RealCurrents

I recently quoted, in AeroGo of all places, from Eugene Peterson’s Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places. Peterson’s willingness to take (as scientists, engineers and environmentalists do) a serious interest in creation is one reason this is an important book. It’s unfortunately rare to find a book that seriously grapples with basic elements of our world such as time, place, animals, etc., from a Trinitarian theological perspective (though James Jordan’s Through New Eyes and Gary North’s Is the World Running Down? are worthy examples).

In doing so, Peterson considers a lot of issues fundamental to the Christian life. His 350pp book is especially strong in addressing the need for a proper balance between theology/scripture and practical living, and I bet a lot of folks will be surprised to read his treatment of some things.

We’ve been reading it in my Sunday school class, and I’ve really liked it, yet still have a long way to go to finish it. Consequently, I can’t definitely recommend it in total yet (I’ve been disappointed quite a few times by books that started out strong diagnosing a problem, and then fell off a cliff trying to prescribe a solution). Nevertheless, the book deals with a lot of the same issues I’ve looked at for years in parts of my research. In essence, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places is taking direct aim at many of the key subjects the Church has either studiously avoided or never seriously considered, but really needs to be grappling with in an age increasingly fascinated with both technology and spirituality.

Let me just give a couple of quick examples of this. The first is escapist premillennial/pre-trib/rapture eschatology (whatever you want to call it). Rather than get into an endless debate about the books of Daniel and Revelation, Peterson simply shows (pp. 65-71), from Genesis 1, how the trite “waiting for Jesus to come back” is really a failure to respond in gratefulness to God’s gift of time to us.

Second, regarding creation, one of the most common questions I hear folks ask about spiritual things is “What happens to animals when they die?” It’s disturbing then, considering that God started the Bible talking about His creation, how little the Church has seemed interested in so much of it (and so, at times, of science). Peterson doesn’t address, specifically, this question, but does consider (pp. 77-82) some of the basic differences between people and animals, disctinctions which, if understood, would cast the human evolution debate in a whole different light.

To sum up, regardless of potential faults, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places may well prove to be one of the books that sets the “paradigm” for Christian thinking in the 21st century. And, yes, we certainly need a paradigm shift - a la Thomas Kuhn - to clear out a lot of the accumulated debris that’s impeded the Church’s thinking, and positive impact on our world, for well over a century.

Today is Election Day in the U.S., and as good a time as any I guess to comment on the odd state of politics in this country. This morning I found myself trying to motivate my 18 year old daughter to vote. Obviously I’d like her to listen to my advice on how to vote, but I’m really more concerned that she learns both to value the right to vote and to take her duty to participate in the process seriously.

She says that she really isn’t interested in politics and so doesn’t know who to vote for. I can’t really blame her; the fact is, politics attracts a lot of goofball or even downright nasty people.

And that’s really the point that began crystallizing in my thoughts this morning as we talked. As voters, our main goal must be to play defense, not offense, to keep the really bad folks from gaining the reins of power.

Every generation seems to produce a new crop of political idealists who think they can solve a bunch of the world’s problems through politics. Of course, in my generation this was the “Christian right”, which swept Ronald Reagan into the White House in 1980. A lot of these folks got disillusioned early on, when Reagan appointed moderates or liberals to many posts (such as the Dept. of Education, which he had vowed to abolish) and kept a hands-off management style that let them work against his stated agenda.

My church seems to have a fair assortment of folks like this, some of whom apparently don’t even vote any more. I guess anyone could understand their disillusionment with politics, but I think we need to grasp that it’s much more important to vote against a bad candidate than to find a good one to vote for. Nearly all candidates will disappoint, but then we shouldn’t be expecting so much out of government to begin with.

When I was a child, it seemed that whenever someone was asked who they were voting for, the standard answer was “for the lesser of two evils”. I never much liked that answer, but everyone understood that was pretty much the way it was with politics.

As David Kuo’s recent book Tempting Faith (of which I’ve read only a little) warns, I think we need to move away from the idealism and get back to that more realist sort of mindset about politics.

Actually, if you look at the way the recent national elections have turned out, the Republicans’ closing the gap in the weeks leading up to the vote can probably be explained by this way of thinking. Before the election, people are dissatisfied and generally unhappy a lot of times with the folks in power, because they usually are disappointed in various ways. However, as Election Day nears, they start thinking more in terms of whether the alternative would be any better, and if the other party’s candidate(s) look worse, will move back toward the incumbents.

In 2004, I think the courts were the issue that really drove a lot of conservatives and moderates to end up voting Republican, as concerns have continued to grow that the judiciary is getting out of control. Osama’s message just weeks before the election also likely encouraged a lot of folks to vote for Bush. This year, while Osama has, notably, remained very quiet, the driving issue for a lot of folks, the perceived “greater of two evils”, is keeping very liberal Democrats from gaining control of Congress and its committees.

John Kerry’s recent remarks have added fuel to the fire by rekindling concerns of Democrats being weak on defense and unsupportive of the military.

It’s clear that a lot of folks are upset with the Republicans’ leadership of recent years. I guess most liberals and moderates are mainly upset with Bush, who certainly hasn’t listened enough, but I think most conservative Republicans are almost as upset with the Republican Congress, which has failed to fulfill two of its primary duties: providing a check on the Executive Branch and controlling spending.

In my view, the bigger failure has been with Congress, not Bush, because Congress has largely abdicated its responsibilities. This is why we haven’t, as I’ve noted before, had a real debate about our strategy and long-term goals with Iraq and the war on terror. The Republicans in Congress have pretty much given in to Bush on foreign policy, when it’s clearly not his area of strength. At the same time, spending has been out of control.

Nevertheless, while it’s clear a lot of conservative Republicans are fed up, the Democrats have clung so far to the left that the thought of their running things is genuinely scary to a lot of folks.

The problem seems to be that the Democrats remain beholden to the most liberal part of their base, so that they refuse to consider, for example, even quite modest restrictions on abortion. They seem unwilling to sincerely acknowledge even the most general, widely-held concerns about the erosion of moral values.

In what is an amazing revelation if true, Kuo asserts in his book that Tipper Gore, after championing one of the few family values efforts the Democrats have mustered, had to go to Hollywood, when her husband was nominated for President, and repent for her (bi-partisan) campaign to put warning labels on music whose lyrics advocate killing cops and other nasty stuff.

If this is the real Democratic Party, one that must kow-tow to the most extreme members of NARAL or the Hollywood elite, then they really don’t deserve to run this country. Maybe this isn’t the case, but the Democrats certainly could do a lot better job of making themselves a mainstream party, because there’s a lot of us, no matter how frustrated we are with the Republicans, who really don’t have anyone else to vote for, but certainly have a clear notion of who we’re voting against.

I recently ran across a popular discussion of Rick Warren’s concept of a “purpose-driven church” on Tim Challies’ blog, which has prompted me to finally get around to posting some basic background information on this subject that most folks may not have.

I don’t by any means intend for this to be a detailed examination of the subject, but before Christians get to beating each other up over it, which is unfortunately what often happens, we need to know that this whole issue of the tension between “purpose” and “comfort” is very basic to management of any organization, not just churches.

Way back in 1973, Ralph Winter (who co-founded the U.S. Center for World Mission) wrote an article, “The Two Structures of God’s Redemptive Mission” that describes this basic dilemma. For those who have taken the Center’s Perspectives course, the article is also in Perspectives on the World Christian Movement (Ch. 19 in the earlier edition).

The basic tension is between two distinct purposes for the local church, what Winter calls “sodalities” and “modalities”. Sodalities are mission/purpose-driven to accomplish ministry to the outside world. Modalities serve/minister to the members of the organization itself.

This is really a very basic tension that exists in all organizations, not just churches. Andy Grove, co-founder of Intel, discusses this at length in his book High Output Management (Ch. 8). He calls the two types “mission-oriented” and “functional”, and links them to the well-known organizational tension between decentralization (independent project-oriented groups on a mission) and centralization (bureaucratic controls set up to serve the organization itself).

Regarding the basic, inevitable nature of this tension, Grove asserts, “Alfred Sloan summed up decades of experience at General Motors by saying, ‘Good management rests on a reconciliation of centralization and decentralization.’” Grove calls this desired result “a balancing act”.

And indeed it is. Before churches go about splitting over “purpose”, Christians need to understand that both points of view are legitimate. The local church is to minister to congregants, as with the widows in Acts 6, and it is also to minister to the outside community, even to the point of sending missionaries as the church at Antioch did (Acts 13).

Nevertheless, we also need to heed the warnings of many with management experience, that left to their own devices, organizations naturally tend to degenerate into bureaucracy and thus an excessive focus on internal ministry, which is more comfortable than external ministry. Legendary GE Chairman Jack Welch has argued forcefully against bureaucracy, saying it is something that must be constantly battled in order for a company to grow and remain profitable.

Of course, unlike a business, a local church doesn’t exist merely to achieve an external goal such as making a profit. It must care for and disciple its members. Indeed, a failure to emphasize discipleship has been one of the problems with many evangelical growth strategies.

Yet it seems clear that, outside times of major persecution, growth should be a normal outcome of a healthy local church (Acts 2:47). As someone has asserted, perhaps the best measure of any successful entity is that it reproduces capable “offspring” after itself. If this is the case, then the proper measure of a successful church is not the size of the congregation, but whether it is producing other local churches, whether across town, perhaps in a depressed area needing help, or in another country (what is traditionally considered to be a “missions” activity).

The Wall Street Journal article cited in Challies’ post (”Veneration Gap: A Popular Strategy For Church Growth Splits Congregants” by Suzanne Sataline), quotes a “purpose-driven” minister as saying that occasionally leaders have to “play hardball” when certain congregants don’t catch their vision for growth or ministry. Perhaps this is the case, but I certainly hope it is the exception.

Leaders must realize that developing a vision for external ministry, whether evangelization of the immediate community, ministry to local needy, or world missions, is going to be a major paradigm shift for most American Christians.

In other words, this is a necessary change in outlook for most churches, but it’s going to take a long time. In moving back along the continuum from modality/internal ministry toward sodality/external ministry, church leaders should bear in mind that it would probably be easier just to move to the other extreme (even though it might well split a church) than to actually move gradually toward a proper balance, educating members and communicating a vision over time.

Yet this must be the goal for a healthy church - a proper balancing of attention toward both internal needs and discipleship and external needs and evangelization.