About those 10 Commandmand Roadsigns

I saw the signs in Ohio. One through five on the first sign, six through ten on the next.  Of course, going like the devil down I-70 leaves you no time to read past the first three words, but the first three words are all most of us need. "Thou shalt not," we read, and then, as the sign dwindles in our rear view mirror, we think, "That was the 10 commandments! On a roadsign!"

Now, up here in Maine, if you put that kind of sign beside the road (not that you could, since we have a law here against billboards and such), but if you did, people would whiz by and say, "Sheesh, how do they expect us to read all that!? Wonder what it was advertising."

And that's the difference, methinks, between Christendom and post-Christendom. In Christendom, it makes sense to put up that sort of billboard beside the road, I suppose. People will know what it's there for: it's there to convict. Whether or not the passing motorist cares at all about keeping the law, they know what they have just seen. It's the law of God, which they learned about in Sunday school. It's the way God wants us all to live. They might or might not believe it, but it's all part of the shared cultural baggage of Christendom. People will see the sign, be reminded of the commandments, and the gears of memory will turn in the completely predictable way. Some will scoff, some will make a mental note, and some will sense an inkling of conviction, but none will simply shrug and wonder, "What was that all about?"

Like in post-Christendom. Here, the whole Billy Graham/sinner's prayer approach will only be met with blank stares. I thought of all this when I read David Fitch's post, “You Must Admit You Are A Sinner!”: Why This Doesn’t Work in Post Christendom Evangelism [HT: Transforming Sermons]. Fitch says it well:

These kind of approaches assume a whole host of things that have been true about our own conversions, yet make no sense to people in the new worlds of post Christendom. We therefore end up coming off as incessantly judgmental, and make no point of contact for witnessing the good news. The result is often now this person will try to run and hide whenever she sees an evangelical Christian within 50 feet.

It's a good post that goes far beyond my ruminations here.

The Idol of Community

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the place of special importance of the act of "hearing" in the Bible. Yesterday I sat down with my concordance and made a list of many of the verses that have to do with hearing or with ears. "Let this sink into your ears," Jesus said, just before telling his disciples that he was going to be handed over and killed.

All this was prompted by my meditation on the first chapter of Colossians, wherein we find that the hearing of the Gospel played a crucial role in the transformation of the Colossians from a people under the dominion of darkness to a community of Christ-followers. The Gospel was spoken to them by a messenger (Epaphras), they heard and believed it, and the fruit of all this was a noteworthy faith and "love in the Spirit."

So all this was fresh in my mind when the guest preacher at our church began to speak about hearing, but with quite a different "take."

He said that we live in an age when the eye and not the ear has become "the organ of decision." People are looking for solutions to their needs "with their ears plugged."

This is cool, he said, because Christianity has nothing to do with words, but with deeds.

Shall I repeat that in bold?

He said, Christianity has nothing to do with words, but with deeds.

This fellow – who by the way seems to be a wonderful man and I enjoyed his sermon very much, even though I thought it was drastically wrong-headed – this fellow went on to say that the way to reach a society with its ears stopped is by being a community in which the love of God is visible. People, you see, are looking for community. They’re looking in all sorts of places. The church is positioned to be that community of love in which they can be themselves and can grow, which is what we are all looking for. The church can be that community through the following three practices: 1) fellowship, 2) forgiveness, and 3) unconditional live.

Finally, we can only be that community by dying to self, like the kernel of wheat that Jesus spoke of. We cry out for God’s help, and God fills us and empowers us by his Holy Spirit to be that community of love that people are looking for.

A few observations by way of response:

1) This is not the Biblical pattern. In the Biblical sequence, vividly described in Colossians 1, community is the "fruit" that followed from the hearing and believing of a message. That message was brought to them by Epaphras, who, by speaking the message of the gospel, ministered Christ to them. He was a "faithful minister of Christ Jesus" precisely because he faithfully spoke the message of the gospel to the Colossians.

2) The suggestion is that people today are drastically different than people in Paul’s day, and therefore different methods must be used. Back then, the ears were "the organ of decision." Now, the eyes are. Therefore, the NT pattern is no longer relevant. I’m just not willing to go there. I’m not willing to displace the message upon which depends, according to the New Testament, our very destiny, replacing that message with, ummm, my demonstrably inferior acts of love and good deeds.

3) According to this fellow's suggested pattern, our community of love is simply so attractive that people will choose us over other possible communities. Shall they join, say, the community of the Mormons, the community of the Buddhists, or the community of the Christians? Is our love as a community really so impressive? Mormons, for example, can make a very loving community.

4) One cannot help but notice that to join a community, even to join a community of loving Christians, is not the same thing as to hear and believe the message of the Gospel. It is simply to join a community. That is why, in my church-community and yours as well, I’ll bet, are numerous unbelievers. Membership in a "community," no matter how wonderfully loving, is not salvation. Believing the message of the gospel is.

And, finally, this is the most important point I want to make today: 5) We come very close to making an idol out of our good deeds and acts of love (or out of our wonderful "community"). I have found this to be a common mistake among us. But our good deeds and acts of love are not the gospel. They almost never, if ever, even come close to embodying the message of the gospel. The only act of love that did so was the act of Jesus described, for example, in Philippians 2. To displace the good news of that act of love with the demonstration of our own community of love in its stead is an act of idolatry.

I’m really quite amazed that a preacher and church planter could give such a sermon as this. That is, I suppose, a measure of the state of things in some parts of the church today. I am not, by the way, downplaying incarnational ministry as a vital part in the transmission of the message of the gospel. I am not forgetting that Jesus said that we should let our light shine before men, so that they will see our good deeds and give glory to the father. But I also remember that,

Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.

"Just Love on 'em." Or something.

It feels kind of improper for one blogger to link to another as often as I link to Jared Wilson's blog -- like I'm some kind of blog-stalker or something -- but Jared it just always saying things that very much need saying. In truth, I'd probably go to Jared's church if I could, but Maine to Tennessee is kind of a long commute on Sunday morning. Anyway, his post entitled Attractional and Missional is really, really good. Read it.

Now, I go to a church that operates out of the "attractional" paradigm. We like to practice what we call "service evangelism," which is doing nice things for people (washing windows, distributing cold water on a hot summer day, etc.) in the hopes that they might come to church one Sunday morning. The fellow who founded the church 15 years ago used to say, "Get 'em into church and who knows . . . they just might run into Jesus!"

The big thing, you see, is to get people to come to church. That's the "attractional" model that Jared is talking about. The trouble with this method, though, I'm sorry to say, is that it's quite unlike Biblical evangelism, which is, pure and simple, talking to people about Jesus. The other problem with this method is that a person might come to our church for quite some time and, well, not run into Jesus at all. It's a sad but a distinct possibility. Jesus is not central to the worship, and he is not typically central to the preaching (in other words, we're a typical American church!).

What then? Funny thing is, the church may grow. People may like the worship music, like the laid-back dress code, like the coffee-break in the middle of the service, even kind of like it that Jesus isn't such a big deal around here as they might have expected, and so, yes, the church might grow. And since growth is the goal, the church leaders will assume they're doing something right. And that's how the attractional model plays out on the ground.

Let me give you an example. People around the Vineyard community of churches have a phrase that I think must have begun with John Wimber. The phrase is, "Just love on 'em."

I first heard this phrase at the Vineyard, and over the years I've never heard it from anyone except Vineyardites. "Just love on 'em."

The phrase is always used in a particular context. If someone brings up the subject of evangelism, or of talking to people about Jesus, someone else is bound to say, "All you gotta do is love on 'em. Just love on 'em."

Now, let me be plain; it's a silly phrase in several ways. It's silly, for example, when compared to actual full-bore love that has nothing "just" about it. That kind of love is hard. In fact, none of us do it well. We are not such impressive lovers, by and large, we Christians (I wish we could get that through our heads to start with).

Secondly, "just love on 'em" as a kind of pre-evangelism is not even a Biblical principle, because it leaves Jesus out, or at least it leaves him to some hoped for end-of-the-process when the subject "runs into Jesus," we hope, at church. Thus, we are relieved of the onerous responsibility of having to talk about Jesus with anyone. It's too high a calling, it seems. All we have to do instead is "just" wash their windows. "Just" hand 'em some water (making sure to let them know what church you go to). But if Christ as savior from sin (which is every man or woman's problem) is not preached, how will anyone ever "run into him?"

But, see, if we're not tenaciously preaching Christ, none of the rest of it matters. We will not make disciples, although we may manage a wonderful cutting-edge contemporary church service. In fact, we will not be pursuing the great commission, doing evangelism, or even really loving people. We'll just be playing the game called building the great American church.

Note: See also Nate's post, The Jesus Paradigm in Preaching.

Preaching that does not reveal the Jesus paradigm, that uses Scripture self-servingly to promote subjectively defined values that are not the fruit of the Jesus Paradigm, that focuses on someone other than Jesus(i.e. you, the listener, 0r me, the preacher, or so-and-so, the model Christian/Biblical figure) and how he thought, related to the Father, interacted with a desperate world, conducted himself towards the salvation-agenda that God is inexorably committed to, embraced suffering and death; in the end can be defined as self-righteous, performance-rooted, unBiblical preaching, and can do nothing but produce non-disciples.

No Bible Thumping 'round Here!

The always readable Andy Crouch has a great article in Christianity Today called The Violence of Evangelism. It begins:

Let the record show that, like right-thinking people everywhere, we have been alarmed by recent rumors of people being "beaten over the head with the Bible." We do not endorse, condone, or tolerate the use of the Bible as a blunt instrument. We are shocked at the thought of unwilling converts cowering in Christian churches all over the land, in fear of further beatings-about-the-head by their proselytizing Christian neighbors. These assaults must stop at once.

Crouch is being funny, of course. The problem, when it comes to evangelism, is elsewhere:

If evangelical Protestants ever did beat people over the head with their Bibles, that era has long since passed. A commitment to evangelism, indeed, has taken many in exactly the opposite direction, to the creation of entire church environments designed with excruciating attention to the needs and tastes of irreligious people. At some of America's most evangelistically active churches, you would be hard put to find a Bible to thump. Surely no one is worried about being beaten over the head with a PowerPoint slide, though I suppose one of those projectors could hurt.

There's plenty to think about in this article, and Andy Crouch is always able to strike to the core of the issue at hand, so go and read the whole thing if you know what's good for you!

Show Up and Don't Duck

Steve Brown's March letter is out. Steve is one of the writer-teacher-preacher types that really gets it.

Someone has said that the world is run by people who just show up. I think that's true and that's exactly what Christians are called to do—just show up and be. With all our sin, our doubts, our fears, our failures, our neediness, our laughter, our freedom, our forgiveness...we need to show up. Evangelism is what happens when we are there and are real. It creates all kinds of questions for which Christ is the answer.

All we have to do is take off our masks, show up and not duck.