Echoes in Eternity

If you know who Andrew Peterson is, then you know how blessed my church is to be hosting him in concert this April 15th (sadly, I won't be able to be there). If you don't know who he is, you need to remedy that.

This is a good post about the future of the pro-life movement as we enter the 39th year since Roe v. Wade. I would say that the author overstates the case a little though. I think the Church is already doing many of these things. It has largely moved from a protest-first mentality to caring for the mothers and babies while also still protesting where appropriate and needed. It does support crisis pregnancy centers. It has mostly framed the debate away from stopping "evil moms from killing their kids" to a matter of human rights and a scientific definition of the beginning of life. But at the same time, the Church has far to go. We need to adopt more babies, bring more single mothers into our homes, and care for those in our community who need our help.

My church is currently working through a sermon series on being the Church. The first message can be summed up by this excerpted quote:

"Bottom line: You cannot genuinely love Christ's bride, the Church, if you only love this abstract, idealized version of the universal Church while you refuse to commit and get your hands dirty and love real people - even really messy, broken people in one localized gathering of believers. The local church is a big deal to God"

That sermon message reminded me of Doug Wilson's "shacking up with Jesus" quote. Then this morning I saw this John Stott quote over on another blog, saying a very similar thing as the aforementioned:

“The church lies at the very center of the eternal purpose of God. It is not a divine afterthought. It is not an accident of history. On the contrary, the church is God’s new community. For his purpose, conceived in a past eternity, being worked out in history, and to be perfected in a future eternity, is not just to save isolated individuals and so perpetuate our loneliness, but rather to build his church, that is, to call out of the world a people for his own glory.”

Last night, I watched "Solitary Man", a recently released film about aging businessman Ben Kalmen (played superbly by Michael Douglas) who finds himself losing everything from his health to his friends to his business to his family, in no small part due to his terrible moral choices. The movie is a surprisingly honest and realistic (for Hollywood, at least) depiction of the carnage that a self-centered, adultery-riddled, hedonistic lifestyle can create. While focused primarily on the man's sexual lusts and proclivities, it never once glorifies his choices and is surprisingly clean of graphic content considering the subject matter. In one particularly good moment in the film, he asks his one remaining friend Jimmy Merino (played by Danny Devito) why he has remained faithful to his wife of 30+ years. The friend says, "when my father gave me this [restaurant] years ago, I used to dream about these [college] girls. Every night, dreams, all kinds of dreams about 'em. But then I'd see them coming back after graduation. They'd come to homecomings, ballgames. They'd sit at the same tables, eat the same food. And I'd look at them and I noticed, they don't stay like this. None of 'em. They put on years and pounds and wrinkles. And I got one like that at home. And we can talk to each other. I know her and I'll always know her."

What does that movie have to do with the first paragraph of this post, you ask? It's this: just as our wives will eventually put on "years and pounds and wrinkles," so can our local churches. People join the church that you may not personally find that likable, or the music begins to lose touch with your particular tastes in worship style, or a new pastor just doesn't teach very well or focus on the things that you think are important. Many people in similar situations have moved on to greener church pastures, places where the band is cool, the children's program is thriving, and good coffee is served. But such spiritual adultery comes with its costs. For one, besides being disobedient to where God has placed you, jumping around from church to church rarely breeds close community. And those popular churches will one day find themselves wrinkled and old. What are you going to do then? Being faithful to the local Bride of Christ, with all its warts... that can be hard. But as the pastors and theologians above remind us, it's what we're called to be.

Wow. I'm not sure if I should laugh or cry.

[HT: My hot wife]

If you ever wondered what it looks like when people worship God in spirit and... well, just spirit, watch this video.



Hopefully I didn't ruin anyone's meal.

This may be an extreme example, but every Christian could use a reminder that God isn't looking for a bunch of emotion junkies who sing stupid songs and think worthless thoughts in their praise. He wants His people to worship Him in spirit and in truth (John 4:24).

This is sad news, but I applaud the Catholic Church for standing by Scripture.

Doug Wilson has an excellent piece today on the role of the Church in transforming culture.

The bottom line issue is this. If the Church is not transforming the culture around her, then the culture around her is transforming the Church. There is no static equilibrium point. That means that the Church will either be prophetically addressing the problem of homo-marriage, or it will be in the process of adopting homo-marriage herself. Either the church will speak about the carnage of abortion, and God's hatred of it, or the church will be in the process of bringing that hated object into the sanctuary.

God did not send His Son into the world to form and establish the Church, in order that this Church could float through the world like a ghost.

[UPDATE: This video has been questioned regarding its veracity, particularly about whether the people are being beaten because they are Christians. Because of that, the videos aren't currently available.]

Be warned, this video contains graphic violence against Christians. But it is critical to the health of the Western church to see and remember the saints who are perishing for their faith. Guess that rush hour traffic jam today wasn't so bad after all...



Francis Chan's response

(HT: JT)

The New York Times has a sad article about mainline (read: theologically liberal) churches in the American Northwest that have turned to environmentalism as a last ditch attempt to stave off the impending closure of their doors. It makes sense that they would turn to another religion to postpone the end; they abandoned Christianity long ago, but they've finally found a new god to worship: Gaia. This sentence says it all:

“I’ve never been good at door-to-door evangelism,” said Deb Conklin, the pastor {emphasis mine} at Liberty Park United Methodist Church in Spokane, Wash., where an aging and shrinking congregation of about 20 people worships on Sundays. “But this has been so fun. Everybody wants to talk to you. It’s exciting. It’s ministry.”

Thank God that only through Christ can a church remain alive. These churches will die, and good riddance.

If the health care bill passes, every American will be required to buy health insurance or face jail time. If that comes as a surprise to you, time to WAKE UP! If it doesn't, what may surprise you is that there is a clause in the current bill to allow people (like the Amish) to opt out based on their religious conscience.

The Amish, as well as some other religious sects, are covered by a "religious conscience" exemption, which allows people with religious objections to insurance to opt out of the mandate. It is in both the House and Senate versions of the bill, making its appearance in the final version routine unless there are last-minute objections.

Although the Amish consist of several branches, some more conservative than others, they generally rely upon a community ethic that disdains government assistance. Families rely upon one another, and communities pitch in to help neighbors pay health care expenses.

It seems like the American Church is long overdue in following in the BIBLICAL footsteps of its Amish sister. All Christians should be helping each other pay for health care expenses rather than relying on the teat of state aid. If this bill passes, we should all grow a "religious conscience" and begin co-ops where the local church cares for each other's needs, as the early church did.

If your church is like mine, you've likely noticed a tendency in the oldest generation to sit in a certain spot in the sanctuary, to go to a certain worship service and/or Sunday school, and to generally have different tastes than the younger members. In fact, my church, a rather large one (3000 attendees per Sunday), has an early "traditional" service almost completely devoted to those of a senior citizen age (who all go en masse to a group Sunday school afterward). Meanwhile, on the other end of the age spectrum, it also offers a Sunday night "alternative" (at least for now, eventually "alternative" becomes "traditional") service primarily geared toward 20-somethings.**

As anyone who's been around churches for awhile will tell you, this is nothing new. Ever since Absalom got tired of sitting with his parents David and Maacah at the front of the Tab and wanted to sit with the cool kids up in the balcony while Grandpa Jesse sat two rows beyond the reach of his hearing, people have naturally tended to flock together according to their age. And nothing is inherently wrong with that inclination. But what happens when the Church begins to intentionally divide according to age groups or put old people "out to pasture"... isn't there a likelihood that a form of ageism will set in where youth is treasured more than age and experience? I've been thinking a lot about that recently because my own church struggles a lot with including the elderly in the life of the church. It has a great focus on bringing together different ethnicities and cultures, yet it seems that the unwritten rule when it comes to age is that once you turn 65, you're expected to be seen and not heard.

This ageism is rampant in our society (the size of homes are ever increasing yet no one seems to able to find room to house Grandpa or Grandma... the family on Gran Torino seems less and less a parody of real life) and, in some ways, the Church isn't far behind. This blogger discusses this issue further.

In our efforts to multiculturalize the church -- which is a great effort and a godly one -- let's not forget the need to multigenerationalize the church. Is your church monogenerational? If not, are your seniors second class citizens in your church? If so, what can you do to fix this?

The kingdom of God turns the tables on business as usual, and this includes church business as usual. The countercultural call of the kingdom requires a revolutionary ageism, where we actually honor our elders above ourselves and our youngers, actually honor those we are most tempted to deem having outlived their usefulness.

So how can we be intentionally multigenerational?

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**To the credit of the alternative service planners, they did have a worship service a couple months ago where they invited the senior citizens in the church to worship with them.

So a priest in the UK is telling his congregation that if they're struggling financially, they should shoplift. But make sure it's a big chain and not a local small business. Somehow, I don't think the apostle Paul would appreciate what the Western Church has come to.

Kevin DeYoung has an excellent piece regarding the Gospel in (it appears) response to Shane Claiborne’s recent letter to unbelievers in Esquire. Read Claiborne’s piece first then check out DeYoung’s response. It’s spot on.

The New Gospel generally has four parts to it.

It usually starts with an apology…

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Then there is an appeal to God as love…

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The third part of the New Gospel is an invitation to join God on his mission in the world…

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And finally, there is a studied ambivalence about eternity…

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This way of telling the good news of Christianity is very chic. It’s popular for several reasons.

1. It is partially true. God is love. The kingdom has come. Christians can be stupid. The particulars of the New Gospel are often justifiable.

2. It deals with straw men. The bad guys are apocalyptic street preachers, Crusaders, and caricatures of an evangelical view of salvation.

3. The New Gospel leads people to believe wrong things without explicitly stating those wrong things. That is, Christians who espouse the New Gospel feel safe from criticism because they never actually said belief is unimportant, or there is no hell, or that Jesus isn’t the only way, or that God has no wrath, or that there is no need for repentance.

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4. It is manageable. The New Gospel meets people where they are and leaves them there. It appeals to love and helping our neighbors. And it makes the appeal in a way that repudiates any hint of judgmentalism, intolerance, or religiosity. This is bound to be popular. It tells us what we want to hear and gives us something we can do.

5. The New Gospel is inspirational. This is what makes the message so appealing to young people in particular.

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6. The New Gospel has no offense to it. This is why the message is so attractive. The bad guys are all “out there.” This can be a problem for any of us. We are all prone to soft-pedaling the gospel, only presenting the attractive parts and failing to mention where Christ does not just comfort but also confronts. And it must confront more than the sins of others. [emphasis added]

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This is no small issue. And it is not just a matter of emphasis. The New Gospel will not sustain the church. It cannot change the heart. And it does not save. It is crucial, therefore, that our evangelical schools, camps, conferences, publishing houses, and churches can discern the new gospel from the old.

Doug Wilson wrote a brilliant post yesterday on the new hate crimes legislation making its way through Congress. Wilson correctly points out that "[s]oon the denunciation of real sin from the pulpit ... will be illegal as well." It's happened around the world, and while the First Amendment may prove more difficult to circumvent, eventually it too will fall.

Wilson goes on to make an important distinction between the gospel that the world wants Christians to proclaim and the Gospel that God commands us to tell.

The central distinction we must learn to make here is the difference between sin in the sense of shortcoming and failure, and sin in the sense of high-handed rebellion. This especially includes sexual sin. This division between failure and rebellion should not be understood as one marking the difference between forgiveable and unforgiveable. Saul of Tarsus was guilty of the latter, and God converted him on the Damascus road anyway. And many live their lives in the former, drifting in a slow spiral as they circle the rim of Hell. So we should understand that lethargic refusal to repent of moral failures is something that will harden into a high-handed and everlasting rebellion. But in the meantime, the difference is not one of forgiveability.

So what is the difference then? The difference can most readily be seen in the attitude that the Church should take toward the practitioners and advocates of those sins. Practitioners of sins are those who commit them. Advocates are those who present the way of sin as though it were a new gospel, which, in their confused world, it is. The Church must always have her doors open to any refugees from the world, no matter how tattered or mangled they may be (Jude 23). Are you a practitioner of sin? Then welcome. Have you wasted your substance on hookers and cocaine? Then welcome. Are you the ultimate of sexual losers? Then welcome.

Are you the adulterous woman who wipes her mouth and says she has done no wrong? Then here is the door. Are you among those who call good evil and evil good, who substitute male for female and female for male, calling upon the UN to enforce your fundamental human right to hump whatever you please? Then good bye. Are you a Jezebel, teaching believers that fornication is part of Christian liberty? Then God will cast you into a bed of tribulation. There is no tolerance of that kind of hellish doctrine thing here.

This distinction must be held out and publicly maintained constantly. If the distinction is blurred, even slightly, then we are preaching a false gospel to our children, those who are growing up in our midst. Without this distinction, the more clearly we fight the apostles of a false sexual gospel (as we must), the more we are going to confuse and terrify those afflicted by lust who know that their lust is sin. Those who know that their sexual failures are sin are in a different category than those who want to remake the world in a way that conforms to their lusts.
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Jesus did not come to die on the cross in order to save those who had succeeded in sinning just a little bit.
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Summarized another way, sin as rebellion is thrown into Hell. Sin as confessed failure is ushered into Heaven with a fanfare of trumpets. This being the case, the Church -- a foretaste of what God is up to in all history -- should reflect the same set of values. In the New Testament, false teachers and their corruptions are escorted to the door and are handed their hat, and the "such were some of you" Corinthians are escorted to the Table, and are bidden to sit and eat. In the modern church, confused as we are about this, we reverse this. We shove the failures aside roughly, and treat the scholars of sodomy with far more respect than they deserve.

So then, in conclusion, if the hate crimes legislation is passed and signed into law, every faithful pastor in America will make sure he commits a "hate crime" the following Sunday in his pulpit. And in that same message, if he is worth his salt, he will extend the hand of grace to every struggling sinner there. Come, and welcome, he will say, to Jesus Christ.

"Church discipline" has gone out of vogue in recent years within the American church. In the rush to avoid judgment in our world of moral relativism, no one is willing to call a spade a spade in fear of committing the ultimate of sins in our society: hypocrisy and prejudice (of course, these words have lost most of their original meaning). After all, aren't we all sinners deserving of judgment? And that is most certainly true. I am, as the Apostle Paul would say, the worst of sinners, or at least, the worst sinner I know (since I know the depths of my depravity much more clearly than I know anyone else's). And Jesus did say not to judge others (Luke 6:37) or to at least first yank out the "log" of sin from your own life before tweezering out the sinful "speck" in the life of a brother. Paul agreed as well with respect to not judging unbelievers (Romans 2:1). Yet Jesus also commanded us to throw an unrepentant brother out of the Christian community (Matthew 18:15-17). It would seem that perhaps the word "judge" means a couple different things or at least is only to be done with right motives and a clean conscience. We ARE to judge (but only those in the Church (1 Cor. 5:12-13), but ONLY to do so with plenty of humility and only out of love for the person and a desire to see them gain eternal life (James 5:20), thus more of the idea of restoration over discipline.

On the rare occasion that we do see church discipline today, many times it is not done well or in a particularly biblical manner. Jesus' four steps aren't followed or it's done in the wrong spirit or on an inconsistent basis (e.g. an adulterous woman is more severely ostracized than the adulterous man). So it encouraged me greatly to see a community of believers at my church be obedient AND faithful to God by practicing church discipline properly and in the right spirit. Both in the message and at last night's Keystone, Pastor Bryan gave the following three reasons for church discipline:

• Serious doctrinal error that warps the church (Gal. 1:6-9)
  
• Deep divisiveness that damages unity in the church (Titus 3:10-11)
  
• Severe, persistent, and unrepentant moral failing (1 Cor. 5:1-13)

What doesn't qualify under these (usually) is something like habitual speeding, smoking, gluttony, etc. In those cases, maybe talk to the person and keep reminding him that he isn't helping his spiritual health (or physical health, as might be the case) by his enslavement to that bad habit, but if he doesn't repent, do as the Dude in "The Big Lebowski" and abide.

And always, do all correction with a broken and humble heart; broken over the sin in the life of your brother or sister and humble due to the sin within your own life or the possibility that but for the grace of God, there go you.