it should, at least some of the time or as Browning asked, “what’s a heaven for?”) she must honestly admit the fact or her hypocrisy short-circuits the current of the discourse. He cannot preach prophetically without counting the cost because he has to keep living in this community. This relationship keeps her on the right side of the border between bravery and mere bravado.

Since the Lord (at least I’d like to think it was the Lord; he plays his cards pretty close to the vest) demoted me from being a pastor to being a professor (that’s not a slap at my current area of ministry; everything is a demotion from the pastorate), the closest I ever come to this is when my pastor invites me to preach at my home church. The rest of the time I am reduced to the role of a guest. Marva Dawn, in her book A Royal Waste of Time, makes this point eloquently. After pointing out that “any sermon depends on our relationship with God,” she observes that “second most important for our sermons is our partnership with the congregation, which is integrally related to their intimacy with God.” Speaking of her own role as a frequent guest preacher, she admits that “often a guest preacher can be a voice from outside the underscore the theology of the community’s leaders. But always there is less of a relationship, adn thus my sermons can only be second best. They are monstrous if God does not inhabit them.” Dawn attempts to counteract this liability by inviting those to whom she preaches to engage with her in the liturgical refrain of “The Lord is with you/And also with you.” Such a simple act can at least stand as a brief covenant of preacher and people to be, for the next half hour or so, a community.

Terry York, in his book Worship Wars, offers similar insights. He targets the phenomenon of television preachers and the whole blight of pulpit celebrityhood but his comments still apply.

When a congregation becomes an audience, the relationship between pastor and congregation is damaged. . . .However gifted the pastor may be in the pulpit, he or she will not be able to sustain the pastoral role of preaching, the heart of preaching, if it is performance only. The congregation will detect the absence of “something.” The pastor will not be fulfilled, nor energized by congregational rapport. There will be no ministry of the week to inform and enrich the preaching of the morning. Planning a show is not the same as preparing for worship. When the congregation is seen as an audience, the pastor will soon be working from personal talent alone. Exceptional and honed as the talent may be, preaching to an audience will deplete the pastor’s spiritual, emotional, and physical energy. The pastor will know the sermon preparation process. He or she will remember the “timing” and “word-smithing” that have made the delivery so engaging in the past, but he poetry of it all will be gone. Entertaining an audience is not the same as engaging a congregation.

Note York’s son-rich language: talent, process, timing, word-smithing. These are all Energy or Activity aspects of preaching. But notice, when he speaks of the weakness of such sermons, his emphasis on the spirit-elements: an indefinable “something,” a lack of fulfillment and energy, of “congregational rapport,” the need for an ineffable “poetry” that means more than the rhyming little ditty after the third point.

I preach in a lot of different churches these days, usually when the pastor is on vacation or something, but sometimes when the church is between pastors. People always (or almost always) say nice things - usually about a humorous illustration; almost no one ever enthuses over a Greek word-study. It feels good. They even joke sometimes about wanting me to submit a resume to the pulpit committee. And that’s just the point: a single sermon placed in the context of seeking a pastor is the equivalent of a falsified resume, like a secular job applicant saying he has an MBA from Harvard or something. It isn’t that I mean to lie; I don’t. It’s just that they are hearing a sermon from someone who has never made them angry, never had to say a hard word or deliver a necessary “no.” A sermon in that setting can be a triumph of sonship, a technical masterpiece whose eloquence can, for a single Sunday or so, masquerade as this week’s expression of a well-fathered theology. Aptly chosen, affective illustrations and well-crafted phrases can find their target and seem to do the work of the sermon-spirit as long as they only have to do it on a given Sunday.

One of my favorite stories concerns the novelist John Steinbeck. As an aspiring young writer he had the chance to meet one of his idols, James Branch Cabell. He refused, supposedly explaining that, after having read the great man’s prose, he would probably only be disappionted to encounter him in person. Cabell, much amused when friends relayed the story to him, sent Steinbeck a note which said, “Dear Mr. Steinbeck - I, too, often wish that I did not know the undersigned.” If we preach better than we are - and, as I said, we’d better - then meeting the actual preacher will always be a disappointment, just as marrying the actual girl or getting the actual job or buying the actual car will always be. But preaching operates in that disappointment, or it is nothing but a scalene, son-skewed heresy.

Posted in General | 1 Comment »

July 15, 2008 by djackson.

Then God said, “Let the waters teem with swarms of living creatures” - Genesis 1.20

I have a sea monster in my head. You have one too. At least I hope we do - otherwise we’re in for a merry old mess when it comes to navigation and short term memory.

I refer, naturally, to the hippocampus, or actually hippocampi, since a brace of them comes standard on human beings. They’re little peanut-shaped structures ensconced in the medial temporal lobe of the brain. At least, I think they look like peanuts. To Julius Caesar Aranzi, the sixteenth century anatomist who originally described them, they looked like seahorses. Hippocampus, the Greek word for seahorse, literally means sea monster. Thus, we all have sea monsters in our heads.

I recommend that we get the seahorse into our heads in a more metaphorical - and even spiritual - sense. We could do worse than to internalize this little Pisces. An elegant and inoffensive creature, the seahorse displays especially admirable traits when it comes to its mating habits. For instance, the seahorse is the only fish that mates for life. Male and female are often seen gripping their tales, like a pair of human lovers holding hands. They do little celebratory dances around one another before heading out to forage each morning. The seahorse has some chameleon-like abilities to change color for camoflauge but also makes romantic use of this ability: upon encountering its mate, a male seahorse will blush a bright saffron. Perhaps most impressive to human women, the male seahorse is the one who gets pregnant, receiving the fertilized eggs from his spouse for gestation. And thus, with due apologies to one of my favorite saints, I offer the following

“Canticle of Brother Seahorse.”

Let us now praise Our Lord for Brother Seahorse,
Who alone among the finny tribe mates for life,
Even as Our Lord Christ elects his bride the church
From eternity past to eternity future.
Let husband and wife become truly one,
For this is good for themselves and their progeny,
And showeth Christ to the World.

Let us now praise Our Lord for Brother Seahorse,
Who receives from his spouse her fertile eggs,
Becoming pregnant with his own offspring,
Even as our brother Paul labored to birth the Galatians.
Let husband and wife share the burden of child-rearing,
And all believers be mother church:
The womb that nurtures those new-born in Christ.

Let us now praise Our Lord for Brother Seahorse,
Who, wife and husband, dance each morning in mutual delight
The pre-dawn dance of lifelong courtship,
And blush bright yellow at days’ first encounter,
Even as Our Lord takes eternal delight in His beloved spouse.
Let husband and wife rejoice anew in one another each dawn,
And all the church greet Christ daily in glee-footed dance and glowing praise.

Posted in General | No Comments »

July 9, 2008 by djackson.

7 Practices of Effective Ministry by Andy Stanley is the biggest pile of manure in two counties - and that’s only because the third county over has a commercial hog farm and a copy of Your Best Life Now.

Once during a doctoral seminar I unlimbered some similarly measured and moderate language about a different book. The professor challenged my scorched-earth approach, arguing that the book must have some value. “After all,” he chuckled, “even a broken clock is right twice a day.” I responded by citing Ernest Hemingway’s short story “The Killers,” in which the clock is always twenty minutes fast - and thus is never corect. A broken clock is not only right twice a day; it is harmless: a glance tells you to ignore it completely. A misset clock is dangerous because it is always accurate - and thus always wrong.

That’s the problem with this book and its sister volume Next Generation Leader: Both say some useful things, but the whole argument is miscalibrated and thus even its truths become untrue. In fact, the Hemingway metaphor is a good one: Stanley’s books keep World Standard time but Christians long ago reset their clocks to Kingdom Central.

Warning: plot spoiler - Stanley frames his insights in a fictional device. There isn’t much plot per se, but what there is I’ll probably give away. But I don’t think anyone really reads this kind of book for the story anymore than kids used to buy baseball cards for the bubblegum.

7 Practices begins with an interesting premise: a hapless young pastor has blundered into the Great Dismal Swamp of church vision-casting, an entrepreneurial Okefenokee where theology no longer helps. Fortunately, the members of his board (also entrepreneurial initiates) conspire to hook him up with his own personal Crocodile Dundee, a savvy businessman who - though a professed and contented unbeliever - can navigate the hierophagous dangers of the real world. (Back to Ernest: Ray Martin is the Hemingway Hero, the callow youth seeking initiation from the Cult Hero, the scarred veteran, stronger at the broken places, one who has looked into the nada. Notice who is teaching whom; this is where the clock gets reset.) Joe Harlan, a sort of sanitized Ted Turner, teaches Ray the seven practices. The number is interesting: as if the letters to the churches of Revelation have been upgraded to something more practical.

Pete, the pastor-rescuing exec, shows his hand early. “It seems to me,” he quips, “that church work is a lot like any other business. You have a product, you have customers, and you have salesmen. The only difference is that you have God on your side and that should make it easier, right?” So - we reduce relationship with the unknowable mystery of the Almighty to our “product,” immortal souls created to bear God’s image become “customers,” and the call to transformation into the image of Christ sinks to the level of hawking Amway. And don’t miss the patronizing tag-line that tosses God into the mix sort of like the rear bumper of a muscle car - or more like the bumper sticker on the rear bumper of a muscle car. Indeed, Stanley himself, summarizing the book’s contents in the preface, notes breezily:

Notice something missing? Conspicuously absent here is any discussion about prayer, the Holy Spirit, and dependence upon God. Though absent from the book, these things are certainly not absent from the culture of North Point or any other healthy church.

Not absent, perhaps, but not necessarily necessary and, at any rate, not central. The real knowledge rests with the businessmen. Jesus eighty-sixed the money changers out of the temple; 7 Practices not only invites them back in but has the Saviour sit at their feet.

Nor is Stanley alone in this view. Ken Blanchard, who made his name with the blockbuster One Minute Manager, recently gave an interview to Rev! magazine under the heading, “If I Were a Pastor.” Apparently he has now mastered the art of the One Minute Minister and, though he has no experience with the vicissitudes of the pastoral call, is ready to complete the sentence that was the bain of my existence as a minister.

I’ve just written a book called The One Minute Entrepreneur, and it could be The One Minute Pastor. There are three aspects of running a great organization. One is that your income has to exceed your expenses. . . .The second one is to take care of your customers - business can help you on customer service. And third is managing people, treating your people right.

Notice anything interesting? Like the fact that you don’t need Jesus for any of this? At least, you don’t need him to die and rise again. Money comes first, giving people what they want comes second, and good HR rounds out the blasphemy of this secular trinity. But Peter told Simon Magus and his money to go to Hell, Jesus preached a sermon the day after he fed the five thousand that reduced his market share by about four thousand, nine hundred and eighty-eight, and he promised his junior execs that he’d get them all killed.

Later in the book, in the non-fictional exegesis of the opening parable, Stanley lists the “essential truths” his church wants to teach preschoolers, children, and youth. (This comes under the heading of practice #4, “Teach less for more.” It replaces Paul’s inept suggestion that we preach the whole counsel of God.) In the entire list (thirteen items total) I find only one, “Jesus wants to be my friend forever,” that could not be taught at a synagogue or mosque - and that one comes during the preschool years. In fact, six of the thirteen would work nicely at a gathering of secular humanists.

“If I were a pastor,” indeed! I remember a conversation in a restaurant with a well-meaning layman, a retired restauranteer. He described his disgust when, at a pastor’s conference, the keynote speaker described how his church handled deacon ministry. As soon as the meeting broke up, this man told me, he heard all those ministers saying, “Well, it would never work in my church.” Then he spun out a comparison: “If I heard about a restaurant that was serving a dish that people loved, I’d at least try it!” Now, my long standing motto is “Don’t feed the rednecks,” which means don’t get into every argument that comes along. But I yearned to enter a Socratic dialogue with the man. I wanted to introduce him to what Jim Collins, detailing the spectacular failure of a CEO when he tried to run a university, calls “a thousand points of no.”

“What if all your cooks said, ‘We don’t know how to make that kind of food’? What would you do then?”

“What if all your waitresses said, ‘You can put it on the menu but we’re not going to recommend it and if customers ask for it we’ll try to talk them out of it and if we can’t we’ll refuse to serve it.’”

Of course his reply would have been, “I’d fire them!” and that would have led me to ask,

“But what if the restaurant was jointly owned by the staff? And, for that matter, what if they all worked for free and you were the only one who drew a salary from the business? What if you couldn’t fire them but they could fire you?”

My point is not that he was a bad guy or didn’t love Jesus. My point is that being a pastor is a calling and a vocation but also a skill and a trade with its own secrets and arts and that Ken Blanchard is in no better position to tell ministers how to do their work than he is to give an interview entitled, “If I Were a NASA Engineer.” The One-Minute Brain Surgeon? Probably not. And this is more than an accidental oversight on Stanley’s part. In Next Generation Leader he confesses (or brags; I can’t quite tell which) that “ironically, my pastoring skills have almost nothing to do with my success as a pastor!” I would humbly suggest that if this is true, then his success - whatever it may be - is not as a pastor at all. Indeed, it is hard to feel too much rancor for my layman friend. How could he be expected to respect pastoral ministry as an art if pastors themselves have no respect for it?

Ultimately, all of this comes from the same source as any heresy: poor exegesis. In Next Generation Stanley offers the apologia for his un-traditioned (as opposed to the more popular term “untraditional”) approach by pointing out that “leaders in the first-century church had no model to follow and no traditions from which to draw.” But of course a basic class in church history, or even a decent commentary on Acts, would have taught him better. The early church drew heavily on the tradition of the Jewish matrix from which they emerged. In fact, Stanley makes this blunder in the context of discussing the creation of deacons in Acts 6. But the church needed deacons to oversee the distribution of food to the poor, a practice they had adopted from temple and synagogue! And this is more than (though, I admit, perhaps not less than) a bad-tempered quibble on my part. The church did not draw her practices from, say, the prospering and efficient bureaucracy of the Roman empire, which provide a pretty good model of modern business techniques.

Sloppy exegesis gets a good number of church-growth gurus into trouble. In an article called “Seven Ways to Rate Your Church,” megachurch maven Leith Anderson writes about newspapers that publish a “church review” in their religion sections. He cautions his readers, “Before protesting the impropriety of such ratings, reread Revelation 1–3 and recall the biblical reviews of the seven churches of Asia Minor.”

Do you see the problem? Secular newspapers and the New Testament both write critiques of the church. He may as well have pointed out that both use paper on which to write these critiques. The comparison is like saying that an abortionist and an obstretician are both doing basically the same thing! It all sounds very cocky and prophetic but is Anderson really comparing a word of judgment from the risen Christ, the wounds of his love for his church eternally visible, to the casual musings of a secular reporter who regards the whole thing on the same level with whether his water glass gets filled at the local eatery? This is the kind of loose exegesis I often find among church-growth types: a glancing blow at a text ricochets off a non-sequitur and becomes received truth.

Again, remember the miscalibrated clock: it isn’t that business has nothing to teach the church. The problem is that we’ve made secular business the template and the Christian faith one of the interchangeable add-ons. At one point Stanley’s secular cicerone dangles this little bit of bait before his prey: “We can stop at number five (of the seven practices) and your organization will last a good, long time. Or we can go on to number six and your organization can last forever.” Forever? And here I thought it was the rock of Christ that made the church eternal and threatened the gates of Hell. “Upon this practice I will build my church - along with a big league baseball franchise and an outlet mall.”

I could go on but perhaps it is time to hear the thoughts of a real businessman. A few years ago Jim Collins published his runaway best-seller, Good to Great. Of course, pastors and church-growth consultants bought it in bulk. A short time after, Collins released an addendum, a little tract entitled, “Good to Great and the Social Sectors.” He opens by insisting that “we must reject the idea - well-intentioned but dead wrong - that the primary path to greatness in the social sectors is the become ‘more like a business.’” Collins seems to respect that fact that business is not the Borg which will and should ultimately assimilate all forms of community. And he wisely recognizes that it comes down to language when he notes that “we need to reject the naive imposition of the ‘language of business’ on the social sectors.”

One of my students recently wrote an excellent paper on her personal theology of church leadership. She wisely notes that most metaphors of the modern church come from the mechanism: We speak of a church that “runs smoothly,” is succesfully “programmed” and that produces “quantifiable results.” Biblical language about tending, shepherding, and growing we relegate to the status of archaisms fit only for the pulpit.

Let’s re-set our clocks to the GMT of Christ’s kingdom proclamation. In fact, we should let the New Testament reverse Stanley’s narrative framework. Jesus once released a booklet called “The One Minute Christian” (alright - it takes about twenty minutes to read aloud) that could have been called “The One Minute Entrepreneur.” What advice does he have for businessmen? When you’re sued for trademark infringement, give the plaintiff your market research as well. Price your stuff to where the people who need it can afford it, not as high as the market will bear. Give generously to charity, but don’t call in the media. Worry less about your bottom line than your eternal account. Don’t invest in power suits - you’re into a different kind of power. Well, that’s my pick-and-choose paraphrase of the Sermon on the Mount; you’re welcome to develop your own.

The point is that it is Jesus who takes business to the woodshed, not the other way around.

Posted in General | 2 Comments »

July 8, 2008 by djackson.

Today marks the 267th anniversary of the sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” preached by Jonathan Edwards at the Congregationalist church in Enfield, Connecticut. As is my custom, I took a few moments today and re-read that great Puritan tract on the nature of damnation and salvation. It is a practice I recommend. I want to offer a few meditations on the experience.

Edwards preaches Hell: flat-footed, two-fisted eternal damnation with no apologies and no escape hatches. Modern preachers (and I sadly include myself) can find triage for their own anemic offerings by the mere exposure to the red-blooded and rock-ribbed boldness of this by-gone pulpiteer. Yet his language is remarkably restrained - no Stephen King gore, no sadistic glee in extra-Scriptural descriptions of specific forms of torment. He portrays damnation as the logical downside of the glory of God instead of the twisted torture chamber of an arbitrary and immature potentate. God’s greatness is a gun that kicks as hard as it shoots and Edwards’ words leave one feeling that Hell is simply the price to be paid for a God worth worshiping.

Edwards also sees Hell as equal parts external and internal: God casts us into it but also permits it to come out of us. “Sin is the ruin and misery of the soul. It is destructive in its nature, and if God should leave it without restraint, nothing else would be needed to make the soul perfectly miserable. . . .As the heart is now a cesspool of sin, so if sin were not restrained, it would immediately turn the soul into a fiery oven, or a furnace of fire and brimstone.” We find this same idea in C. S. Lewis and Charles Williams, though I think Lewis at least owed it more to the Victorian universalist George MacDonald than to an American clergyman. (Where Williams got his ideas God alone knows; his was truly an original mind and since he didn’t take drugs I think he must’ve been crazy with a happy madness.) In Lewis’ novel That Hideous Strength, one character, contemplating his own joy at the wickedness of an enemy, likens his heart to the bad guys’ hellish headquarters when he wonders, “Is there a whole Belbury inside you too?” Edwards’ sermon uncomfortably awakens one to the need to look within and see what seeds of Hell the enemy has planted - and that I tenderly nourish.

I believe a dream I had last night - or rather early this morning - predisposed me to be particularly receptive to Edwards’ sermon today. I won’t go into the details - they had the usual blurry incoherence of dreams. I won’t claim that God sent it to me - that kind of claim surely belongs to someone else and I have no Joseph or Daniel to parse the mass into an instructive parable. I will only say that, in this dream, I had fallen among low companions, lured by the blandishments of a decadent lifestyle until I had finally sunk to that place where I no longer enjoyed its rewards but was too weak to cast them aside, and where even my companions in evil had grown disgusted by the flabby thing I had become. I remember at one point sitting at a table in some sort of dive, surrounded by loud and wicked people, impaired by whatever I had been eating and drinking. I resolved to leave, to give it up once and for all and made to rise, only to realize I was completely naked. The interesting thing is that I hesitated, by rising, to face the derision of those people whose company I could no longer abide.

Perhaps that dream helped me resonate to Edwards’ vertiginous descriptions of the plunge to damnation: The unconverted “walk over the pit of hell on a rotten covering,” and “if God should withdraw His hand,” all or efforts to remain aloft “would avail no more to keep you from falling than the thin air can hold up a person who is suspended in it.” Why, all our efforts to cling to life “have no more influence to uphold you and keep you out of hell than a spider’s web has to stop a falling rock.” If I have not entered the world of my dream, if I have not sunk like slime in a pit to the nadir of human existence - only to find, horribly, that I can go lower still - it is because the grace of God has sustained me. And if, with eternal Hell yawning below, I do not plunge into the pit, it is only because “underneath are the everlasting arms.”

Posted in General | No Comments »