In the Metricized Church Size Matters More Than Love

Mushroom, in my backyard

I have a stack of books I am reading to inform myself while writing my book Technology and Spiritual Formation. This book will be stage 2, the first being the other book I am now  writing, How God Changes the Human Heart (A Phenomenology of Spiritual Transformation).

Two of my tech books are by former NYU Professor of Culture and Communication, Neil Postman. They are Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1986), and Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (1993). As my friend Dr. Jim Devries told me, "Postman was prescient."

Reading Postman, I am learning much and some pieces are coming together, even as regards the American Church, which in many ways has surrendered to technology.

One way this has happened is the Worship of Metrics. Of Numbers. As the way to measure "success" (beware of that word, followers of Jesus!).

This has not always been the case.

For example, teachers have not always assigned numerical grades to students' work. Postman writes, "when we use such a technology to judge someone's behavior, we have done something peculiar."

Postman continues, in explanation:

"In point of fact, the first instance of grading students' papers occurred at Cambridge University in 1792 at the suggestion of a tutor named William Farish. No one knows much about William Farish; not more than a handful have ever heard of him. And yet his idea that a quantitative value should be assigned to human thoughts was a major step toward constructing a mathematical concept of reality. If a number can be given to the quality of a thought, then a number can be given to the qualities of mercy, love, hate, beauty, creativity, intelligence, even sanity itself.." (Technopoly, p. 13)

Postman doesn't think this is stupid, just strange. Odd. Odd, that one would metricize value.

Just as odd, I think, that clergy would begin to metricize Church on a Success/Failure scale. 

More than this, punishing. Worth-killing. Striving...  to up the numbers. Because in the Metricized Church size matters more than love.


***

My two books are:

Praying: Reflections on 40 Years of Solitary Conversations with God

Leading the Presence-Driven Church 

Many American Churches Dismiss the Supernatural and Miraculous

Jet, taking off at Detroit Metro Airport

I want every follower of Jesus to read Lee Strobel's The Case for Miracles. It's all very good. Especially good for the Church is Strobel's interview with theologian Roger Olson. It reminds me, just a bit, of Karl Barth's discovery of, and return to, "the strange world within the Bible."

In the a-Western, odd world of the four Gospels, we see Jesus praying for the sick, healing people, casting out demons, and raising the dead. (Jesus believed demons were real, correct? How fantastic for us not to!)

In the even stranger world of the American Church we are praying, not for healing, not against demons, but that God would (supernaturally?) "guide the doctor's hands" and "comfort the person in their suffering" (supernaturally?) As nice as that sounds, this strategy is not found in the strange world of the Gospels.

Olson challenges this. Strobel writes that Olson's point is that, "whether they recognize it or not, many American evangelicals have relegated the supernatural and miraculous to the past (biblical times) and elsewhere (mission fields) rather than seeing them as an ever-present possibility in their lives." (pp. 219-220)

Olson asks Strobel, "What's missing in the Church today?"

Strobel: “Asking God to supernaturally heal them.” 

Olson: “Precisely. The Bible says to pray for their healing, lay hands on them, and anoint them with oil, but mainstream evangelicals tend to look down their noses at churches that do that. They suspect those churches are cultic or discourage ill people to seek medical treatment. What’s more, they avoid any mention of demons, and they shun exorcism as primitive and superstitious—unless Jesus did it.”

In thinking this way American evangelicals have unwittingly adopted "the teachings of Friedrich Schleiermacher, the father of modern theological liberalism, who denigrated petitionary prayer as something that children do because they don't know any better." (Olson, in Ib.)

When people were sick, or troubled, WDJD? What did Jesus do? 

***
My two books are:

Praying: Reflections on 40 Years of Solitary Conversations with God (May 2016)

Leading the Presence-Driven Church (January 2018)

I am now writing:

How God Changes the Human Heart

Technology and Spiritual Formation

Many Choose Predictability Over the Holy Spirit

Downtown Monroe

Last Sunday morning at Redeemer was one of those worship experiences where the Holy Spirit took us in unexpected directions. As it was happening, I addressed the people, especially those new to us, and said, "We just left the program."

Then I added, "Actually, we don't have a program."

This is because the Holy Spirit is non-programmable and unpredictable.

Correct? Do you agree? Or, do you really believe we can control the Spirit of God? Or that we should try to do so?

Does it make any rational sense at all to think any of us can predict the ways of an omniscient God?

Isn't it far better to allow the Holy Spirit to lead us, rather than to have a "safe" religious service where nothing weird happens?

I write about being led by God's Spirit in Leading the Presence-Driven Church. Lee Strobel writes about this in his new book The Case for Miracles: a Journalist Investigates Evidence for the Supernatural. 

One of Strobel's interviews is with Baylor theologian Roger Olson. Every follower of Jesus who loves the Church needs to read this interview.

One of the problems in the American Church, Olson says, is the lust for predictability and, hence, "safety." Strobel writes:

"I mentally scrolled through Acts, which unfolds the story of the early church. The apostles seemed to go around expecting that when Jesus and his resurrection were proclaimed, something supernatural might very well occur. But that’s not true today, Olson said. 

“All we expect to happen these days when we proclaim Jesus and the resurrection is that people will nicely nod and say, ‘Oh, we agree with that.’ Then they go home and live as if that’s not really true, because they don’t expect miracles to happen anymore. They don’t expect God to do things that are inexplicable. It would make their life unpredictable.” 

“That’s a sad perspective for a Christian,” I said. 

“It should be, yes. But I think a lot of people are happier living with predictability than really expecting that God will do unusual things in their lives. They hear of supernatural activity and miracles miracles happening in Africa, and they say, ‘Well, praise God,’ but the unsaid part is, I’m really glad it doesn’t happen here. That would be scary. That would be threatening.” (Strobel, 219)

Aslan is not a tame Lion. Not really.

***
(Join us in two weeks when Steve Backlund from Bethel Redding comes to Redeemer. 
Join us when Darren Wilson premieres his new movie "Finger of God 2" at Redeemer - date and time TBA.)

The American Church: Embarrassed by God's Presence

Cottonwood tree in my backyard

For anyone following this, it's old news: the American Church is, for the most part, secularized. We have been captured and colonized. (On how to decolonize see my chapter "The Language of the Presence-Driven Church" in Leading the Presence-Driven Church.)

Lee Strobel, via theologian Roger Olson, agrees. One of Strobel's interviews in The Case for Miracles is with Olson. Olson says,

"American religion in general has become secularized. That is, a lot of churches don’t really believe that God intervenes or guides, except through what we might call human wisdom and reason.

... “My point is that American evangelical Christianity has accommodated to modernity’s rationalism and naturalism,” he said. “The truth is, they don’t really expect God to do anything except in their interior spiritual lives. They pay lip service to the supernatural, whereas the Bible itself is saturated with it.” (Strobel, The Case for Miracles: A Journalist Investigates Evidence for the Supernatural, p. 218) 

In Western Christianity, secularity prevails. Olson states:

“Years ago, I noticed that churches were tending not to think biblically or theologically about the way they ran their operations. Decisions seemed secular to me, as if they were being made in the boardroom of a corporation. They’d ask, ‘Will this fit into our budget?’ regardless of any faith that more funding could come in. They wanted predictability." 

So much for the Holy Spirit, who is unpredictable, non-programmable, uncontrollable, and as unsafe as C.S. Lewis's Aslan!

Strobel mentions an article co-written by Stanley Hauerwas and Will Willimon in 1986, "Embarrassed By God's Presence." Strobel writes:

After nearly three pages of largely gentlemanly prose, [Hauerwas and Willimon] were blunt in their bottom-line assessment: “The central problem for our church, its theology, and its ethics is that it is simply atheistic.”

Yes, you read that quote correctly. They were accusing mainline churches of conducting their business as if God didn’t really matter. “We endow pensions for our clergy and devise strategies for church growth,” they wrote, “as if God were not here.” 

How does this godless presupposition affect the church? “Our Sunday worship is immoral and indifferent (if not rather silly) unless we really believe that God is present in our gathering and in the world..." (Strobel, 217)

My Belief in Non-physical Realities

Jerusalem

I have an atheist friend from my distant past who is amazed, and at times amused, that I believe in spiritual realities, especially:

1) A non-physical, immaterial being - AKA God;  

2) spiritual, unembodied beings - AKA angels and demons;

and 

3) the human soul - AKA you.

But of course. A real atheist would think this about someone like me. 

Because, on the atheist worldview (philosophical naturalism), immaterial things cannot exist. An atheist who believed in spiritual beings (and objective moral values) is a poor village atheist who has not understood the logic of their foundational belief-claim.

Such is the nature of worldviews; viz., one sees other worldview-beliefs as amusing and absurd. I'm no exception here, since I find the intra-worldview beliefs of atheism absurd, if not at times amusing. I tilt my head in wonder at my atheist friend's intra-atheistic discussions, since I find philosophical naturalism infested with intractable problems. I could never rationally accept his beliefs. Like, e.g., downright funny [to me] atheistic claims to be "brights" and "freethinkers" when, on philosophical materialism, neither the "mind" nor "free will" exists [e.g., see Daniel Dennett et. al.].

The atheist who bwa-ha-ha's my belief in nonphysical realities is like the chess player who laughs at the football player because they believe in field goals. Put in a Wittgensteinian way, the language games of atheism and theism lack significant overlap in terms of their core beliefs. If one wants to have meaningful discussion here, one must formulate and evaluate on the level of "worldview," not on intra-worldview matters. (Which is where a lot of atheist twittering and chattering happens.)

As for me - I believe in God, I believe persons have souls. I believe in spiritual beings such as angels and demons. All this, grounded in my preexisting worldview.

For some philosophical assaults on philosophical naturalism that I am familiar with see, e.g.:

The Waning of Materialism, Robert Koons and George Bealer, eds. 

"Twenty-three philosophers examine the doctrine of materialism find it wanting. The case against materialism comprises arguments from conscious experience, from the unity and identity of the person, from intentionality, mental causation, and knowledge. The contributors include leaders in the fields of philosophy of mind, metaphysics, ontology, and epistemology, who respond ably to the most recent versions and defenses of materialism. The modal arguments of Kripke and Chalmers, Jackson's knowledge argument, Kim's exclusion problem, and Burge's anti-individualism all play a part in the building of a powerful cumulative case against the materialist research program. Several papers address the implications of contemporary brain and cognitive research (the psychophysics of color perception, blindsight, and the effects of commissurotomies), adding a posteriori arguments to the classical a priori critique of reductionism. All of the current versions of materialism-reductive and non-reductive, functionalist, eliminativist, and new wave materialism-come under sustained and trenchant attack. In addition, a wide variety of alternatives to the materialist conception of the person receive new and illuminating attention, including anti-materialist versions of naturalism, property dualism, Aristotelian and Thomistic hylomorphism, and non-Cartesian accounts of substance dualism." (from amazon.com summary)

See also Naturalism, by Stuart Goetz and Charles Taliaferro.

And J. P. Moreland, The Recalcitrant Image: Human Persons and the Failure of Naturalism. 



***
My two books are:

Praying: Reflections on 40 Years of Solitary Conversations with God

Leading the Presence-Driven Church 

I am working on two more books...

How God Changes the Human Heart

Technology and Spiritual Formation

Three Books for Summer Reading

Bluejay on our back deck

Here are three books I read in the past two weeks. I could not put them down!

Michael Brown, Playing with Holy Fire: A Wake-Up Call to the Pentecostal-Charismatic Church. This is must-reading for all of us in the Pentecostal-Charismatic stream. I would love to have many of my HSRM friends read Michael's book before he joins us at our conference in June. 

Jack Deere, Even in Our Darkness: A Story of Beauty in a Broken Life. I could not put it down.

Lee Strobel, The Case for Miracles: A Journalist Investigates Evidence for the Supernatural. This book will reawaken you to the reality of God's power manifested in healing and miracles. And, in the Craig Keener interview, Craig talks about one of the healing miracles we saw at Redeemer. 

It Is a Fearful Thing to Grow in Love

Bamboo, outside of Brasilia, Brazil

What our diseased world needs now is love. I pray for love to fully rescue my imprisoned heart. 

Thomas Merton writes: "Now I see more and more that there is only one realistic answer: Love. I have got to dare to love, and to bear the anxiety of self-questioning that love arouses in me, until “perfect love casts out fear.”"[1] 

How do I “dare to love?” I think it means abiding in Christ and, in the intimacy of this union, ask God to produce his love in me. God's love is so transcendent and beautiful that only God could transform my heart.

As the transformation happens, I will acquire love’s attributes. I will…

• become patient
• become kind
• not envy
• not boast
• not be prideful
• not dishonor others
• not be self-seeking
• not be easily angered
• keep no record of wrongs
• not delight in evil
• rejoice with the truth
• alway protects
• alway trusts
• alway hopes
• alway perseveres
• never fail

I will sacrifice for others. Jesus said "anyone who loves their life will lose it."[2] And: "Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends."[3]

My love domain will expand. Jesus said, "Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you."[4] In this way, love is power. With love, things come together; with war, things fall apart. Christ’s love, in me, will be reconciling and restoring.

The world needs love. I need love. The only answer is God. 

Love's primal, aboriginal subject is God. Jesus said, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’; and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”[5] "Love" is defined by the being of God. God is love, in essence.

The world fails to find love apart from God. Love makes no rational sense without God. Without God, and if there is no God, love does not exist. 

Atheist physicist Stephen Weinberg acknowledged this.[6] Weinberg's scientism causes him to conclude that "the worldview of science is rather chilling...  the emotions that we most treasure, our love for our wives and husbands and children, are made possible by chemical processes in our brains that are what they are as a result of natural selection acting on chance mutations over millions of years."

Weinberg is correct. If there is no God, there is no "love," since all our emotions, to include "love," are but chemical processes in our physical brains. 

Weinberg is incorrect. There is a God. This God is love. God’s love looks like Jesus. It is the only answer.

I once heard that the actor John Wayne defined “courage” as being afraid, but saddling up anyway. It is a fearful thing to grow in love, because it requires deep change. Say the word “change,” and choruses of trepidation sing. 

Courage is needed. 

I am praying for courage to love.

---

[1] Merton, Learning to Love: Exploring Solitude and Freedom (The Journals of Thomas Merton), New York: Harper Collins, Kindle Locations 857-858, April 25, 1966.

[2] John 12:25

[3] John 15:13

[4] Matthew 5:44

[5] Matthew 22:37-39

[6] Stephen Weinberg, “Without God.” The New York Review of Books, September 25, 2008.

***

My two books are:

Praying: Reflections on 40 Years of Solitary Conversations with God

Leading the Presence-Driven Church 

You Will Experience the Truth, and the Truth Will Set You Free

Hole, in the lower right corner of the window screen

Wednesday morning. Another day of experiencing God begins.

Jesus said, You will experience the truth, and the truth will set you free. (John 8:32) Such experience happens today.

There are two kinds of knowledge: 1) knowledge by experience; and 2) knowledge by theory. If a theory has no experiential cash value, it can usually be discarded. Experience convinces, in ways theories cannot do.

Take "Emmanuel" literally. God, with me, in experience and encounter. I know God this way. This happens now. Now, God is with me.

The kind of knowledge intended by the Greek word in John 8:32 is experiential knowledge, not simply intellectual knowing. Some will respond, "Whoaaa, careful now, watch out for experiences. Don't base your doctrine on experiences!" But "in the real world experience counts for a lot, and any theory that does not work in experience is soon to be discarded." (Charles Kraft, Confronting Powerless Christianity, Kindle Location 74)

One day Linda and I were sitting in the upstairs office of our home. We noticed a wasp in the room. I opened the window, in hopes the wasp would see it. It did, and flew to attach itself to the window screen. I closed the window, encasing the wasp between the glass and the screen.

The world between the glass and the screen is a prison. Tiny, in comparison to the world beyond the screen. I was hoping the wasp would find the hole in the lower right corner, and make its way into the vast freedom of the outside world.

We left our office and went off into the day. Eight hours later I returned, only to see the wasp in the same position, attached to the screen, looking at the unreachable reality lying before it. It was unaware that, only a few inches away, the prison door was open.

And then, the wasp slowly rotated, turning 180 degrees, and began walking down the screen, towards the opening. Would it make it to freedom? Finding the hole, the wasp perched on it for a moment, moved its wings, and exchanged the barren environment for a world of rich experiential possibilities.

When you read the story of Jesus in the Gospels, and the experiences of the first church in the book of Acts, it can seem like these are unattainable realities. But the truth of the gospel is that the kingdom of heaven is available and accessible, presently, in experience. You will know this, and by it you will be free.

***
See the chapter on "The Case for Experience" in my book Leading the Presence-Driven Church ($4.80 on Kindle).

Throughout my book on prayer I write of the experience of God - Praying: Reflections on 40 Years of Solitary Conversations with God (now $6.00 on Kindle).

We Need God, Not Words About God

Monroe County

If God is not with me, experientially, then what good is he to me? 

What I deeply need is God, not words about God. I need God to walk before, with, and behind me in this desacralized, disenchanted world. If this is not real, experientially, then at most I am left with deism, and at worst I am an atheist.

I need God with me presently, because I am not smart enough to guide my own life, much less assist others on the way. I am not powerful enough to halt the eroding wasting-away of my physical body, much less heal others. I am not loving enough to overwhelm my enemies, and even struggle with loving myself. I am a flower that emerges from the ground, blooms, then quickly withers and dies. I am an ocean wave that crashes and recedes. I am weak in time and space, body and mind, strength and soul, a virtually unknown speck of matter in an ever-cycling faceless mass of humanity, situated in a universe that is beyond all human comprehension. 

That’s me. That’s us. We are fragile, and small. 

I am weak, but God is strong. This is my condition. I need help. On my own I am not strong enough, knowledgeable enough, or loving enough to do the job God asks of me. God, however, is omnibenevolent, omnipotent, and omniscient. If I could connect with God, the resources that are his being could flow into me. I need God with me. 

Is not this what we have been promised? The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel (which means “God with us”). I assume this does not mean God is with me, in theory.

- From John Piippo, Leading the Presence-Driven Church, (Kindle Locations 168-183). 

more on.... Perichoresis

I recently posted on perichoresis as a concept the early church used to describe the complex unity of the Trinitarian being of God. (See here.)

Stephen Seamands has insight into perichoresis, writing about it in Ministry in the Image of God: The Trinitarian Shape of Christian Ministry. Here are some highlights.

"Perichoresis conveys a number of ideas: reciprocity, interchange, giving to and receiving from one another, other, being drawn to one another and contained in the other, interpenetrating penetrating one another by drawing life from and pouring life into one another as a fellowship of love." (Kindle Locations 1405-1406)

Theologian Jurgen Moltmann says, "The doctrine of perichoresis choresis links together in a brilliant way the threeness and the unity, without reducing the threeness to the unity, or dissolving the unity in the threeness." (K 1408)

"The earliest theological use of this term was in discussions concerning cerning the two natures of Christ. Theologians like Gregory Nazianzen zen and Maximus the Confessor used it to portray the mutual indwelling dwelling and interpenetration of the divine and human actions of the one person of Christ." (K 1408-1410)

"Perichoresis was first used in reference to the Trinity in the sixth century by a writer known to us as "pseudo-Cyril" and was popularized ized in the eighth century through the writings of John of Damascus." (K 1411-1412)

"In order to convey this more active sense of perichoresis, theologians in the Middle Ages used the image of a divine dance. The Greek noun perichoresis, they noted, is closely related to perichoreuo, the Greek verb that literally means "to dance around" or "to dance in a circle" (derived from the noun choreia, dance, from which we get our English word choreography)." (K 1423-1425)

"Perichoresis is both passive and active, both rest and motion, both indwelling and interpenetration. In a sublime way, Rublev's icon portrays the perichoresis of the Trinity. (K 1430-1431)

Andrei Rublev, "Trinity", 15th century