Last night, I led a group of fairly seasoned Christians in our church through a study of several passages from the book of  Acts in an attempt to deal with this issue.  Just as in our experience, the biblical answers to the first questions were fairly straightforward and consistent.  When the earliest Christians were faced with conflict, crisis, or decisions, they commonly prayed and fasted as they made their decisions.  That all makes good sense, and we would expect those answers.

More problematic was how they actually determined God’s will.  In Acts 1, they cast lots.  Of course, this was not uncommon in ancient culture, and we see it at work in the OT, but it certainly seems an odd method to us.  In another instance, Peter depended on a vision and the clear manifestation of the Holy Spirit to know that God was at work in bringing Gentiles into the church (Acts 11-11).  More acceptable to us was the prayer and fasting of the church of Antioch and then their commissioning of Paul and Barnabas (Acts 13).  And in Acts 15, we have church leaders coming together for a frank exchange and then a decision on the Gentile question.

The actions of the church are clear here.  Our interpretation is what is difficult.  When we are faced with crisis, conflict, or decisions in the church, which of these examples from the early church should we follow?  Should we have a healthy debate or pull out a silver dollar and call heads or tails?  Do we choose one over the other because it fits our cultural sensibilities better?

Certainly, the primary lesson is that the church depended on the leading of the Holy Spirit in all of these instances, but beyond that, what do you learn about how we should make decisions as the community of faith?

When we talk about Christianity being true the unchurched person of today shrugs with disinterest.  ‘You have your truth, I have mine.’  What he wants to know is, ‘Does it work?’  We need to help him to understand the absolute and unchanging truth of Christ, but we should also explain how Christ is available to help him in practical ways to heal his hurts and help him deal with everyday living.  We need to communicate that Christianity isn’t just for the tomorrow of his eternity but also for the today of his life (Celtic Daily Prayer. New York: HaperOne, 2002, 393).

Lee Strobel has been a very effective communicator, both in print and in the spoken word, for many years, and I have tremendous respect for his intellect and what he has accomplished.  I think this is excellent analysis for a large group of people, primarily age 45 and older.  The problem is that many people in the generations that follow asking different questions.

Strobel has a utilitarian approach to Scripture that is echoed in much of the preaching of the day, especially in very large churches.  Andy Stanley’s Communicating for Change, which has been highly influential on my preaching, advocates for this approach to biblical interpretation, and therefore, to preaching as well.  However, the next generation is not asking “Does it work?”  The questions that they are asking are more like the following:

• Can this teaching challenge me to serve the poor or oppressed in a way that matters?
• Can this text help me make a difference in a broken world?
• Who is the Jesus that stands in the text?  What story is he part of?
• Who is this person standing in front of me speaking to this group?  Does his or her life line up with this teaching?

Christian preaching and teaching are in the midst of change because the culture is continuing to change.  We can’t ignore what is happening around us.  We need to re-introduce story into our message so that the people who hear the message of Jesus can see how they can be part of what God is at work doing.

• Identify the problem: lose weight, get control of finances, stop drinking, get healthy, be a better parent, take better care of my pet hamster, etc.
• Seek solutions: Google it, buy a book on amazon, ask a friend, join WeightWatchers
• Develop a plan: Set goals, make checklists & resolutions, think about necessary steps to change
• Buy stuff: We will inevitably think of things that we have to buy to make the change, and besides, buying stuff makes us feel good, even if our problem is debt.  (This is why Dave Ramsey makes a boatload of money off of people trying to get out of debt.)
• Act: Hopefully we get to this point; it’s easy to get bogged down in all the other stuff.

Sometimes, these steps work really well.  We can think of examples in our lives of when we actually dealt with a debt problem or a health issue.  This is a good rubric because it does work…sometimes.

But it doesn’t work for everything.  It doesn’t work as well for character.  It doesn’t work as well for spiritual formation, and it’s not always terribly effective in ministry.  Joan Chittister uses a parable to point to this truth.  Her last line has been with me for days:

One day the Teacher said, “It is so much easier to travel than to stop.”

“Why?” the disciples demanded to know.

“Because,” the Teacher said, “as long as you travel to a goal you can hold on to the dream.  When you stop, you must face reality.”

“But how shall we ever change if we have no goals or dreams?” the disciples asked.

“Change that is real is change that is not willed.  Face reality and unwilled change will happen” (Wisdom Distilled from the Daily,  New York: HarperOne, 1990, 53).

Unwilled change is uncomfortable.  I want to control my own destiny; I want to be in charge of where my life is going, and I want to choose how I will change.  Unwilled change is surrender to the Holy Spirit, and if I give control of my life to the Holy Spirit, all heaven might break loose.  I might be called to do something unpleasant and unplanned; I’m not sure I’m fully comfortable with that.

Gradually, we began to get some clarity on a troubling truth: attracting people to church based on their consumer demands is in direct and irredeemable conflict with inviting people, in Jesus’ words, to lose their lives in order to find them.  It slowly began to dawn on us that our method of attracting people was forming them in ways contrary to the way of Christ.

What a powerful realization!  Carlson and Lueken were co-pastoring a large and successful church in California when they began to realize the model that they were using to grow the church was not nearly as biblical as they thought.  They were doing what lots of us are doing.  They were designing programming and worship around consumer demands in order to attract people.  And for them, it worked…amazingly well.

But they came to this point in the life of the church when they realized that their strategy was only feeding the monster of consumerism.  This line of thinking says that church is like everything in our culture; we expect it to meet our needs and do everything the way we want it done.  If it doesn’t meet those expectations, we will take our business elsewhere.  This consumerism is present whether we like it or not, and many of us have come to believe that churches should attempt to exploit it.  We use consumerism to grow churches.

The question that Carlson and Lueken are asking is whether that approach only leads people to a deeper consumeristic approach to spirituality.  Is that biblical?  Is that remotely like anything that Jesus taught?  Those are good questions that I have been working through recently, and they found voice in this book. I haven’t answered all of this yet, but I know that consumerism is not a Christian approach to much of anything. Is there a better way to do church?

This is not restricted to retired Floridians.  The same is true when churches are planted all over North America and have a target audience of young families under 35.  The same dynamic is at work in this strategy.  We don’t want to deal with people who are different from us.

The problem is that neither world is real.  Humanity involves an amazing amount of diversity: racial, age, gender, language, among others.  When we isolate ourselves from that diversity, we lose sight of the mission that we have been given to make disciples of all people.  And we also lose the value of what we can teach each other through our diversity.

Joan Chittister brilliantly puts it this way in her book Wisdom Distilled from the Daily: “The elderly learn from the young that life goes on, that creation keeps creating.  The young learn from the elderly that life is about more than titles and careers, that someday we shall each be only what we are and no more.  Then we will all look back on our relationships with God, with our selves, and with others as the only lasting mark of our humanity.”

My criticism is not directed at churches that are planted near retirement communities.  These churches are attempting to live out the mission of the church among the people who happen to live nearby.  Rather, my grief is that in these churches, and in churches composed only of young adults, Christians miss out on the gifts that we have to offer each another.

In the Name of Jesus deals with some of the temptations that ministers (including volunteer leaders in the church) face as part of serving the people of God.  Nouwen uses the temptations of Jesus as a paradigm for understanding how ministers are tempted and for finding ways to overcome.  For Nouwen, the first temptation is to be relevant, just as Jesus was tempted to be relevant by turning stones into bread.  Everyone needs bread.  How could anything be more relevant?  Ministers often feel the need to be relevant to the lives of the people around them.  They want to do something practical, something that will be of immediate help.  But that relevance is often not what people need.  What they need is a leader steeped in prayer, just as Jesus was.  This connection with God gives the minister the opportunity to share Jesus rather than provide a service.

The second temptation is to be spectacular.  Jesus was tempted to do something which everyone would have noticed: jump off the temple and be rescued by God.  Anyone who knows me knows that I have little to worry about in this area.  I don’t think I’ve had a spectacular day in my life.  That’s just not who I am.  But again, Nouwen is right in that he knows that ministers want to make an impact.  We want to impress; that’s human nature.  To guard against that tendency, Nouwen argues that ministers and leaders need to be freer to confess their own sins.  While we have this desire to stand as perfect examples, Christian leaders do not stand above the need for confessions and forgiveness.  We are broken as everyone else.

Finally, Nouwen argues that Christian leaders are tempted to by power, and we are.  Power calls us to wield it, to use it for the purpose of program,  administration, and even control.  Instead of using power to our advantage, even if that is in the interest of the church, Nouwen suggests that ministers should be led.  We need submission just as everyone else does.  We need those in our lives who will lead us.  It is not that Nouwen argues for weak leadership.  Rather, he argues that a follower of Jesus knows how to lead and to follow.

These are powerful temptations; they are forces that can corrupt and disrupt.  Nouwen knew the church, and he knew ministry.  This book shows it clearly.

In Deuteronomy 8, God prepares the people for the gift of a land.  He talks about the great bounty that they will
experience once they have come into the land.  They have been either in slavery or wandering the desert for longer than anyone can remember, but now everything is going to change.  They are going to build houses, plant farms, produce food, buy and sell, and have a much easier life, and God knew that this new prosperity could be their downfall.

And so, God warned them of this.  He warned them not to get so involved in the wealth of this new life that they forgot who had provided it.  In essence, he warned them not to forget him.  God knew/knows human nature; he should because he’s he one who created it.  But this passage confirms a common human experience.  We depend on God to get us where we want to go, to accomplish something important in our lives, and when we reach the goal, we don’t need him any more.

God calls for our devotion in all of life.  God created us and gave us life.  He sent his Son to redeem creation.  And he calls us to him daily because he knows that we need the relationship he offers.  We decide whether we are satisfied with what we have accomplished or whether we want something more. We decide whether we will open ourselves to everything that he offers.

I could easily cite several of Nouwen’s books as influential on my life and ministry, but one impacted me most powerfully.  Life of the Beloved was the result of a request by some of Nouwen’s friends.  They wanted an explanation of the Christian life and spiritual formation apart from his scholarly work, and that’s exactly what he produced.

The basic theme of the book is that we are deeply loved by God.  We are the “beloved,” and that truth became evident to me in ways that I had never known while reading this book.  For me, Life of the Beloved was more than an intellectual exercise; it was an emotional experience which opened up God’s love for me and for every other human being.  That’s a truth which stands at the core of our faith and the very nature of God.  Nouwen brings it out like no other.

Other great works from Nouwen include his classic The Wounded Healer, The Return of the Prodigal Son on the parable and the painting by Rembrandt, and the volume edited by some of his students, Spiritual Direction.  I recommend them all.

Sullivan argues that one of the primary problems is that the church has (from the beginning) politicized Jesus, and our culture has taken this to extreme.  Thomas Jefferson attempted to deal with the problem by creating a Bible which contained only the sayings that could be attributed directly to Jesus.  Of course, Jefferson himself was the arbiter between the “diamonds” and the “dunghill,” as he put it.  Sullivan’s answer is not to edit the gospels but to use Francis of Assisi as a model for understanding the character and ministry of Jesus once again.  Francis’ ideals become Jesus’ ideals.  Best of all, Francis was, like Jesus, apolitical.

That’s an interesting statement.  The question is whether Jesus was apolitical.  Certainly, Jesus was not political in the way conservative Evangelicals tend to be political.  He (and none of the NT authors) didn’t call the Roman Empire to become a Christian empire, and he didn’t attempt to bring a new morality to the Empire.  However, to claim that Jesus was apolitical is to misread him.

It all begins with Mary’s song in Luke 1:46-56.  Mary has just learned that she will bear the Messiah, and she sings of him bringing down the powerful and raising up the weak.  The second half of her song is all about politics, at least in its largest sense.

In Matthew 20:1-16, Jesus uses a parable about workers earning the same wages regardless of how long they worked.  Labor unions would have risen up against him had there been any.  In Mark 10:17-31, he tells a successful young businessman to sell all that he has gained in the free market and give it to the poor.  Rush Limbaugh would hardly approve.  In Mark 12:13-17, Jesus tells his disciples to give to Caesar what belongs to him (taxes) but nothing that belongs to God.  In Matthew 26:55-56, Jesus makes it clear that his kingdom was not about violence.

Jesus spoke frequently about politics, just not the kind of politics to which we are accustomed.  I don’t think we can ever read the gospel without seeing Jesus’ political side.

What does that mean for us?  It doesn’t necessarily mean that we align with one party or one cause.  What it does mean is that we understand that the word “politics” comes from the Greek word polis, meaning city.  The city was the building block for ancient Greece.  Athens and Sparta were hubs of the culture.  What is interesting is that for the world of Jesus, one city claimed to be the hub: Rome.  The early church didn’t see it that way.  The church was the polis.  The church was political.  They didn’t put signs in the church yard for one candidate or another.  No.  The church didn’t take political stands for or against the emperor.  the church was the life of the people.  It was their community, their polis.  Their lives were organized around the life of the church.  What mattered to Jesus mattered to the church.

We have determine what mattered to Jesus and allow it to matter to us today.  And we have been too quick to focus on one or two issues and forget the rest.