The Dangers of Thinking Big

Recently, I got a mailing from another church saying they were "transforming Charlotte for Christ."   I say "another" because it seems that I get something every other  week from one Christian group or another planning to transform Charlotte for Christ.  It would seem by now that one of them would have already transformed it.  No matter,  God bless their efforts--they are welcome to try.

Even so,  I can't think of a single city, large or small in the developed world where it could be said that a single church or group of churches have transformed it for Christ.  Overall, the churches today seem to have less impact on their cities than ever before.   Crusades and programs come and go,  yet the crime rate remains the same,  unwed pregnancies continue to rise,  abortion mills stay open,  porn shops and night clubs continue to flourish,  and  the total number of churchgoers remain pretty much the same,  shuffled between one megachurch or another.

I am not an expert on city transformation, but I can still speculate on some of the reasons why the churches' impact is so little felt.  

First,  there are preachers. Preachers are responsible for most church planning and promotion, and are usually the one declaring we should "transform Charlotte for Christ." But preachers (as everyone knows) are often notorious liars.  They don't lie about the Bible or the Gospel, but they do stretch the truth quite a bit about their own personal importance and influence. We make one timid convers and count it as a hundred.  We receive ten dissatisfied members from some other church which has just undergone a split, and tout it as if we had just broken the gates of hell. We forget that the world is impossibly big, and that one person or one church cannot win it alone, no matter how gifted or important we suppose ourselves to be. The only thing "city-wide" about most of us are our egos. 

Second, we forget that when the church seeks to transform the city, the city in turn will begin to transform the church.  It is a two way street.  As we gain more influential perches from which to proclaim our message,  the denizens of the city who are ever hungry for power and influence, will flock to us, hungry to use our influence for their own purposes.   Politicians visit the big churches.  Businessmen seek out networking opportunities,  promoters of causes and providers of services will flatter our egos,  worming their way onto church boards,  promising money and influence.  We kid ourselves into thinking we are exploiting these movers and shakers,  but all the time they are exploiting us.    As we grow in the city, we become like the city, indistinguishable in goals and standards from other  institutions around us.  

We preachers are susceptible to what Eugene Peterson likes to call "ecclesiastical pornography."  The dream of some ideal,  secure, and influential churches,  which is smoothly transforming people around us with our slick programs,  smooth preaching, and attractive members is just as sinful and misleading as the airbrushed babes of Playboy.   We lust after this with an unholy lust that causes us to forget the real, ordinary parishioners around us.  IN our quest for a city-transforming ministry,  we look after the big and dishonor the small.  For the sake of efficiency, we ignore the hurting in our own homes,  thinking them less important than the hurting downtown.  We speak prophetically to the big social issues, yet stay silent about the sins in our own house.  We condemn homosexuality, but encourage pride,  we condemn lust and leave gluttony alone,  we fight abortion, but keep silent about prayerlessness.  We become hollow, because we spend all our time on outer veneer, not  inner transformation.  We seek to transform the city, yet have forgotten to transform ourselves.

It's interesting to notice that while Paul--perhaps the greatest evangelist who ever lived--rarely mentioned evangelism in his letters to the churches.  He did not berate the Ephesians, for example, to go out and transform Ephesus.  Instead, he told them to seek Christ.  When they sought to be like Christ,  witnessing came with the package. Instead of making plans for world transformation, we should seek the transformation of our own souls. As we become like Jesus, we impact the world.  On the other hand, if we try to become like the world in order to reach it,  we will become less and less like Jesus. 

Again, I don't want to berate churches who feel called to impact cities for Christ.  I support their efforts.  It's just that I often feel we are spreading  grass seed when we should need to be planting oak trees.  We are making converts who, like grass, fade with the slightest heat,  when we should be establishing disciples with deep roots in the eternal Gospel, who will not fade in times of famine. It takes much longer, and is definitely less flashy to build a few praying Christians, but in the end, it is much more satisfying. 

Welcome to Esalvation.com

I was a counselor at a Billy Graham crusade when I was seventeen.  That was when I first learned to share the Gospel.  Later I learned to use the Four Spiritual Laws, that famous little mustard yellow booklet with the illustrations that has led millions to a commitment to Christ. I also learned the Roman Road, the Bridge,  Evangelism Explosion, and the Gospel glove.  All of them are ways of telling people the plan of Salvation, the road to God through Christ.   I still believe them all.  I have not changed in this one little bit.

Nevertheless, there is something has always bothered me.  Receiving Jesus is the most important decision in life, yet it seems so formal, so mechanical when we present it.  Christianity is not a hell insurance policy. It is an encounter with the living Christ. 

To illustrate,  think about the second most important decision we make in life--who we are going to marry.

Imagine logging onto an online dating site and seeing this profile:

"Hello, I'm(blank) and I have wonderful news for you!

"I love you and have a wonderful plan for your life!    

Until now, your separation from me has made that plan impossible. You distance has separated you from me.

"Fortunately, there is a solution!  You can reach me through this web site.  All you have to do is email me, and I am yours for life!

"Here is a sample email you can send:

"'(Blank), I recognize that I'm lonely.   This is wrong. I confess that you are my best hope for matrimony.   I want you as my husband.  From now on, I will be your loyal and obedient life. Thank you for taking me as your bride. Amen."

Check this box to indicate your agreement."

Sounds crazy, right?  If it is crazy for our second greatest decision, then why do we think it sufficient for our first great decision?   We assume in marriage that we should actually personally meet the person we are marrying, before we commit.  Sd do not enter into a lifetime partnership lightly. If we did,  then it is unlikely that we would last very long.

Yet somehow  we think that a trip down the church aisle or a prayer at the back of the book is sufficient to secure an eternal relationship with the Father.

Christianity cannot be this casual. It is a permanent, serious relationship we ought to take  seriously. We should encourage people to get to know Christ before they commit to Him. We should be encouraging caution to the altar, not speed.  People should fall in love with Jesus, not come to Him in moment of fear or desperation. Maybe this is why we see so many people fall away after initial  decisions. 

The facts of quick evangelism is correct--the feelings are not . We need to be overwhelmed by Jesus, dazzled by His presence and awestruck by His authority.  Then we will come to Him changed in heart and ready to begin a new life.  We will treat evangelism of the lost with more seriousness than liking His Facebook page. 

Here's the catch. If we are to help others experience Jesus, we have to be experiencing Him ourselves, not as a legal loophole for hell, but as a living,  loving ,  overwhelming Presence in our lives. 

Are we experiencing Jesus, is He truly the center of our lives?  He is more than a decision, He is a friend, a companion, and a Lord. 

For God So Liked the World

One of the first religious books I remember reading was CS Lewis' The Four Loves. Lewis describes four kinds of love based on four Greek words for love--Sturge, Eros, Phileos, and Agape.


Here they are in grossly oversimplified terms.

Sturge is a passing enjoyment, such as "I love baseball" or "I love chocolate."

Eros, is a sensual, consuming passion, obsession, or addiction.

Phleos is friendship love, the love in commonly shared relationship or experiences.

Then there is agape love. This divine love is only possible fully through Divine intervention. It is a sacrificial love, as Christ loved on the cross. It is not a love because of liking anything about a person, but liking in spite of everything unlikeable about a person. This love is the blessed, chaste love of a true saint.

When I read that book, I wanted to be a true saint. (I still do, though I have never achieved it.) This was the love I longed to have--a love that does not depend about liking anything about people, but only depends on the love God has for poor lost sinners such as ourselves.

Agape love is not so much an act of he heart as of the will. It is, as Finney put it, a "decision to seek the highest good of another." I can decide to love my enemy, and seek his highest good without having to like him. Agape love is sacrificial, giving ourselves to others.

That was my understanding in my days of youthful idealism.

Since I have grown older, though, I have come to realize that agape love, though it may be the highest, is not the only kind of love God wants us to have for others. Agape allows us to love people we do not like. But it does not settle the issue of whether or how we should also like them.

We need to be careful about "sloppy agape." That is a general and ideal love, but not personal and specific. It is not enough tolerate the lost, but to welcome them. We may claim we love a person in Jesus, while detesting everything about them. This kind of love is not love at all, but paternalism and condescension--a misuse of the doctrine of Christian charity.

A purely ideal concept of love lacks both passion and staying power. We may be able to love those we do not like, but we cannot keep it up for long. Sooner or later, no matter how pious we may act, our love needs to grow into real, honest affection or it will not last.

Think about broccoli for a moment. Many people hate broccoli. (Not me, I actually like it.) Those who hate broccoli may be determined to eat healthy, and they know broccoli is good for them, so they force it down their throats. But how long can they keep doing this without either developing a taste for it, or dropping it from their menus?

Or take marriage. A person may marry another as a result of prearranged marriage or out of a sense of duty. But unless that person develops a geniune liking for their spouse, that marriage will be unsatisfying for both. This is not to suggest that people should divorce if they do not feel love, but rather that we find something likeable about our spouses if we do not already have it. If ideal love does not turn into honest affection, then that marriage is doomed.

We can suppress our feelings, but it will wear us out in the end. No one can work at something they do not like to do forever without respite. We will not stay with people we honestly do not care for, without making them and us miserable. At some time, our feelings will conquer us.

This idea of liking as well as loving is absolutely essential for the spreading of the Gospel. For hundreds of years we have been preaching evangelism. Also for hundreds of years, the majority of Christians have simply ignored the call. They love the world, in a spiritual sense, and do not want to see others go to hell. But they do not like the world. Many Christians find the current age so abhorent that they want nothing to do with it. They move into fortresses of their own making, isolating themselves from "sinners" so they will not be contaminated by the things of the world, whether or not that world has anything to do with the gospel itself. We make excuses for hating the world around us, condemning aspects of music, dress and language that do not fit our cultural, non-spiritual norms. We do this to further emphasize our differences with the culture around us. We do this for the same reason teenagers of my generation wore their hair long or dressed in miniskirts--because we wanted to be different from our parents' generation. It's not that we didn't love our parents and grandparents. We just didn't like them, or anything about them. As we grew up, we learned better, when our children did the same to us.

John 3:16 begins "For God so loved the world." God does not just love the world, he honestly likes it. God may not like what the world does or what it believes, but God, like the parent of a rebellious teenager, sees something of Himself in them. He experiences genuine affection for us, as well as loving us in an esoteric sense.

Many Christians cannot grasp this. That is because many of us have an "all or nothing" mentality regarding our likes and dislikes. If we do not like a man's politics or religious opinions, we drop him in a bin in our mind that is labeled "Don't like." If we agree with a person, we drop him in the "like" bin. I don't believe God thinks this way. He recognizes the fact that there is very little difference between those we like and don't like. We have the same DNA. We were created in God's image. We are affected by the same sinful nature. There are actions, ideas, and attitudes which we should not like, that's true. But it up to God to decide who is or is not condemned in their sin. Even in the worst of us, there is something to like and admire.

Phileos love, that is friendship love, is built on commonalities. Our common interest, passions, and failures make us far more like each other than different.

We share similar interests. Among men, it may be more effective evangelism goes on at the lake or on the golf course than in the church. Christians who golf with non-Christians forge a friendship which provides a bridge for the Gospel to get to their hearts. Those places where we share neutral activities with others--the gym, the mall, or the marketplace, become those places where we come to like unbelievers, which leads to loving them. Some Christians are more afraid of unbelievers affecting them than they are excited about affecting unbelievers themselves. We share the same passions. Not long ago, I was asked to hold a funeral for a relative of someone in my church who had been a lesbian. The grief of her "significant other" was no less real than our grief for a spouse. Pain is pain no matter who has it. A sensitive, caring believer will recognize the pain in others, whether or not that pain is theologically justified. Jesus wept over Lazarus, even though He was about to raise him for the dead. He did not chide Mary and Martha for their lack of faith. Our own pains enable us to understand the pains of others.

We also share the same sins. We once lived in the same apartment building with an unmarried couple who were addicted to drugs. We got to know them and talked to them about their problem, even though we never used drugs. But I found that my own struggles with food were not that different in form from their struggles with drugs. It differed only in consequence and intensity.

We believers are comfortable with the fact that we are sinners. We just don't like to admit we have sinned, or have anything in common with those we consider to be really bad sinners. Our sins are small, but their sins are big. We regard ourselves as sinners in a general, esoteric sense, but do not like to admit to any particular sin. Yet it is our admission of our fallenness and failures which helps the unbeliever believe that God means it when he says "I forgive." It is our failure, not our successes that give us the ability to befriend the lost. We were lost, and now are found. We still sin, but we still find grace.

God doesn't just love the world. He likes it. He enjoys the enjoyable things about it, even though he hates the things that are broken. If we follow in His footsteps, then we ought to do the same.

The Witnessing Life

Let’s talk about lostness. Lostness means that people are lost without Jesus. Paul said “There is just one name on heaven and on earth by which we must be saved—Christ Jesus.” Jesus said “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” If we believe that these verses, then we must also believe there is something wrong with this world. It’s spinning out of control. It’s like a flock without a shepherd, But we don’t see it because in our hearts we just don’t see the world as lost. John Eldridge writes in his book Desire, “Something awful has happened, something terrible. Something worse, even than the fall of Man. For in that greatest of all tragedies, we merely lost Paradise—and with it, everything that made life worth living. What has happened since is unthinkable. We’ve gotten used to it. We’re broken in to the idea that this is just the way things are. The people who walk in great darkness have adjusted their eyes. The only thing worse than the fall of Man is the failure of man to see that he has fallen. We have entered a dangerous realm—the realm of the uncaring, and of despair. When people are in peril, others rise to be heroes. In the recent crash of a jet in the New York harbor, the Staten Island ferries headed for the downed plane. Ordinary passengers hauled up those stranded in the water. They literally took the shirts off their backs to cover the soaked survivors. They understood the lostness of those passengers. Without help, those people would be dead. But every day, we go to the store, sit in theaters next to people who are under the threat of eternal lostness, and we do nothing. True, death is not written on their faces. But underneath their lives are broken, their hopes are broken, and their hearts are broken. We see the evidence of that in divorce rates, in the drug trade and the flesh trade and all that is going on around us. It is in the greed of corporations and the violence of street crime. The world is lost, and we do nothing. Christians have a curious relationship to the world. We know it is temporary. We know that not to concern ourselves with worldly things. Even so we have to live in this world. So we compromise. We give space to our fears of losing prestige. We snuggle up to the world’s temptations losing ourselves along the way. Paul writes in Romans 10:1-4 Brothers, my heart's desire and prayer to God for the Israelites is that they may be saved. For I can testify about them that they are zealous for God, but their zeal is not based on knowledge. Since they did not know the righteousness that comes from God and sought to establish their own, they did not submit to God's righteousness. Christ is the end of the law so that there may be righteousness for everyone who believes. Paul said this not of the Greco-Roman world, but the world of his Jewish heritage. He could have compared his God-fearing relatives to the pagans, and missed their lostness. After all, they were so much better! Just because they didn’t know Jesus didn’t make them bad people. But Paul saw through their religiosity and realized that these people knew nothing. Paul’s Jewish friends were sincere, but that didn’t matter. Sincerity only counts if you are sincerely right. Nowhere but religion would anyone dare to suggest sincerity was enough. If a jury convicts and innocent man, does sincerity count? If a doctor amputates the wrong leg, does sincerity count? So why should sincerity count when it comes to souls? The Jewish misunderstanding of God was hurting people and sending them to hell. Sincerity made no difference. Can we be content to see the world go to hell, and do nothing? Can we take a “live and let live” attitude, and let the rest of the world perish? Magician Penn Jillett --no friend of Christians—had an interesting reaction when a Christian offered him a Bible. He took it. Later he said, “How much do you have to hate somebody not to proselytize? How much do you have to hate someone to believe that everlasting life is possible and not tell them?” For once, he was right. When we do not tell others, we are not being polite. We do not care whether they go to hell. How much do we have to hate a person to do that? Many wonder how a God of love could ever make such a place as hell. Honestly, I don’t know. It’s not my job to understand God’s mysteries. Our question needs to be how we can claim to love others, and not care if they know Jesus? Leave it to God to determine their ultimate fate--just love them enough to tell them about Jesus. So here’s our challenge for the week--“Make sharing our faith a natural and normal part of our lives.” When we talk about witnessing, most Christians get weak in the knees. It’s frightening to us! But what does Paul say? (vs14) How, then, can they call on the one they have not believed in? And how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them?” Sharing our faith is scary. But whenever we are afraid to do something there is only one cure—do it! If we’re afraid of sharing, then do it daily. Plan it in your schedule. “Pick up groceries. Wash the dog. Spend time with the neighbor.” My challenge to you is to do just that. And I will tell you how. First, pray for our neighbors. Put your neighbors specifically on your prayer list. I believe that God will honor your prayers. Even if you don’t get a chance to share, someone else will, if we pray for them repeatedly. Second, meet our neighbors. Many Christians are allergic to nonbelievers. We’re afraid they embarrass us. Of course they will! But if they were members of our own family, I’m sure we would find a way to overlook their rude behavior, for he sake of love. Sometimes we have to overlook minor faults to achieve major results. Third, reach for our neighbors. Look for ways to show our neighbors that we care. It is important to earn the respect others before we share with them. That is people must first welcome the messenger before we can receive the message. Finally, share with our neighbors. Build a bridge to their souls. Then we can authentically offer what Jesus means to us. Let them know what Jesus can do for them. Bishop Stephen Neill is famous for defining witnessing as “one beggar telling another beggar where to get bread.” If you have eaten the bread of life, then don’t keep it to yourselves. Share it. Ask God for opportunities to share with others. Or not, if you choose. But if you choose the latter--ask yourself Paul’s question “How can they hear without a preacher?”