To Those Who Wish To Go Away

It’s a Saturday, so I’m safe writing this. Here in Georgia, the sun is shining and people are busying themselves by the pool. In the midwest, they’re trying to recover from yesterday’s terrible storms. In California, they’re…well, they’re doing whatever people in California do. Bottom line: nobody reads blogs on a Saturday. There’s too much else to do.

Which is why I’m safe writing this post. Lately, my heart has been breaking as I read stories of people who have been abused by religion. Shamed. Made to feel unacceptable. People who, in coming to a system of belief that is supposed to be about God’s great love for us, discovered that in some places that love comes at a high price. And that there are guardians at the gate that will exact that price from you, regardless of whether or not you want to pay.

Take this blog post for instance. Does it not break your heart? It does mine. It makes me shudder at the times that I made young women in my youth group wear one-piece bathing suits because I didn’t want them to “cause the boys to think wrong thoughts.” Never mind that teenage boys can think wrong thoughts about a woman in a burka. I read that blog and my heart broke for the times that I made someone feel shame in the name of holiness.

I didn’t know that’s what I was doing. I won’t excuse it now, but I thought I was doing what was right. I thought I was being a good minister. I thought I was teaching the kids a valuable lesson, about self and life and other stuff. What I was really doing was putting them in bondage to other people; I was telling them that their appearance, their very being, is either a blessing to others or it’s a curse. I put shackles on those girls and boys by objectifying all of them, reducing them to base creatures on opposite poles: girls, as things to be desired, and boys, as creatures incapable of anything but desire.

But it’s not just sexual identity where shame pops up. It’s other things too. I grew up among people who didn’t think college was necessary. In fact, some found it to be pretentious, a showing off that was unseemly. Wanting to go to school (or, in my case, being told by my father that I would go to college, end of story) was seen as something prideful, and pride was a sin to be avoided. Even though recovery is something many churches offer to help with nowadays, there’s still shame in being a former addict; there’s shame in being a single parent; there’s shame in voting for a particular candidate or party; there’s shame in liking certain music, or watching certain shows, or thinking certain thoughts.

Heck. Read this, by Dale Fincher. It covers it so much better than I’ll ever be able to.

So what’s the point of this post? My heart goes out to those who don’t feel like they belong in the church. My heart aches for those who wish they could just go away, disappear, not be a target for once in their lives. I hear and read story after story of people who turned away from church and God because they didn’t fit a certain mold, didn’t look a certain way, and I just want to grab them in my arms and say, “It’s okay. God still loves you. He’s still Truth. He still wants to know you and heal you and walk with you everyday.”

Is it hippie sounding? Bet your sweet butt. Yet I am constantly meeting people who want to know that very truth. People who wouldn’t set foot inside a church on Sunday but would sit down with me for coffee, or chat with me online, or read this blog post and respond in an email. People who, for lack of a better word, want the Gospel to be true, but want to know that truth in something more than just words.

Once upon a time, someone would call this kind of concern evangelistic. But lately, that word has taken on another meaning entirely. I’ll just roll with this: I want people to know that God loves them, that Christ loves them, that there is a power found in faith that can transform any life – especially in ways that aren’t expected. And I’m willing to carry that message to people who need to hear it most, even if it means being shamed by those who would disagree.

If you’ve made it this far and you’re one of those people – if you’ve been shamed by me, or anyone else, and you’re wondering if God could possibly love you – then let me first say, I am sorry. I was wrong. You are created in the image of God. You have fallen. But you are not beyond repair. You are not who you’ve been made to believe. You are His. He is yours. There is healing to be found.

To those who wish to go away, Christ stands, arms open, inviting you to Himself.

Stop the Band, Kill the Noise

“Smeagol isn’t listening! Not listening! My preciousssssss…”

About every six months or so, I get awfully tempted to become a real blogger, the kind that generates thousands of daily hits and tons of followers on Twitter. I make a deal with myself to sit down and craft content that will draw eyes and ire, generate reblogs and rebukes, and just in general put my name on the minds of people who troll/scour the Internet looking for that sort of engagement. I tell myself it’ll be easy – two to three times a day, I’ll post a list of things that are wrong with the church, or I’ll attack a strawman argument on a hot political issue, or I’ll wade back into one of the denominational war zones that always draw attention and alarm from the masses.

I plan all of this, and I’ll even give it a go for a couple of posts, and inevitably, it falls by the wayside. I can’t do it. I can’t keep up. My brain simply can’t conceive of a way to keep writing about the same things in the same ways over and over again.

Apparently I’m neither creative nor outraged enough.

Regardless – whether my lack of imagination or indignation – I have recently begun to marvel at those who can crank out that kind of content on a regular basis. My Twitter feed is filled with such people; I can’t refresh my feed without someone new posting a blog about 5 Reasons the Resurrection Is Absolutely, Positively REAL or 10 Secrets to a Dynamic Church or 39 Things You Must Do To Make Jesus Happy or Else He’ll Revoke Your Salvation.

(I’m kidding about that last one. Kind of.)

There’s one particular gentleman that I follow that posts links and blogs like that non-stop everyday. I know he’s not writing all of those posts himself, but I am utterly gobsmacked at the fact that he does write an awful lot. And they’re usually good. Some quite so.

Writers like that simultaneously inspire and deflate me. Inspire, because I love the fact that they sit at their keyboard and let the ideas flow down like mercy. Deflate, because so often those ideas are either recycled or reheated. They don’t add much new to the conversation.

I know, I know – there’s nothing new under the sun. Heck, even what I attempt to do here is admittedly what another writer did to far better effect. But what I always try to do is to make whatever I write in my voice, in my honest voice. I fail sometimes; there are occasions when I get up on a high horse and either try to sound smarter than I really am, or try to write with an authority I don’t possess, and when those occasions come along, I am reminded over and over again why I don’t write like that all the time.

Because it’s not me.

So why am I bringing all of this up? Lately, it seems like I’m drowning in noise, endless, repetitive noise. The same people clanging the same gongs for the same audience. Mostly, these posts are on some political or cultural issue, and they only exist to get someone’s dander up, or undies bunched, or pick another metaphor for useless agitation. The same medium through which I find my greatest outlet of expression – blogging – is the one that allows untold others to beat our collective cultural dead horses again and again, and to present the blogs on those poor, flagellated equine corpses as fresh and new and unique, when really they are none of those things.

And this harsh rehashing of the yada-yada-yada isn’t confined to one particular spectrum of the web; it’s not just the church people who do it; it’s not just the liberal media; it’s not just the fringe wackos or reality stars or any other specific class of people. It’s all of us. All of us. Adding to the noise, transferring information because we can, not because it’s needed. Even the very words I’m typing – noise, noise, noise. For some reason, today, it’s exhausting.

It creates a sense that the world will always be irretrievably broken, but if we try just that much harder, we can fix it – yes, we can! If we can get rid of the fundies, the gays, the illegals, the GOP, the Dems, the rednecks, the hippies, the commies, the druggies, the libs, the unenlightened, and the downright socially awkward, then we can all live in the glorious utopia that Our Forefathers first envisioned when they arrived on this fair continent and poisoned the Native Americans after swindling them out of their land.

Ugh. Just make the voices stop, Brain. If you don’t, I’ll stab you with a Q-Tip.

So what’s the take away? What do we do? Personally, I’m culling my Twitter feed, starting today. I’m getting rid of all the counterfeit voices, the people who simply channel the outrage of others without contributing thought themselves. I’m going to delete the emails that merely generate sound and fury. I’m going to hide the Facebook friends who only share tiresome photos and memes from random quasi-political groups.

And I’m quite sure that there will be people who decide to delete this post – and any of my subsequent posts – from their information flow. I can live with that. My style isn’t for everyone, and that’s fine by me.

Today’s just one of those days to take a stand against the people who want to manipulate us with fear or anger or both. I’m not gonna dance to their tune anymore. I’m stopping the band, and killing the noise.

Hopefully, it will give me more time for my own voice.

Yours too.

The Lesson of Cain

This morning, I began a new segment with my Christian Learning Center class. We’re discussing the philosophical foundations and development of Biblical worldview this semester, so that means were looking extensively at how the Bible answers the four fundamental questions of life: origin, meaning, morality and destiny. This morning marked the beginning of our look at morality. So naturally I started in a really strange place: the story of Cain and Abel.

I read the story from Genesis 4 and then asked the students one simple question: Was God fair to Cain?

Immediately they connected my question with the punishment of Cain, and naturally they said that God was not only fair to Cain, but merciful. I kindly replied that Cain’s punishment wasn’t the action I questioned. I wanted to know if God were fair to Cain before that.

They questioned my question, so I asked them to do me a favor (you can do this too, if you want to play along at home and humor an idiot such as myself): I asked them to go back into Genesis 1-3 and find the place where God laid down the laws regarding sacrifice. Any verse would do. Just find the one where God tells Adam and Eve or Cain or Abel what He expected regarding offerings submitted to Him.

They went silent, searching their cellphones and the random hard copies on hand. One minute ticked by, then two; eventually, after five painful minutes, one of the students looked up and said, “This is a trick question. There’s nothing in here about what sacrifices God wanted.”

And I said, “Bingo. When you read the Scripture, it would appear that the gifts from both Cain and Abel are spontaneous gestures. Cain brings part of his stock and trade; Abel brings part of his. God is pleased with Abel’s, not so pleased with Cain’s. There’s no reason given why He felt that way, despite the fact that many Christians have been taught that Abel gave from a pure heart but Cain didn’t. That’s not in the text here**, so let’s put it aside and consider this story as it’s written, and let me ask you again: was God fair to Cain?”

**I’m patently aware that Hebrews 11:4 acknowledges that Abel’s sacrifice was better than Cain’s, but the writer of Hebrews still doesn’t tell us why that was so – it merely confirms it was. So I submit to you that the notion that Abel’s heart was more in tune with God is something that we read into the text to help create a context for what happens next. I think this is an instance where well-meaning Christians have invented a false “truth” to help ameliorate discomfort over the seeming arbitrariness of God in the passage.

There was a pause. Finally, one of my students said, “No, I don’t think He was. It’s not fair to not give a guy any standards and then tell him he doesn’t meet those standards.”

Other students agreed.

One did not. She still insisted that God had been plenty fair to Cain, and that Cain was a jerk at heart anyway because he got miffed and killed Abel. And murder confirms jerkiness, so Cain probably brought a jerky sacrifice and God merely pointed that out.

Again, I told asked her to put aside the aftermath of Cain’s sacrifice, and just consider the sacrifice itself. I asked her to set aside everything else she knew about the story and just consider, for a moment, if God were fair to Cain in rejecting his sacrifice.

She looked at me, and said brilliantly, “Yes. Because He’s God, and He determines what’s acceptable or not.”

And I pointed at her and said, “Exactly. This is the beginning point of morality for anyone who would profess to be a Christian: God alone determines what is and isn’t acceptable. What is and isn’t right or wrong.”

I wish I could say that this was a deep and profound thought that I’ve been harboring for a long time. I wish I could say that I stole it from someone like John Piper or Tim Keller or Al Mohler or any other wise and deep theologian. Instead, it was the result of me staying awake most of the night with this story on my mind, convinced that it was the place to begin our exploration on morality without really understanding why, other than the fact that this story has ALWAYS bothered me.

Maybe it’s because I’m an older brother myself, but I never could quite shake the idea that Cain got a raw deal. I’ve grown up being taught that he was a jerk, that he was an evil person at heart (as evidenced by his killing Abel), and it never seemed quite fair to me. In fact, it always struck me as retrofitting. I’m probably the only Cain sympathizer in the known universe, so I’ll accept any questions regarding my orthodoxy with the acknowledgement that I deserve such questions.

But walking through this passage this morning, with God leading me ahead of my students, helping us all to see that He alone is the Sovereign King who decides right and wrong on the basis of His perfect, unchanging nature and character…well, that was the most exciting thing that’s happened to me in a long time. It brought sense to a text I’ve wrestled with for years and it opened up my heart to fear and marvel at God once again.

I don’t think God was capricious in His choosing between Cain and Abel. I don’t doubt that any of the explanations we’ve offered in the millennia since this story was written contain truth about Cain, his heart and what God knew about each. To be perfectly honest, this story makes me think about Romans 9, an incredible passage that makes clear God makes vessels of dishonor to use as He sees fit.

I would daresay Cain was one of those vessels.

The students sat stunned at the idea. I won’t say anyone’s paradigm shifted (after all, it’s hard to shift anything at 7:30 in the morning) but there was certainly a look of comprehension on a great many faces. The story of Cain and Abel wasn’t about their righteousness or unrighteousness – it was about the Sovereign God and His established rule.

I’ll probably be castigated for my take on the passage, and I invite and welcome the discussion in the comments below. But even if my interpretation is unorthodox, I stand by the conclusion: that this story shows us, if nothing else, that the root of Biblical and Christian morality lies not within ourselves, or even our understanding of God’s Law. It is found in the essence of God Himself, in His character and authority and His power.

Can’t get more orthodox than that.

Too Much Accountability?

The other day, Rachel was talking to a friend of hers about church. The conversation flowed, touching on everything from music to children’s programs to their own personal involvement in the church’s ministry. Soon, the topic led to them discussing a mutual friend who went to still another church, and the following line was said to my wife:

“Yeah, they haven’t really been going to church lately because there’s too much accountability. 

When Rachel repeated that to me, I was floored. Too much accountability? Too MUCH accountability? Is that even possible?

Read through the Scriptures and you’ll find verse after verse telling us to keep each other accountable. We’re told to encourage each other (1 Thess. 5:11), rebuke each other (Gal. 6:1), correct each other (Colossians 3:16), teach each other (Rom. 15:14), pray for each other (James 5:16), and on and on. The idea is that our Christian lives aren’t lived in a vacuum; we need the community of believers, the fellowship of the church, in order to grow. As iron sharpens iron and all that.

But when I began thinking about the statement, I understood. Sometimes in church we have a bad habit of calling judgmentalism accountability. Under the guise of holding others accountable, we project our personal preferences and standards onto other people and then measure them accordingly. Didn’t wear a tie this Sunday? Didn’t raise your hands in worship? Read from the wrong translation? Said something too old fashioned? Asked for grace after breaking a rule?

To spoof off a line from The Brady Bunch, “Guilty, guilty, guilty.”

Jesus said that we would know our fellow Christians by the fruit that they bear, but He didn’t give us permission to critique the type. Accountability is something that flows from relationship: our relationship with Christ and our relationship with each other. Sometimes it gets ugly; sometimes, we have to speak frankly to someone who is living in direct defiance of God, and that can get unpleasant. That’s accountability at its hardest and its finest, and it takes a mature, humble, and seasoned believer to speak the truth in love.

But when our accountability is merely thinly disguised bullying, that’s not accountability at its worst, that’s just flat out sin in our own hearts.

When it comes to the proper attitude for holding others accountable, James E. Orr, in a hymn influenced by Psalm 139, said it best:

Search me, O God, and know my heart today,
Try me, O Savior, know my thoughts, I pray;
See if there be some wicked way in me;
Cleanse me from every sin, and set me free.

I praise Thee, Lord, for cleansing me from sin;
Fulfill Thy word and make me pure within;
Fill me with fire, where once I burned with shame;
Grant my desire to magnify Thy name.

Lord, take my life, and make it wholly Thine;
Fill my poor heart with Thy great love divine;
Take all my will, my passion, self and pride;
I now surrender, Lord, in me abide.

O Holy Ghost, revival comes from Thee;
Send a revival, start the work in me;
Thy Word declares Thou wilt supply our need;
For blessings now, O Lord, I humbly plead.

May we be guided by God’s Word, prompted by His Holy Spirit, and loving with our hearts this week as we walk with our brothers and sisters in Christ. May we call sin, sin whenever we see it, but may we remember to offer grace as our Savior did – and does – with us.

The Statement of Our Steeples

For the past few months, anytime someone has discovered where I work, I automatically get the question.

“What’s up with your steeple?”

If that sounds like a strange question for people to ask me, 1) I work at a church, and 2) my church’s steeple has been lying on its side in our parking lot for the last six months. During the summer, we discovered that the steeple was unsafe for our roof, so we had a company come and take it down, thinking that we could just pop it back up there after a quick fix. Well, it turns out that the steeple was damaged; and what was supposed to be a few weeks has turned into a few months as we’ve gone round and round with various people over just who bears the blame for the steeple being damaged.

So, when people find out that I work for my church, they naturally want to know what’s up with the steeple.

I laugh and tell them that that we’re the only progressive traditional Baptist church in Georgia: we believe that everything should be interactive, even the steeple.

The reality is, we’re in legal limbo. We’ll get it resolved, sure, but until then you can drive by and see a hulking mass of fiberglass and steel resting like a felled giant. And after last night’s powerful storm system moved through the area, you can drive by and almost touch the sucker from your car.

See, the wind rolled the steeple towards the road last night. Thank goodness it was tethered down, or else we would’ve had a mess on our hands this morning. As it was, the thing basically turned on its axis, and instead of running parallel to the road, it now sits at a 45-degree angle with the base near the road and the tip pointing to our athletic fields. We have a crane operator coming this afternoon to come and move it to another, safer portion of our property, as we don’t want to endanger anyone driving by.

So, other than the oddity involved here, why am I blogging about this?

Simple: sometimes we let good intentions and good ideas cause havoc. Our steeple was generously donated by some of our members, and was erected to serve as a visible cue to the Grayson area that our church stood, ready to welcome in the spiritually hurt and broken. When placed atop our roof, it made for quite the stunning sight. But, when placed on the parking lot, it became an eyesore – not just to community members, but church members as well. Right or wrong, what was once a proud symbol of our faith became a symbol of our issues.

I’m not suggesting that our church is in a state of disrepair. Nor am I against steeples. I’m not anti-Christian symbolism. I think both are needed in our cultural context.

But symbols send messages, and right now, our message is that we’re a church with challenges. All churches have challenges, because anytime you put a group of people together and ask them to marshall around a common purpose, you get common problems. If you don’t believe that, just take a look at the cubicle next to yours. Or attend the next seminar on “How to Express Appropriate Concern in the Work Environment.”

It’s not a big deal for a church to have challenges. But it’s a big deal when people think churches aren’t supposed to have them, and that’s the real issue here. Church has become synonymous with “holier-than-thou” which leads people to look for the hypocritical underbelly. And since a church is comprised of people, that’s not too hard to find. Thus, when someone sees a crack in the facade, it’s easy to say, “That whole church thing is for the birds.”

Actually, people say much harsher things, but my mom is probably reading, and I don’t want to upset her.

So our steeple on the ground is a physical reminder of a truth that we, like a lot of churches, would prefer people not know: we’re messy. And why do we not want people to know this about us? Because we think that they’ll be less likely to attend if we don’t “have it all together.” The problem is, that’s not what keeps people from coming. People can handle issues and messiness when it’s honestly addressed and owned up to; if they couldn’t, I sure as heck wouldn’t be married or have any friends. What keeps people from coming is the promise of “having it all together” is a false one. Because life, even a godly, righteous, Spirit-driven life, is messy and devoid of easy answers.

So we’re offering a message that life counteracts, and people intuitively know it.

Jesus understood this. “I didn’t come for the righteous, the religious have-it-all-togethers,” he said in my most unacademic paraphrase ever. “I came for the people who were broken and confused, and looking for help. The cure is for sick patients, not ‘well’ ones.”

The church isn’t for the holier-than-thous. It’s for the sinful-and-I-know-its. It’s for the redeemed-and-given-new-lifers. It’s for the let-me-tell-you-about-a-God-who-loves-you people.

This afternoon, a crane will come and pick up our steeple and move it to the back our property. Chances are, it will still be in plain sight to passers-by. And that’s okay. Because if the past few months have taught me anything, they’ve taught me this:

Those people asking me about our steeple are people I can talk with about my God.

Sometimes, owning the mess is better.