Does It Really All Boil Down to "Chat with God?"

By the time you read this, I'll again be on a writing retreat, and I have no plans to post the remainder of the week...so can I reiterate my call for guest posts?  This is your time to shine!  Get them to dan@notreligious.org .  Here's hoping we have a robust week of great topics to ponder!

So I realized today that I'd gone as far as I was going to go with this book by James Davison Hunter called To Change the World that we talked about a couple weeks back.  I've made it to page 200 of 286 pages.  And I've appreciated it.  As advertised, he's really astute and a good writer.  I've learned things, particularly about the three streams of faith he talks about: evangelical conservatives, evangelical liberals and neo-Anabaptists.

I'm persuaded by his critiques of why all these Christians who have wanted to change the world have failed to do so.  (To perhaps oversimplify: it seems to boil down to "because everyone ends up politicizing their objectives, even the anti-political neo-Anabaptists, and politics is not the same as God's kingdom.")

And I haven't yet even read his own proposed solution!  I'm quitting before I get there!  But I'm realizing I've sort of quit caring.  And that seems to be because I seem not to believe that really smart evangelicals have the answer to things like this.  It's seeming to me that the only answer would have to be "and then God spoke to people and they listened and acted and then really neat things happened." 

I'm back to our old saw: Stage 4 faith relies on chatting with God and hearing back.  It relies on a God who is bigger than us but who very much wants to guide and direct us.  And if God wants to change the world--as he did when he sent St. Patrick a vision of returning to Ireland, as he did when he told St. Francis to "rebuild my church," as he did with the simplicity of his communication with St. Therese of Lisieux, as he did when he encouraged Billy Graham to put his faith in the truth of the Bible and then see what happens--then we need God to do that.

But that can seem...not smart enough.  Not responsible enough.  I read Hunter and I hear a call to arms to really smart evangelicals to...do something.  I'm not sure I'm quite smart enough to figure out what, but I'm sure I'd be helped by reading his actual proposal. 

But I just got off a get-together with my amazing friend, Rich, who uses the wealth he's accumulated in his own astounding "chatting with God" journey of business to encourage top-level scientists and wacky-but-amazing inventors and people starting a freaking film studio (sorry, the sentence didn't seem to work without the intensifier) that their only hope is to ask God how to solve their challenges and then do what God says.  And I leave so encouraged (as do some of the very impressive people Rich is encouraging apart from me).  It settles my spirit. 

Just this past weekend, as we faced some not-insignificant challenges shooting these Seek videos in this super-professional, super-pressurized setting, I realized my only option in several instances was, "Ask God for direction.  Assume God will answer.  And then do what he says.  In the next 30 seconds.  As this entire crew of filmmakers and this large audience waits for you to do something."  And by gum if it didn't work.

So, is that really our bottom line here?  Does it really all boil down to "chat with God, see what God says, and then do that?"