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In further exploring what I’ve talked about yesterday, I’ve been reading the rest of David Fitch’s posts on the subject. I want to condense some of the more pertinent ideas down here.

I believe a host of problems in American evangelicalism originate in our disregard for community. Indeed, our hyped up attraction approach to church has put the individual first in such a way that community becomes an afterthought which creates problems for discipleship, catechesis of our children, as well as evangelism. We seek to draw the individual in, sell him/her a message, and then provide communities. Community by definition becomes commodified. Instead of an individual being grafted into the Body of Christ as the very foundation of his/her salvation, this individual becomes a consumer of what kind of community best suits the kind of Christianity he or she can fit into her life. The ramifications for discipleship are disastrous.

I would agree with this. Our “evangelism proper” is highly individualized. What’s important in being a Christian looks something like this:

Confess Jesus Christ as your personal savior
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sinning less…
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Community
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I think the word he used, “afterthought” is a good way to describe it.

Roman’s Road is solid stuff. It’s not scholarly, but it’s still almost completely rational. The rhetoric masters take something akin to this approach: Convince someone that God exists and repentance and discipleship will follow naturally as they are enlightened of the error and ignorance of their ways. But really changed lives are always way more complicated than that, and the thing that complicates them (good and bad) is tied up in community.

Michael Spencer comments:

Apologetics deals with reasons, evidence, objections, etc. But I have almost never seen apologetics alone have any sort of evangelistic impact. Our problem, at root, is not intellectual or evidential, but moral.

OK. Pop quiz. Moral change is facilitated/nurtured most by:

A) The Holy Spirit
B) Reading your Bible more
C) Attending worship services
D) Moral company (Godly parents, friends, peers, and leaders)

Well (A) is a given. The Holy Spirit produces real change. (Perhaps ALL change depending on your theology.)

What about (B)? “I have hidden your word in my heart, that I might not sin against you” – Psalm 119:11. OK. You can’t discount that one.

(C)? Singing worship songs. Listening to a preacher. Real moral change? Really? Perhaps. Maybe when it’s like (B). Or maybe when it’s like (D). How often is it really like either of these? (millage may vary)

And finally (D). “Do not be deceived: Bad company corrupts good morals” – 1 Corinthians 15:33. And the opposite? Living in a community of Godly men and women nurtures real change.

Fitch really lays it down in this post about how real community is NEVER easy to break in to. Sorry.

…any community of any significant depth will present barriers to entry for the new person. The community will already know each other deeply, the visitor will not. The community will have shared a journey, struggles, pains, sorrows and joys. We will already understand deeply our purpose, our Mission as worked out for our context because we have spent months, maybe years, praying and listening to God.

We should always be hospitable in inviting others into this great life we have been called to share. But frankly, it cannot be communicated or extended through the exchange of simple pleasantries after church gathering on Sunday morning. Unfortunately, there will always be these communal hurdles to becoming part of such a community of Mission.

It takes long-term commitment. I think that the Walmart-like greeters who wear a smile and have a system to greet you going into the large church are a sign of the loss of this community. It is false, a simulacrum, and it eventually breeds cynicism.

So what do you do? If attractional evangelism is by it’s very nature shallow and low milage, but deep community is naturally a walled garden, how do we bring in new believers? How do we find this community if we move into a new community (geographically or otherwise)? Is the burden put on us to work hard to find it and break into it or even create it from scratch? Where is the Holy Spirit in all of this.

The answers you give to these questions have huge implications in church sociology, missions, and even family relations. A large portion of what I’m trying hardest to grasp and wrestle with falls under these headings.

While waiting in line at our local coffee shop, I perused some of the books on display in large shelf against the wall.

I came across Bound Only Once, a collection of essays criticizing Open Theism, edited by our local and prolific Reformed folk.

Open Theism could be described several ways. Arminianism on steroids is one of those. It is the belief that God doesn’t actually know the future. He knows all POSSIBLE futures and does shape things, but the end of the story is rather vague.

In the collection of essays, they again go out of their way to say they are NOT attacking Arminianism, but only this particularly heretical flavour of it that has surfaced a lot more often lately. They say that Open Theism IS more logical than classic Arminianism, but in the opposite direction of Calvinism. So it is more intellectually honest, but also more wrong and therefore, dangerous.

I remember that critics of Wild at Heart had their biggest beef with some of the Open Theism that shows up in John Eldridge’s controversial book. For the record, my feelings on it are rather mixed. It has a lot of problems, but also a few brilliant passages.

Anyway, throughout Bound Only Once, Open Theism is given a human face in Greg Boyd, a notable pastor, scholar and proponent of the theology.

So just today at the BHT, is this quote from Boyd:

When followers of Jesus aren’t careful to clearly distinguish the Kingdom from their own nation, we easily end up Christianizing aspects of our national culture we ought to be revolting against.

Good stuff. Where have I heard this before? From Wilson, Leithart, and the other contributors to the book in question of course! They actually don’t spend much near as much time writing and preaching against things like Open Theism as they do writing and preaching against the subversion of Chritianity by the culture (especially American culture). If someone had given me the quote above and asked me who said it, I probably would have said Wilson.

Funny what people can still have in common. Are there heretics on your team?

Don’t you wish you lived in Manhattan sometimes?

Programmer/writer Chad Fowler has some killer commentary on consumerism. Can you see yourself in any of this? Wow.

Experiment: next time a really important goal comes along, I’m not allowed to do any discretionary spending related to that goal.

My hypothesis is that unfunded life goals stand a better chance of being met.

Read the whole thing (it’s short).

Today, Michael Spencer called out EXACTLY what I’ve been thinking (and writing about) for a couple years.

Does anyone- I mean, really, seriously- have any idea what is actually happening within the worship culture of evangelicals?

Worship has now become a musical term. Praise and worship means music. Let’s worship means the band will play. We need to give more time to worship doesn’t mean silent prayer or public scripture reading or any kind of participatory liturgy. It means music.

My early (and very amateur) study of the Greek and Hebrew showed that of the 100+ times that worship appears in the Bible, it nearly always means “bowing down” and virtually never music by any stretch.

Don’t get me wrong, I love music. But music is not worship. And music you are only listening to (not participating in) is even less so. That listening to tunes is often the centerpiece of our corporate gatherings has contributed greatly to the self-destruction of the evangelical church.

I’m going to take a break from blogging for a while to refocus on some priorities.

Expect infrequent posts for at least several weeks.

Thanks to the handful of you that follow some of the things I cram in this scrapbook.

There are two kinds of people in this world…

You can follow that statement by a lot of phrases. We love to classify things.

Here in the conclusion of his anthropological Christian apologetic, Chesterton doesn’t divide the earth into Christians and non-Christians directly, but in light of the preceding discussion, from a curious angle:

The religion of the world, in its right proportions, is not divided into fine shades of mysticism or more or less rational forms of mythology. It is divided by the line between the men who are bringing that message [the gospe of Jesus] and the men who have not yet heard it, or cannot yet believe it.

And later on:

Mohammed did not, like the Magi, find a new star; he saw through his own particular window a glimpse of the great grey field of the ancient starlight. So when we say that the country contains so many Confucians or Buddhists, we mean it contains so many pagans whose prophets have given them another and rather vaguer version of the invisible power; making it not only invisible but almost impersonal.

When we say that they also have temples and idols and priests and periodical festivals, we simply mean that this sort of heathen is enough of a human being to admit the popular element of pomp and pictures and feasts and fairy-tales. We only mean that Pagans have more sense than Puritans. But what the gods are supposed to be, what the priests are commissioned to say, is not a sensational secret like what those running messengers of the Gospel had to say. Nobody else except those messengers has any Gospel; nobody else has any good news; for the simple reason that nobody else has any news.

-G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, p.309 (Conclusion)

Well that’s it for The Everlasting Man. The copy I retrieved from the library now smells like campfire smoke from my family’s trip to the woods this past weekend. I hope they don’t mind too much.

Photo credit

The local Calvinists in our town are generally very fond of Chesterton. This is a good thing! They aren’t as boring as R.C. Sproul and can typically take a joke a lot better than John MacArthur (as if that were very difficult). I’m not sure if they WERE this way, so they naturally liked what they found in Chesterton, or they BECAME a bit this way from reading him. A bit of both I’m sure. Maybe they got that way from reading too much Wodehouse or listening to too much blues. Who knows.

Chesterton himself though often takes pot shots at the TULIP folk. Yes, he always includes them in the body of Christ and as necessary for the balance of Orthodoxy to exist, but words like “vinegar” often crop up. It seems likely to me he had met several of the intolerable Scottish variety.

And we only say once more to-day as has been said many times by our fathers: `Long years and centuries ago our fathers or the founders of our people drank, as they dreamed, of the blood of God. Long years and centuries have passed since the strength of that giant vintage has been anything but a legend of the age of giants. Centuries ago already is the dark time of the second fermentation, when the wine of Catholicism turned into the vinegar of Calvinism. Long since that bitter drink has been itself diluted; rinsed out and washed away by the waters of oblivion and the wave of the world. Never did we think to taste again even that bitter tang of sincerity and the spirit, still less the richer and the sweeter strength of the purple vineyards in our dreams of the age of gold. Day by day and year by year we have lowered our hopes and lessened our convictions; we have grown more and more used to seeing those vats and vineyards overwhelmed in the waterfloods and the last savour and suggestion of that special element fading like a stain of purple upon a sea of grey. We have grown used to dilution, to dissolution, to a watering down that went on for ever. But ‘Thou hast kept the good wine until now.’

-G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, p.299

Keeping the good wine until now. Christianity has been diluted or made bitter. I was surprised to find this language here. This exact sentiment was often expressed during the rise of Pentacostalism in the past 100 years. Perhaps this language is appropriate to every age where the Lord renews and reforms the church.

Really, it can? I’m changing my mind about this.

It is that enthusiasm for theological studies that marked the most doctrinal ages; it is the divine science. An old Don with D. D. after his name may have become the typical figure of a bore; but that was because he was himself bored with his theology, not because he was excited about it. It was precisely because he was admittedly more interested in the Latin of Plautus than in the Latin of Augustine, in the Greek of Xenophon than in the Greek of Chrysostom. It was precisely because he was more interested in a dead tradition than in a decidedly living tradition. In short, it was precisely because he was himself a type of the time in which Christian faith was weak. It was not because men would not hail, if they could, the wonderful and almost wild vision of a Doctor of Divinity.

-G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, p.297

Since I’ve found church history quite a bit more interesting lately, Chesterton’s final chapter (The Five Deaths of the Faith) was one of the better ones. His observations about how Christianity seems to die every few hundred years and then blossom with fresh life is a very hopeful sentiment indeed. One can see the hand of God sustaining us, instead of we of little faith tossed on the seas of heathen sociology and politics.

The whole chapter is good, so a bit difficult to quote from.

At least five times, therefore, with the Arian and the Albigensian, with the Humanist sceptic, after Voltaire and after Darwin, the Faith has to all appearance gone to the dogs. In each of these five cases it was the dog that died…

Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a God who knew the way out of the grave. But the first extraordinary fact which marks this history is this: that Europe has been turned upside down over and over again; and that at the end of each of these revolutions the same religion has again been found on top. The Faith is always converting the age, not as an old religion but as a new religion.

-G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, p.288

It ends with a word of advice to critics. Oh every few years some celebrity critics crop up. Richard Dawkins. Bart Ehrman. Whoever. Some of them need to keep this in mind:

If our social relations and records retain their continuity, if men really learn to apply reason to the accumulating facts of so crushing a story, it would seem that sooner or later even its enemies will learn from their incessant and interminable disappointments not to look for anything so simple as its death. They may continue to war with it, but it will be as they war with nature; as they war with the landscape, as they war with the skies. ‘Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.’ They will watch for it to stumble; they will watch for it to err; they will no longer watch for it to end.