Not The Religious Type

Christmas is NOT Too Consumeristic! / Jeff Heidkamp (Minneapolis, MN)

I am an unabashed Christmas junkie, albeit on a small scale.  Egg nog, Christmas trees, lights, carols, the whole schtick.  It doesn't bother me at all that it starts early, and I don't really mind that it involves a lot of consumption.

Let me add a caveat- of course, in general, US culture is way too consumeristic.  And, of course, in general, there are places and times when too much is spent on any celebration.  But that said, I would argue that Christmas has great potential to redeem consumerism.  I think a great deal of popular anti-Christmas sentiment has more to do with cynicism, self-righteousness, and overall Grinch-iness than any kind of actual moral virtue.

First of all, charitable organizations of every stripe know that Christmas is a great time to raise money.  Almost every church I know does some kind of special outreach to the poor or the lonely at the holidays. That is, there is something about the celebration of God's great giving that spurs people of faith to extra acts of charitable-ness. And I don't think this is limited to people of faith.

Second of all, at Christmas, people are spending gobs of money ON OTHER PEOPLE.  I think many people hate Christmas shopping, not because they really oppose consumerism, but because they prefer to spend money on themselves.  People talk about "all the stress of picking out the right presents."  In my book, thinking and working hard to give gifts to other people would be defined as an act of love, not of stress.  It's pure gnosticism to think that the act of spending money on another person is somehow a lesser act than a kind deed that doesn't involve cash and shopping.

Third of all, at Christmas, people spend a lot of time and money on getting together with other people to eat and celebrate together.  This is one of the healthiest things in the world to spend time and money on.  Again, people complain about the stress of putting together nice Christmas events.  But I would argue that love is usually costly- it isn't easy to love well.  And there is nothing unspiritual about good hospitality and great times of being connected to friends and family. As far as all the commercial accouterments- well, it's America.  I would simply suggest that attacking Christmas is attacking consumerism in the wrong place.  People dump tons of money on themselves ALL the time.  Christmas is the one shot we get at encouraging people to spend money to show love to other people and spend time being connected to the people that matter most.  If that means I have to listen to the Chipmunks Christmas album at the grocery store in October, so be it.  And if you don't like it- bah humbug on you.

Yes, Christmas is Too Consumeristic. But What to Do about It?

Happy almost-Thanksgiving, everyone!  I suspect this will be it for posts this week, as I can't imagine many of you will be eagerly reading this blog from Thursday on...and it's possible I won't want to break away from the yams to post.

I'd love your thoughts on Christmas consumerism.

Christmas creep is a famous and detested thing, yet in these times of slow consumer spending, it's ever-more with us.  Two of Boston's oldies stations started playing only Christmas music TEN DAYS AGO.  I wasn't ready for Johnny Mathis and "It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas" just yet.

Disney's mega-budgeted A Christmas Carol opened a few weeks back to middling business.  My family is the absolute perfect target for that movie--with five kids, we pretty much see every new kids movie eventually.  But my kids had zero interest in this because they weren't thinking about Christmas only a few days after Halloween. 

I'll soon be writing a sermon about the holidays and stress and money, so I'd love any and all thoughts about the subject.

You might have heard about a popular approach to this dilemma of a year or so ago called The Advent Conspiracy. (I've embedded their very cool video--you should check it out if you haven't seen it.) The church I mentioned learning from last week is very into this, leading me to buy the short book they put out.  The pitch here is to limit gift-giving as dramatically as possible and give the money instead towards providing drinkable water around the world for those who need it.  Clearly this is hard to argue with.  (And did I mention the video is cool?  It's cool.)

And yet I found myself not quite buying it as a one-size-fits-all.  I mentioned it to Grace and she pushed back.  Is it all bad that one time a year we get a prompt to give a small gift to family members and a small circle of friends?  Are cards to people we love but who are out of our area such a bad idea?  In a relational universe--a very big idea behind our stage 4 talk--perhaps it's not clear that a modest approach to Christmas is all bad.  Perhaps--as Grace suggested--for all it's worthiness, the Advent Conspiracy is stage 3--a protest against blind consumerism without being, to use that stage 4 word, all that mystical, all that interactively connected to God as we look for our calling at a season like this.

It's not that its corrective is in any way bad--most of us are not all that mystical as we go the other direction and are blindly stressed-out and consumeristic.  And perhaps we should give towards clean water whatever we do at Christmas.  But perhaps the solution to Christmas creep and consumerism and stress lies in connection to Jesus and doing our best to walk through it all with rather than apart from him.

But what are your thoughts?  How do you approach the holidays non-consumeristically and stress-free? 

Don't Label Me, Man! / Vince Brackett (Evanston, IL)

I've noticed something about my young post-modern peers:  We avoid being decidedly self-identified as one thing or another like the plague.  Certainly there's a resistance to bounded-sets—that would definitely be decidedly one thing or another—but it's the self-identification piece that is interesting to me. This trend isn't just about others labeling me, it's about me labeling myself.

I've had the fun opportunity of late to pitch two-way prayer with Jesus to a couple of my young post-modern friends and they have both found the experience to be great.  But, since then, as our conversations have gone back to prayer and Jesus and to my suggestions that they check out church if those were good experiences for them, the idea of a God who hears us and we hear from seems to have ended up just another thing in their bags of tricks.  I feel like they've hit some wall that prohibits them from letting their own personal interest in any one spiritual stream take priority over other spiritual streams out there.

And, again, the interesting thing is that, to my mind, this is all internal struggle.  The issue is not a lack of courage to say amongst spiritually diverse company, “I had a good experience with Jesus;” it's a resistance to say to one's self, “This Jesus thing seems to be working, maybe I should wade in a little deeper.”  I expect the post-modern understandings of relativism and pluralism and other -ism's to inform how conscientious young post-moderns try to relate to others in diverse contexts; but I guess I've never considered that those understandings could be so ingrained that sticking to them as personal beliefs (that sounds... gasp!... modernist) or the paralyzing fear of identity crises were they discovered incomplete would trump personally diving deeper into one particular spiritual stream after finding it at least somewhat in one's self-interest. 

Perhaps, my friends aren't being totally honest with me.  Maybe they just told me they had good experiences with this two-way Jesus prayer to make me happy... but I don't think so.  I think they have indeed found Jesus to be in their self-interest, but it feels evil in their mind to give any one spiritual stream more priority in their personal life because what always seems to follow that in the world they know is bigotry, which may be the biggest evil of all in their post-modern understandings.

I think it's a given that centered-set church leaders following this blog aren't interested in judging other spiritual streams personally or publicly, but what can the communities we're leading do to squash this culturally-conditioned (and, let's face it, legitimate) fear in young post-moderns that making Jesus more of a priority in one's personal life will make them a bigot in their public life?  Strangely enough, am I onto something that that fear is prohibiting young post-moderns from thinking about their self-interest?

Hell. Yes, hell.

While I framed yesterday's post in terms of "mission," I suppose it actually shaded more towards a conversation on the challenges of "evangelism," and I appreciate your perspectives.  I suppose my bias came out in that conflating, because I do link "mission" pretty closely to "evangelism," which is intriguing in that I'm not now nor have I ever been an especially effective or motivated "personal evangelist."  A handful of people, most from fairly far back in my past, have decided to follow Jesus largely through a personal relationship with me and some key conversation.

And yet I do think a fair amount about Jesus as the key to every lock.  I do feel that Jesus was the singular help in my own life.  I think any sane person, if they understood the offer made--and perhaps the stakes involved--would of course give all they had to follow Jesus as a top priority.  And that was a part of my starting a church on the terms that we did.  It was too much pressure on me--and and anyone else--to see each individual relationship in terms of evangelism, or at least exclusively in terms of evangelism.  But I had some real hope that a collective endeavor would, while taking the pressure off of all of us, empower us together to influence hundreds or thousands of people in this way, and that's proven true.

That said, we do encourage lots and lots of praying for folks who haven't, best as we can figure out, encountered Jesus, and we see lots of good results from that all the time.  This very afternoon, I got an email about two of the folks I pray for along these lines (we call them one's "6," in the spirit of encouraging each other to be praying for 6 such folks each day).  Another friend got in touch with them and reported very encouraging things on a spiritual front. 

But why?  Why do I care about such folks in this way?  Why am I tempted to conflate that sort of caring somewhat closely with finding one's mission in Jesus?  Clearly it's not that there are not other worthy things to be done with one's life.  There are wells to be dug and diseases to be fought and microbusinesses to be started.  I suppose it's because I do, non-postmodern as this may sound to my chagrin, believe in ultimate stakes to living.  It's one of the things I like most about life--that it matters.

Which raises questions of heaven and hell.  For my first year of pursuing faith in Jesus, along with--I later discovered--CS Lewis in his own first year of faith, I could neither stomach nor believe in the thought of hell.  It was incompatible with my take on an all-loving, all-good God that this God could "send" people to hell, to some sort of eternal misery.  Whatever they'd done to "deserve" such a thing could never actually "deserve" that sort of response, and it clouded a picture of this entirely encouraging God that I was on my way to experiencing.  (It's been years since I've so loved putting so many words in quotation marks.  Or "quotation marks."  Fun with punctuation!)

But I do believe in hell.  Who will experience hell is, of course, a far-different question than the belief in hell at all.  I recently took a course on the history of theology which ended by focusing on several streams--that didn't qualify as classic "universalism" (the belief that all would be saved)--that found help in wishing all to be saved.  That struck me as an intriguing endeavor.

I pretty much never preach on hell (and "pretty much" might be overstatement).  Motivating through fear of hell strikes me as something that might have been helpful in a very Christianized world that included such a fear before you even brought it up--not a world I've ever lived in.  Such a message would have been repellent to me as an atheist debater.

And the power of hell strikes me as being that it starts now.  Following Jesus--it seems to me--offers us a way out of hell and into a taste of heaven this moment, and that very much does motivate me.

I'm not tempted to build a scriptural case for my belief in hell--and the usefulness of that belief.  I think there is a compelling case to be made in the Bible, but one could make a case--as I've heard made--that it's a relatively minor New Testament topic until--depending on your interpretation--one bumps into Revelation. 

But a belief in hell works for me.  It works to hone my lifelong endeavor.  It works to hone my sense of personal mission.  It works to keep me focused and motivated.  And all of those things seem entirely helpful to me, which would rate a thumbs-up on the "you'll know a tree by its fruit" standard.  The fruit has been very constructive from inside my skin.

So what's your take on hell?  Does your belief one way or another have real-world impact on your behavior day by day?  How so, or not?

What's Your Take on Mission?

Thanks for the feedback on "secular friends with no needs."  We had some rousing calls to friendship as being the key thing.  And we had a few comments to the effect that it can feel weird or wounded to have to assume our secular friends are a pathetic mass of needs, whatever they may say.

I was intrigued to press this a bit further.  A fundamental tension for churchgoers is the distance between stirring calls like Jesus' to "make disciples of all nations" and the sense that we're not superior to anyone else and that it feels weird and non-relational to see all relationships with non-churchgoers as ones where, like an Amway salesman, we're only allegedly "befriending" them in order to serve our larger purpose of "making them Christians."  I suspect that reconciling that tension is a fundamental step in the life of everyone trying to follow Jesus and probably is not divorced from the conversation we're having here.

NOT reconciling that tension leaves two unappealing possibilities.  One is that we embrace that our mission is to "give people the gospel," that that's what "courageous' people do whether or not they every actually enjoy an actual friendship with such people.  We don't care if we treat people as objects to be acted upon by us or not.

Or: We regard objectifying people as such a serious and unavoidable risk that we blow off any sense of "joining Jesus' mission" and just mind our own business.

So it seems to me we need to embrace the tension and utterly reconcile it without taking either of those paths.  To my mind, as some of you pointed out, friendship with no strings is indeed important.  But so is the belief that God is actually alive and responds to prayer, thereby removing the need to "convince" our friends of anything.  I think we're helped by centered-set thinking in this. 

Let's talk!

What Should We Do for Secular Friends Who Have No Needs?

I led a couple workshops (on all this stuff--did I need to include that qualifier?) at a Harvard IVCF conference (alums of their grad ministries returned for the event) this weekend. 

The question that came up the most was: All of my friends are Stage 3--confident secularists who present themselves as blissfully happy with no needs.  How can I offer faith to them?

I'd be interested how you'd respond.

Though I'll skew your responses by giving a taste of how I responded.  I said that, in my experience, argument got nowhere in those cases.  A common response in those settings would be for the friend to say that they're as good a person as you are--they care for the environment, recycle, judge the right people, etc. 

To my mind, the best bet was through prayer for them--or, for the adventurous, prayer and fasting for them.  God will have to change their hearts.  And of course they have needs.  It's the human condition to have needs.  The only issue is if God will open their eyes and hearts to those needs and to the possibility God could address them.

One response: It sounded like I was saying that they only way they could experience God was through bribery--he'd do things for them once they experienced needs.  But clearly God wants to call people to himself through many means.

I'll let you answer that one, if it grabs you.  And feel free also to answer the "How do you offer spiritual help to your secular friends with no overt needs?" question.

Reversing Rick Warren's Baseball Diamond

First off, it was good to hear that your health is improving, Ben!  Keep us posted.

Second, as we pulled back from our conversations the last few weeks about "religion" and "Christianity," Caleb Maskell suggested we might read Jeffrey Pugh's book, Religionless Christianity: Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Troubled Times.  I asked if he could preview it first, which he's doing.  But I ordered a copy.  As of page 50 or so, it's dynamite.  I'll keep you posted.

I spent the early part of my week in a gathering for pastors of large churches (which no doubt has some intriguing context, given our recent conversation about house churches).  Our presenter was Adam Hamilton, the pastor of the largest United Methodist church in the country, Church of the Resurrection in Kansas City.  He gave me lots of food for thought.  Some things struck me as appropriate to Kansas City that wouldn't translate.  Some things struck me as appropriate to a mega-mega-church (they run about 9,000 or so on a Sunday) that perhaps I should forswear until they were clearly relevant to us.  But much was really provocative, and I'd love to pass on one of those thoughts for your consideration.

He talked about Rick Warren's baseball diamond analogy for discipleship.  (We use a heavily-modified form of it in Boston.)  Warren's premise is that discipleship flows like this.  You get converted to Jesus.  You join others in your journey (a church or, better still, a small group).  You learn more about discipleship.  You discover your spiritual gifts.  You minister to others.

Hamilton said his experience is the complete inverse.  Secular people start to minister alongside people who follow Jesus.  Then they learn more about themselves as a result.  Then they learn more about biblical discipleship.  Then maybe they start to come to church.  Then they think, "Hey, maybe I want to do this" and they start to follow God.

His case in point was a provocative one.  Their church supported a large food bank.  They encouraged each member to hand door hangers on their neighbor's doors.  If they were bold, they could ring the bell and talk to the neighbor about it.  If not, they could just leave the door hanger.  It said, effectively, "Hey, I'm your neighbor.  My church, Church of the Resurrection, is doing a food drive for a local food bank.  If you'd like to participate, I'll drop by on Saturday.  Leave a shopping bag on your porch and I'll collect it.  If you'd like to learn more, call me.  Thanks so much."  And that's it.  He encouraged his people to pray for each household when they left the door hanger.  When he himself went around to his neighbors, he did ring each bell.   Every neighbor but one participated in the food drive.  And he asked each, as he was leaving, "Are there things I can pray for for your family?"  Everyone took him up on the prayer, and he prayed in person with most, with many of them crying as he did and saying that was the first time anyone had ever prayed with them.  Many of those neighbors have ended up in their church.

His point?  Inviting people to join in low-bar mission is the way to go in terms of "sharing your faith," as opposed to spending much time persuading people they believe the wrong thing.

I found that really provocative.  What do you think?

What can we learn from Stage 2 communities about spiritual power? / Ben Catlin (Minneapolis, MN)

Disclaimer: I believe that within every community there exist people at any of the 4 stages we so often discuss on this blog.  Also, I know that an individual doesn't hold any one consistent 'stage' attitude across all subjects.  That being said, what I'm terming 'stage 2' is a community or person that tends toward more rules-based teaching and highly-structured organizational models.

I don't know if any of you are like me but I find myself periodically seeking to grow deeper in what people might call the ‘power gifts.’ That simply means I'm seeking to hear God more for myself and others, and to pray for miracles and actually see them happen.  Recently after a series of some exciting interactions, and some where I felt particularly let down, I find myself pushing into this topic again.

Just like a lot of people I know, I started digging into this by seeking out people who are better than I am and asking questions.  This could be through online sermons (like Boston Vineyards recent visit from Heidi Baker) or just hitting up my local church prayer/prophetic guru. The last time I felt I had an itch to scratch on this topic my wife and I got involved with a local group called the "Healing Rooms" to draw closer to more people trying to do the same thing.

One thing I noticed is that a lot of these people seem to come from Stage 2 communities, or they carry at least some distinctly stage 2 rules. (The Healing Rooms for example, was full of wonderful volunteers from a very large Charismatic stage 2 church).  By that, I simply mean that they have a very unmovable faith on their interpretation on miracles and healing, almost as if they have an IF-THEN approach to praying for the sick.  (IF I pray long enough, hard enough, and God wants to do this THEN it will happen). They have little to no questioning of these principals and their faith is unmoved, even in the face of some pretty major let-downs.

I once heard Heidi Baker speak (incidentally at that big local Charismatic stage 2 church, where my wife's lingering injury from a bike-on-truck accident was completely healed) and she said something to the effect of "We will not let our Theology be defined by our experience."  At that moment I was simultaneously intrigued, challenged and a little put off.  Because I didn't know what to do with that statement, I tried to compartmentalize that into the context of the setting I was in (namely a big stage 2 church).

But, it didn't fit neatly into any box.  On the one hand, to not challenge a dogmatic principal in the face of overwhelming evidence is very Stage 2.  On the other hand, this woman had just prayed to heal people and several were, including my wife.  And that is to say nothing of the all the things she said that night that I thought fit very well into a stage 4 understanding of faith, or the umpteen-thousand churches in Africa she has helped to plant, or the dead she and her friends have raised.  (I've never raised the dead, but that seems like a pretty sweet thing to have happen).

So, I was challenged.  And here I am, getting ready to help teach at a conference workshop about hearing God for yourself and other people, so the topic is very on my mind. (I figure at this point if I want to go farther into the topic, I have to start sharing with others how far I've already made it).  And I find myself wondering, what, if anything, can I learn from these communities and people (who don't seem to fit into my faith 'culture') to grow in my own spiritual power?  If I can’t argue with or reproduce the results, there has to be something good going on there that I’m not getting.

Are House Churches the Silver Bullet?

I love house churches.  I work with some start-up churches that are at the house church phase and the upsides are immense--most notably that everyone has something to do, that there's a sense of all being in it together.  The teaching style is by definition egalitarian, lots of give and take, which can make for a more-dynamic and "owned" learning experience.  They're the epitome of low overhead, so one's money-theoretically--can go other places to see the gospel advance or the poor fed. 

So I'm sympathetic to those of you who, in the comments to the last post, suggested that maybe house churches are the answer to the problems churches face, as some writers from the house church camp forcefully claim.

Those of you who have followed this blog for a year or so might remember this now-you-see-it-now-you-don't proposal we floated that we gave the crappy name of "faith ambassadors" to.  The big idea was that we might dream for one person in each zip code in the country who would take responsibility to foment a conversation about stage 4 faith in that zip code. Effectively that was a house church model with trendy language.

And there's more!  Just this week I was reunited with an awesome former member of our large church who left the area for work reasons.  I asked how life was treating his family and he talked about how, after three years of looking, they'd finally found a church in their new town that they really liked.  They'd liked our church so much that they'd kept looking for a large, hopefully dynamic church.  But they really didn't like any they visited.  Finally they tried a small church with, as my friend put it, lots of problems.  The church wasn't exactly a house church.  It fluctuates, they tell me, from 50 to 150 people and then back again with some regularity.  The kids program needs work.  But, for all its problems, they've surprisingly loved it.  The people are great.  Everyone is doing their best.  And my friends feel like they have a role there that, much as they loved our church, they could never have had here. 

So I'm entirely rooting for house churches!

But they are not the one and only hope for a stage 4 revival in the secular west. 

Again, some house church proponents write books that critique, from stem to stern, the "institutional church" in all of its forms.  That would eliminate, say, my hero, Patrick of Ireland, who built monasteries from town to town and persuaded Ireland in pretty much its entirety to follow Jesus rather than druidism (with its human sacrifice).  And then his followers, one generation later, reclaimed the whole of Europe for Jesus after the barbarian invasions had wiped out biblical faith.  By their incredible work in Europe--establishing institutions, monasteries, from town to town--they pretty much saved biblical faith entirely, since Europe was the vast bulk of where such faith had been practiced.

And, for our purposes, if we're just talking about fomenting a stage 4 revival in the secular west, I'm not sold that house churches have cornered this market.  Granted, nobody has.  But I know way more secular people who've experienced faith in, yes, institutional churches than I do who've done so in house churches.  The house churches I know the most about don't regard themselves as good at all at helping their secular neighbors experience faith.  They're too intimate and vulnerable for those friends to give them a try.  These churches tend to stay roughly the same size with roughly the same people in them. So they're awesome for full participation, but not so great--the ones I know at least--for fomenting revival. 

This summer we ran a post about the distinction between dreams (good) and idealism (bad).  Some house church proponents, in my experience, fall into the latter category.  They have an idealistic vision of why this beautiful house church dream is so much better than that evil church they were once a part of that they condemn all paid clergy and buildings throughout history as part of the devil's work.  One of the best-selling such writers came out of a house church movement that one of our staff members was also a top lieutenant in.  To listen to our guy, that bunch was astoundingly--truly jaw-droppingly--dysfunctional. I find myself longing for really functional, effective, godly churches of any stripe, big, small, whatever.

So, to recap, I am entirely rooting for any house church that can pull off a stage 4 approach to faith to thrive in all ways.  Whatever works!  That's my motto.

But when house church proponents need to draw strong lines in which they are the only heroes in this endeavor...  To put it bluntly, that's crazy talk.

CrazyPills sound bite  Will Ferrell sound bites

Thoughts?

Should We Avoid Gathering with Other Folks Trying to Follow Jesus?

Dave and Abby raise the intriguing question in their comments to Charles' post from two days ago that perhaps churches will never be a good idea for folks hoping to pursue stage 4 faith, because stage 4 is, by definition, individualistic.  Institutions, by necessity, need to be stage 2--they need to set limits, draw lines, create structure.  Or perhaps, as Dave suggests, they need to be stage 1.

So what do you think?  Do we need to avoid others in this journey lest we institutionalize?

I see it pretty much the other direction.  Yes, institutions can rigidify in stage 2 (or stage 1, I suppose), but that's why we're talking on this blog at all, so we can figure out how to transcend that.  In Peck's view of the stages, it's not that you or I are in one stage and thereby have left the others behind.  His point is that, as we move through the stages, we retain the previous stages as we move on.  So a parent would be a fool to play the stage 4 card with their four-year old.  It's stage 2 all the way, baby!  And wisely so.

Over the years our church has seen some neat things happen with people, usually men, who were formerly homeless or nearly so.  One thing we often need to help these often middle-aged men with is boundaries in terms of how they relate to young women.  On the street, these men were often very direct with such women.  In our church small groups, they would sometimes creep such women out.  What was needed was clear structure and boundaries on our part.  Stage 2.

Just yesterday I got in touch with some noteworthy anger at one group of people I regarded as unreflectively stage 2, to disastrous results.  I wasn't sad about their alleged failings, I was angry.  Seems remarkably like stage 3.

And my take on churches is that the ones we're describing here will need to play the cards of each stage well.  (Stage 1 is always the hardest to talk about here, but it seems to me that the healthy church and the healthy spiritual leader will always be very in touch with and transparent about their stage 1 side.  It's as we're open about our stage 1 selves that we win trust, it seems to me, even as, of course, we're doing our best not to live there.)

Of course a church will need to establish structure and draw the occasional line.  That's a card that will have to be in their deck.

The key, it seems to me with the communities we're describing here, is that there will also be other cards they can play.  If the only card is the stage 2 one--as I believe is often the case--then, yes, we are dreaming here that there would be more to a church community than that, that that would be a community without the kind of transparency, honesty and spiritual depth to attract and hold the kind of stage 3 people that fill the towns of many of us reading this.  But even those stage 3 people are going to want to know that the community does have some structure and some standards, however enlightened.

And, to my mind, with Charles I'd agree that the fundamental nature of God's universe is that it's relational.  Relationships that work--between people, between us and God and between us and ourselves--are a bottom-line good thing, the greatest good thing.  Alienation is the ultimate bad thing (CS Lewis picked up on this with The Great Divorce's vision of hell as isolation.) 

So, with Charles, I'm a church guy.  Going our own way is not a stage 4 choice, as I see it.  We do need connection and partnership--something this blog is shooting for as well.

Yes, again, I'd like these churches to be places that can serve all people, not least those in stages 3 or 4.  And so we talk about such things.  But I wouldn't want to abolish them.

Your thoughts?

How Does Prayer Fit In?

I'm intrigued by your comments to Charles' post--Abby (and Dave, to some degree) raise whether churches have a role in this endeavor at all, which seems worth some consideration.

But for now I'm wondering how you all think about prayer in this endeavor.  We've been throwing out that maybe our objective could be summed up as something like, "to help facilitate a stage 4 revival in the secular west."  Given that most of what we've seemed to be doing recently is define terms, this begs that same question.  What do we mean by "revival," most notably.  But I'm bogging down with defining things just now, so we'll leave that unanswered. 

So, however you think about "revival," what role do you feel prayer will pray in it?  Are you pursuing that kind of prayer in any fashion?

A few churches represented here are fasting and praying as whole churches right now for something at least along these lines.  Their thinking has been that cleverness and savvy cultural interpretation and good leadership and preaching skills can indeed take us somewhere down the path to this dream.  But limits will invariably set in.  Our smarts and skills and normal devotional practices can only take us so far.  Perhaps prayer and fasting will bump this up a level.

But what do you think?  Has prayer for your community (or the secular west) been part of your repertoire?  Has God spoken to you about this along the way?  What's God said to you? 

How does prayer fit in?

An Historic Take on the Importance of What We’re All Shooting For/ Charles Park (New York)

From Dave: My friend Charles Park, whom many of you heard as the kickoff speaker at this year’s Culture Center Summit, recently e-mailed me with how he’s been thinking about the importance of the task we all have taken on.  Charles is as good as anyone I’ve met in thinking about things from the big picture, so I thought you might enjoy his insights as much as I did.  His remarks assume a working knowledge of what we’ve called “Stage 4 Faith,” something you can learn more about—if it’s new to you—by clicking on the tab of that name, above or watching the video below.  I’d love your thoughts on Charles’ perspective.

[Charles edited this post to flesh it out a bit more.]

There is a pattern to revivals both in the Bible and in church history.  First, you get a people group in trouble:  oppressed or in barbaric, chaotic state.  Think of Israel in captivity in Egypt, or Europe in Dark Ages overrun by the Barbarians, or some Third World country plagued with alcoholism and criminal chaos.  If you’re familiar with the stage theory, that’d be stage 1.  Then, God’s message comes in through the church, and people start to clean up their act, work ethic comes in, God’s blessings flow, and the country prospers:  the Promised Land or a chaotic developing country becomes developed.  That’d be stage 2.  Then, over several generations, people become apostate.  Israel starts worshiping other gods.  Developed countries go secular humanist.  That could be labeled stage 3.

 What the church usually does at this point is to lament and point fingers, warning of God’s judgment to come.  But, here’s an interesting thought.  If the church is only able to preach a stage 2 message, the nation that has gone to stage 3 will never listen, because their identity is shaped by the rejection of stage 2.  Even logic won’t work any more, because our identity and culture shapes our logic.  If this goes on for hundreds of years, what option does God have?  If the church won’t preach a message that the world can listen to, then the only option God has is to move the world back to stage 1 so that some may be saved.  Think of The Flood.  Babylon.  The Black Plague.  What’s next?

It's sort of an exalted view of the role of the church, but I believe the Bible has a high view of the church's role in history.   The challenging question that arises from this reflection is this.  The church has historically lamented people going apostate, but can the church do better than just point fingers? 

 Can we preach a stage 4 message that will lead to a stage 4 revival?  Not Religious Inc. is trying to craft a movement of churches to develop a stage 4 revival in the Western world that has gone stage 3.  If every revival has followed the trajectory described before, then this cause is critical.

We'll Figure It Out

So, as I commented on Friday, I think we've run aground on our latest string of posts, which might reflect the degree of difficulty of the enterprise.  I'm not sure I can fully frame what the enterprise is, exactly, but it's something to the effect of proposing a way forward for faith in Jesus in a secularizing western world.  We've used terms like "stage 4" or "centered set" along the way to try to characterize what this way forward might feel like.

Not all of us would agree that that's needed.  Maybe just learning from all the best thinkers in the church and theological worlds will do the trick.  If that's your take, fair enough!  I don't believe it, though, and that's been the spirit of the last posts.

But, just to clarify, it was clear to me we'd run aground when the last post drew impassioned defenses of theology or studying the Bible.  I was taken aback.  Was I arguing for anything but that?  This whole chain of posts, after all, had started with a post I'd done comparing the theologies of the Pietists, early Methodists, Lutherans, and reformation-era Catholics.  That sounded...theological to me. 

And it seemed to ground our conversation, if in a glancing way, with some historical thought on the subjects at hand, even as we attempt to press forward, which is what theology has historically done.  It did mention some traditions that evangelicals rarely look at, but perhaps that can reflect on the thinness of some evangelical theology rather than on the uselessness of Pietists, early Methodists, Lutherans and (though they were the villains in this post) reformation-era Catholics.

My point, in conception at least, was not that the way past the alleged deficiencies in evangelical theology was to scrap theology or the Bible, but to transcend the (to my mind) culturally-bound terms that have rendered it less than useful.  My enemies in the last post, you'll recall, were the Pharisees.  I don't see the Pharisees as our model for good theology, but rather as our model for lots of bankrupt proof-texting from scholars who'd lost sight that God was knowable. 

When I talked about people in our church from evangelical backgrounds occasionally complaining about wanting more "meat" from me or from our church, I wasn't conceding their point that there was more meat where they'd come from, but that I refused to feed them.  My take: the perceived "meat" they were looking for was thin stuff indeed, pumped full of steroids and sawdust, but the rich repast being offered them was unappealing because they'd become so accustomed to the other gruel.  (That sounds, oh, immodest.  I'll figure out a way to rephrase before we're done.  But...to make the point.) 

As I mentioned in one of my comments in the last post: I'm in conversations about starting a whole theological institute, costing big money and big effort in the end.  Three cheers for theology!  It's a good deal of what I regard myself as doing.

A lot of our road through these last few posts has involved questioning accepted definitions of terms of interest, like "love," "religion" and "Christian."  This could seem, I suppose, like a jettisoning of thought, because a renunciation of terms could seem like heading into...nothing.  But most theological steps forward throughout the history of the church have involved questioning terms.  The most famous thinker in the last century to talk about a "religionless Christianity" was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, nobody's idea of an anti-intellectual.  

So, hey, we'll need to figure out another way to have this conversation someday, because it's a central one to our enterprise.  Clearly the terms I laid out just didn't work and generated more heat than light. 
At the moment, I'm not coming up with better ones, but that's been true along the way with a number of subjects, and we have been able to find ways profitably into those subjects just a short time later.  May it be true here.