Sunday I preached a sermon on the dangers of productivity while also rolling out a new church management platform that will likely make us more…productive.

And while increased productivity was not the purpose for the new platform, the irony was not lost on me.

Nor was the fact that this was Labor Day weekend, a holiday typically devoted to resting from labor and productivity.

None of this was planned.

As I mentioned on Sunday, the primary purpose of our new church management platform, which is called Subsplash, is to improve our infrastructure so that our culture can more effectively grow and spread. We want to communicate more effectively, make it easier for people to take meaningful action, and keep better records so we can make more informed decisions.

And when I say “we” I am referring to our church leadership team. The entire church is a “we” of course, a body in which every person plays a unique and vital role. But some of those “parts” are set aside or “called” by the rest of the body for the purpose of serving the whole as leaders.

The primary role of a leader in the church is to serve the body by making decisions that direct it to Jesus and help it grow up into maturity in Christ, full of love.[1]

But doing that effectively in today’s culture is not just a matter of prayer and hope. Leaders need strategies and tools to help implement those strategies. That is what Subsplash is all about.

The platform will enable congregation members to connect with the church and faith throughout the week, whether by accessing media and blogs, registering for events, reading scripture, or communicating with serve teams, but it will also help church leaders collect and organize data so we can better shepherd people along their faith journey.

At Waterville Community Church, that is always the goal and the metric applied to every decision. Is this change going to positively impact our ability to help people grow up in their faith?

We believe the answer with Subsplash is yes.

I know that some people are cautious about adopting new technologies. I appreciate that. Please know that we did our homework. Subsplash is entirely secure and it does not collect or sell user data. If you’re feeling cautious, I understand. But part of what makes for healthy church cultures is a broad and diverse leadership team (which we have) that makes decisions thoughtfully and for the right reasons (which we believe we do) and a congregation that trusts the leaders it has entrusted to lead.

So, if you have not already, please take a few moments to; 1) Download our new App. Subsplash is an app-driven platform. Through the App you’ll be able to do everything from pre-check kids into Sunday morning kids’ church, manage your giving and see your giving history, watch or listen to media, register for events, and manage your volunteer schedule; 2) Create a user profile. You can use certain features in the App as a guest but to get the most out of the platform you need to setup a profile. Be sure to use a unique email when setting up your profile. Subsplash uses your email as your unique identifier in the system so no sharing emails with your spouse; and 3) If you are currently giving to the church online, your current recurring gift will process as usual in the month of September and will then automatically cancel at the end of the month when we officially phase out our current system. All you need to do is reestablish giving through Subsplash, which you can do through the App or on the church’s website.

As I mentioned on Sunday, the hope is to have everyone transitioned over and using the new system by Sunday, October 4th. Thank you again for your participation.
   
   
   [1] Ephesians 4:13-16

Back in 2022 I wrote a post reflecting on Malcolm Gladwell’s book Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know Abou the People We Don’t Know. You can read that post here.

Gladwell’s basic point is that we’re bad at talking to strangers. That is, encounters with people we don’t know have a tendency to go very badly. According to Gladwell’s analysis, that is because; 1) we default to truth, that is we assume other people are being honest with us. When they are, great. But when they’re not, not so great; 2) we buy into the illusion of transparency. We think a person’s body language is a clear indicator of intention or motive. When it is, we’re usually right. But when people are what Gladwell calls “mismatched,” even law enforcement professionals are terrible judges; and 3) we neglect context. We pay attention to the person but don’t account for time, place, or situation.

Surprisingly, a reason Gladwell does not cite in his book for why encounters with strangers can go terribly wrong is our existing, often unexamined prejudices.

We all assume certain things are likely to be true about certain other people based on various experiences and inputs. If every homeless person I see portrayed on television is a drunk or drug addict, I am likely to assume every homeless person I encounter in real life is as well. If I grow up hearing from authorities in my life that people of another race or religion are somehow “less than,” I will assume that to be true of all people in those categories.

We grow up believing certain things to be true of certain other people and more than that we assume we have good reason for our beliefs.

But just as we can be very wrong because we default to truth, assume we can read people based on their body language, or fail to consider context, we can be very wrong because of our preconceived assumptions about people who fall into certain categories or groups.

For example, there is a story in Genesis 20-21 involving Abraham, the patriarch of the nation of Israel, and a man named Abimelech. Abraham moved with his wife Sarah to the region of Gerar where Abimelech was king. Fearing that Abimelech would kill him to take possession of Sarah, Abraham introduced Sarah as his sister. Abimelech quickly took Sarah into his home to be his wife but before sleeping with her God appeared to him in a dream condemning him for what he did.

Abimelech was shocked. He had acted innocently. It was Abraham, the patriarch of God’s people, who had been deceptive.

When Abimelech confronted Abraham, Abraham’s excuse was, “I thought, ‘this is a godless place. They will want my wife and will kill me to get her.’”

“I thought, ‘this is a godless place.’”

Abraham just assumed that Abimelech and his people were godless and, as such, that they would take his wife by violence. But he was wrong. True, Abimelech did not know Yahweh, the God of Israel, but that did not mean Abimelech lacked a God-inspired conscience and a moral code. But that’s what Abraham assumed about him.

And because Abraham assumed Abimelech would treat him in an ungodly way, it was actually Abraham who treated Abimelech in an ungodly way. To protect himself against a presumed threat Abraham became the threat.

I understand anyone choosing to exercise caution around people they don’t know, especially when taking into account certain contexts. And there are good reasons for why our brains group people into categories. Those are shortcuts called heuristics that help us cut through the endless data input our brains receive each day so we can make decisions without melting down from exhaustion.

But those same heuristics can become biases or prejudices that contribute to us getting people wrong. And when we assume wrongly about another person, we tend to be the ones who act wrongly toward them. As I’ve said and written about many times, the beginning of love is to think the best of the other first. Let other people demonstrate to you who they are before you decide who they must be.

Christians are called to forgive. I call it “reactive grace.” It’s “reactive” in the sense that we offer grace in response or reaction to someone doing something to hurt or offend us.
But grace also has a “proactive” dimension, one we may not be as aware of or concerned about.

The proactive side to grace is less about forgiveness and more about how we choose to think about. All people. All the time.

This proactive dimension to grace is connected to and helps inform grace’s reactive dimensions.

When someone does something that results in us feeling hurt or offended, the emotions we feel are the products of our interpretive narratives. As meaning making creatures we have to assign meaning to every word and action. We often do this without even realizing we’re doing it, but we’re doing it.

And the stories we tell produce very different emotional outcomes. If I tell myself my spouse forgot to wish me a happy birthday because she doesn’t care about me, that narrative will likely produce anger, sadness, or resentment. If, on the other hand, I tell myself she didn’t wish me a happy birthday because she’s just struggling to keep her head above water right now with everything going on in life that my birthday simply didn’t make it on the “emergency” list, I might still be a little sad but that sadness might also be tempered with compassion and understanding.

Proactive grace is choosing to tell yourself the most benevolent story about another person as you can. In other words, proactive grace is the choice to give the other person the benefit of the doubt regarding their motives, intentions, etc. Choosing to see another person in the best possible light is the most basic act of love. It is where love begins.
Now, there is a shadow side proactive grace, just as there is a shadow side to reactive grace. Just as you can forgive another person’s bad behavior only to suffer that same bad behavior again and again, always giving another person the benefit of the doubt can materialize as excusing bad behavior which can lead to abusive situations.

You keep telling yourself the other person probably didn’t mean, they’re just having a bad day, if the circumstances were different they probably would not have said or done what they did. But the same behaviors keep happening and you keep suffering.

Neither type of grace—reactive or proactive—ought to result in the party extending the grace feeling like they’re being walked on or taken advantage of. If that is happening, it probably isn’t grace. It’s probably avoidance.

And in my experience, that’s usually what happens. One party does the work of proactive grace by telling themselves the best possible story regarding the other person, but they don’t then take the time to address the behavior and verify the story.

Giving someone the benefit of doubt does not mean you avoid discussing the issue. It just means you chose in the moment to give the other person the benefit of the doubt.

You still need to verify if the story you told yourself was correct. I told myself my wife forgot to wish me a happy birthday because she’s stressed and busy. Is that true? What if I found out the entire day of my birthday she was relaxing by the pool? Well, I need to amend my story.

You can appreciate the importance of this step more when you look at it from the negative. Imagine I choose not to give another person the benefit of doubt and consequently I am filled with emotions like anger and bitterness. What if I’m wrong? What if the motives or intentions I assigned to the other person’s actions are not accurate? Then what I’m feeling isn’t accurate either. It’s accurate based on the story I told but if the story I told is wrong, my feelings aren’t justifiable. I’m holding another person accountable for something they never meant to do with the malice I assumed. Love obligates me to verify the story I told myself.

That is no less true when you tell a benevolent story of another person. To prevent proactive grace from becoming a mechanism whereby one person just gets abused that person must address the behavior and seek to verify if their benevolent story is correct. If they were incorrect, if the person’s motives were malicious, and especially if that behavior continues, grace does not require a harmed person to remain in an unhealthy situation.

Grace is both reactive and proactive. We are called to forgive people when they wrong us, but we are also called to think the best of people before they wrong us and even when they do. But grace does not stop there. Grace involves the search for and commitment to truth.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what Patrick Deneen calls the “ideology of progress.”[1] Deneen is a political scientist and in his exert opinion, “progress” is the fundamental assumption or goal that drives liberalism as a political system.[2]

Progress is variously defined, of course, but it usually boils down to the promise of increased economic opportunity and/or greater charity with regard to social expression or what is sometimes called “identity.”

Our liberal pursuit of progress has no doubt done much good in the world. But it may also be making us sick.

Like the pharmaceutical ads that seem to dominate our marketing space. A new drug promises to clear up your psoriasis but may cause liver disease. Or a drug promises to lower your A1C but may cause swelling in the anus or genitals. I saw a news headline the other day that said while LED lights are saving us money, they may be depriving us of vital light wavelengths leaving us less healthy.

“Progress” comes with tradeoffs, some of which can be serious.

I was thinking about that this morning as I hopped back behind the driver seat of a bus and helped get kids off to their first day of school, some of those kids being my own. I thought about all the parents standing at bus stops and all of their hopes for the coming year. I thought about all the teachers, administrators, and coaches who are fresh off their (hopefully) reenergizing summer breaks.

What does an uncritical commitment to “progress” do to us in the learning arena? Does it distort the learning process? Does it impose goals, expectations, or assumptions that actually work against the healthiest modes of acquiring and accommodating new information and skills? If we are driven by the felt need for ever-increasing improvement (more league titles, higher test scores, more impressive college admission rates, more newsworthy achievements, better state report card, etc.), how does that impact both educators and students?

I don’t have answers for those questions, but I do observe that both teachers and students seem to start the school year with what appear to be “full tanks” but operate as if those tanks just slowly deplete over the course of the year until by the last day of school everyone is “empty.”

Is it good that it “works” this way? Does it work this way because secretly we’re all being driven by this hidden, unspoken pursuit of progress? The felt need for more?

It’s like we’re running with a pacer who just keeps getting faster. We’re just expected to keep up. The system is never expected to slow down. In a world built on progress, slowing down would be experienced as failure.

Don’t get me wrong, I want to see kids “achieve” and “succeed” and all that. I just wonder if we’re measuring the right outcomes.

If the two were mutually exclusive, would we rather have a child who gets straight A’s and scores a 34 on the ACT but is so busy and isolated she doesn’t have time for meaningful friendships or a student who gets decent grades and scores pretty well on tests but has enough spare time to feel deeply connected to people?

If the two were mutually exclusive, would we rather have teachers who focus on pushing students academically and athletically, or who focus on helping young people become the healthiest versions of themselves?

I know these things are not mutually exclusive, but I am trying to draw out the fact that if Deneen is correct and our political order is uncritically committed to the endless pursuit of progress, the next generation always having more and achieving more than the previous one, our educational systems are caught up in that. And while that leads to some good in the world, it may also contribute to why so many of us feel existentially unwell.

In his book Unconditional Love, the Jesuit John Powell makes this claim: “The crisis facing contemporary society is, ‘Is love really the pathway to personal satisfaction and happiness?’”[3] He wrote that in 1978!

How much more relevant is the question today? I know it’s not the business of public schools to measure this and I’m not suggesting they do. This post isn’t really about education at all. Kids going back to school just got me thinking about all of this. Why are we not as committed to the progress of love? If society is driven by the felt need for ever-increasing improvement, why do we not seem to care to see ourselves and others constantly growing in love, at least as much as we seem to care to see advancement in other areas of life?

Love is the one area where the pursuit of “improvement” doesn’t seem to come with a shadow side, some way in which it makes us sicker.
   
   [1] From his most recent book Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future (New York, NY: Sentinel Press, 2023).
   [2] When you hear the word “Liberalism,” don’t think “liberals,” as opposed to “conservatives.” Liberalism refers to the general political structure of American society, as opposed to say Marxism. Both “liberals” and “conservatives” are liberals in the sense that they all subscribe to this form of political order. Deneen argues that the fundamental assumption behind the liberal political order is the pursuit of progress, variously defined, but usually with reference to economic opportunity and social expression or what is sometimes called “identity.”
   [3] Powell, Unconditional Love (RCL Bentziger Publishing, 1978).

When it comes to feedback, I mostly hear positive things. That’s not because there isn’t negative feedback out there. I’m sure there is. It’s just that most people don’t share their feedback when it’s negative. I have never once had someone come up to me after a Sunday sermon and say, “Well, they can’t all be home runs,” not because every Sermon I give is noteworthy, but because most Christian people are nice.

To a fault.

In fact, my experience has been that if I say something that offends someone, they are more likely to just leave the church and pretend like we never knew each other than they are to tell me that what I said offended them and talk it out.

So, when I do get “negative” feedback, I consider it a real honor. It means that the person values me, or our relationship, or what we’re trying to do at the church enough to take up the issue. I’m grateful for that.

It also provides opportunity for clarification and extension, which is at least an implicit act of grace.

I bring this up because I received a little pushback from my last blog post “A call for fewer Jesus shirts,” that I’d like to address. If you didn’t read the post you can check it our here, but the basic argument is that our lives, not our tshirts, are our witness to the world and when we identify as Christians with our clothing but fail to live up to the standard of Christ with our lives (as we all do at least sometimes) we run the risk of maligning the church in the eyes of the world. Since we are all likely to do something in public that doesn’t represent the church well, perhaps better to just not wear clothing that makes the association obvious.

Some of the feedback I heard (again, very gracious but still what I would consider “pushback”) was that perhaps people don’t wear their religious swag for the purpose of bearing witness but simply as an expression of their gratitude for God’s mercy. They are not trying to project that they have it all together but that they have been rescued by a gracious God.

That’s a perfectly good reason to wear a Jesus tshirt. I hope we’re all finding ways to express our gratitude for what God has done for us. What I hope we can appreciate as Christians is that the message that we are “sinners saved by grace” communicates differently to those outside the church. To those inside the church it is a powerful, galvanizing identifier. We know that we are imperfect which is why we’re so grateful to have a merciful God. We’ll never get it totally right. Thank God we’re simply loved.

But to those outside the church, that same anthem can sound like an excuse, at times even a justification for bad behavior. They see us act badly and wonder how we can call ourselves Christians but still live like jerks. Because following Jesus is supposed to change how we live. We might fairly rebut, “If you think I’m a jerk now, you should have seen me ten years ago,” or “If this is what I’m like with Jesus, imagine what I’d be like without him,” but that’s the thing, we don’t get to make those arguments to the world. The world simply sees our bad behavior, associates us with Jesus and the church, and takes another step back.

If you’re looking for grace and understanding, you’ll find it in Jesus and, hopefully, the church. Where you won’t find it is in the world. That truth ought to influence how we publicly carry ourselves.

Which brings me to another important piece of feedback I received: that my critique came off a little “judgy.”

Anytime one person critiques the behavior of another person, as I did in my post with a woman I witnessed at Cedar Point, especially when they don’t or can’t have all of the information and they don’t very carefully qualify their statements, it comes across as casting judgment which is like a cardinal sin in our “you-do-you-and-let-me-do-me” culture.

First, there is a difference between judgment and condemnation. Judgment is simply assessing the behavior of another person; calling a right thing right or a wrong thing wrong. We do this sort of assessing all the time. We have to. I simply observed a woman hogging the shade as other people “suffered” in the sun and I called it selfish.

Because from where I was standing, it was. And I’m guessing I’m not the only person who made that observation.

To say that this woman did a selfish thing in that moment is not to say that she IS a selfish person or that she has no value as a person or no future with God. I’m sure she’s a wonderful person who acts in selfless ways all the time. In fact, I’m sure she’s far more selfless than she is selfish. I bet she loves God and I know God loves her.

It is simply to call a spade a spade and say that in this moment she chose to do something selfish.

That’s judgment, yes, but not condemnation.

And judgment is something that we are supposed to lovingly offer one another in the church, and precisely for the concern I raised in my post. As the Apostle Paul instructed the Corinthians, Christians are not to judge those outside the church. But we are to judge one another inside the church.[1]

That does not mean we can’t look at those outside the church and call a wrong thing wrong. We can. It simply means it is not our place to be the world’s moral police. But we are supposed to provide that function for one another and precisely because if we do not, we may behave badly in the world and negatively impact the church’s witness. Loving judgment is how we help one another become more Christlike.

Again, if you’re looking for grace and understanding, you’re not going to find it in the world. Yes, we are sinners saved by grace and we’re not trying to pretend we have it all together, but the fact is that we are supposed to be very intentional about how we live in the context of outsiders recognizing that they are passing a different kind of judgment on us all the time.[2] So, we offer loving judgment to one another that can help us more intentionally align our behaviors with our professed beliefs so that when the world sees us, “they have nothing bad to say about us.”[3]

I recognize that by writing about the woman I observed at Cedar Point rather than talking with her, I may have unintentionally vilified her in your minds without actually helping her live more honorably, which I just said is the purpose of insider judgment. But I felt pastorally it would be instructive and I thought it safe given that her identity is unknown.

I do not condemn her, just as I do not condemn anyone. But because she chose to wear a Jesus shirt I did assume she is a professing follower of Jesus. And that puts her behavior in a different light. Had she not been wearing that shirt I probably wouldn’t have thought much about it. I wouldn’t have just assumed she was a Christian and because I expect people outside the church to do selfish things, I may not have even registered it.

That’s the point. None of us have it all together. We are all sinners saved by grace. But as Christians we all bear the responsibility of public witness. When you leave your home and go out into the world, every word you speak and every action you take in front of non-believers communicates something to them about what following Jesus looks like. The consistent pastoral advice in the New Testament is not, “It’s ok to act badly in public because at the end of the day we’re all sinners saved by grace,” but something more like, “Think very carefully about what you do and don’t do. Be very intentional about what you do and don’t say, because how you carry yourself in public bears witness to Jesus.”

Let us continue to lovingly judge one another, encouraging each other to holiness both privately and publicly.
 
   [1] 1 Corinthians 5:12
   [2] Colossians 4:5
   [3] Titus 2:8

I went to Cedar Point last week. Growing up in Northwest, Ohio, I’ve been to Cedar Point hundreds of times. I love the place. I love almost everything about it. I could ride roller coasters all day.

But as much as I love the rides, I think the thing I love most about Cedar Point is the people watching.

I love humanity. I love all kinds of people, and with thousands of people to watch, Cedar Point is endless people watching enjoyment; tall people; short people; people who wear too much clothing; people who wear too little clothing; athletes; truckers; Bohemians; the Amish.

I love them all.

Well, almost.

There is one group of people I must admit I don’t love watching: Christian people repping their Jesus fit. And that crowd seemed abnormally large this time around.

There were the classics, of course; tshirts with Bible verses like John 3:16 ("For this is how God loved the world: He gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life”) and John 14:6 ("Jesus told him, ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me’”). John is a favorite among Bible tshirt wearers. I even saw one person with a shirt referencing the “mark of the beast” from Revelation.

A different John, but still.

Then there were the slogan shirts; tshirts that simply read, “Jesus is king,” or “Jesus is Lord,” or “I serve Jesus.” One woman had a tshirt on that just said, “Jesus” in large, all-capital letters right across her chest. Maybe there was no other place to put it. Or maybe she thought if someone was going to look at her chest she might as well get em thinking about Jesus.

And I suspect that is why most people at places like Cedar Point choose to wear Jesus attire. I suppose there could be a few who wear it for the same reason other people wear brands like Nike or under Armor or Lululemon; because they like the way it looks, they like the “fit.” But I suspect for most it’s a form of witness. They figure as long as they’re walking around Cedar point all day they might as well be a walking billboard for Jesus.

I don’t mean to be judgmental. I’m not knocking Jesus-wear as far as it goes. I will admit, I’ve never worn a Jesus tshirt myself. I’ve just never really been into Christian pop subculture; Christian music; Christian movies; Christian clothing. Pretty much anything where “Christian” is being employed as an adjective. But if that’s your thing, cool. You do you.

What bothers me when I see hundreds of Christians walking around wearing Jesus shirts is more of a concern that they think the shirts are the important “walking billboard” for Jesus instead of their lives. They want to be a faithful witness for Jesus, so they wear a shirt instead of living a certain way.

Not that the two are mutually exclusive. But I fear they often are.

For instance, the woman I mentioned a moment ago who was wearing the tshirt with “Jesus” in big, capital letters across her chest. We were near one another in line for a roller coaster. The wait was about 60 minutes. Not awful for Cedar Point standards, but still non-preferred. This was at a time of the day when the sun was highest in the sky. It was about 80 degrees but with no airflow it felt more like 90. People were visibly uncomfortable. Fortunately, half of the wait was under a shade canopy.

You could tell as far as everyone was concerned the line couldn’t move fast enough, not to get them to the ride but just to get them into the shade.

When the time came for the lady with the Jesus shirt to leave the shaded area and return to the sun, she chose instead to let the line move on ahead of her while she stayed put. I’m guessing a 50-75 foot gap opened up between her and the people in front of her. She waited for at least five minutes, if not longer.

I should point out that this lady had no visible signs of any health condition that would have made standing in the sun any more dangerous or uncomfortable for her than anyone else. Neither was she accompanied by young children or an elderly person. By all external appearances, she was a normal, healthy, adult woman who was simply choosing to remain in the shade as long as she could.

What she either didn’t realize or didn’t care about (neither is ok for a Christian) was that by remaining in the shade she was preventing people behind her from entering it. While she was enjoying a little more shade time, other people were being forced to suffer more of the sun.

It was selfish, and with her big, bold Jesus tshirt, also a beautiful contradiction in terms.

If you want to rep your Jesus shirt, be my guest. But as I’ve said many times, “Christian” is not an adjective. At worst it’s a noun. At best it’s a verb; a way of life or a way of being toward others. If your character is not formed enough where you can consistently live out the other-centered ethic that is supposed to be the trademark of Christianity, you may consider leaving your Jesus tshirt at home. If you’re gonna wear a Jesus shirt, you better be on your game.

That may be one of the reasons I don’t wear Jesus clothing. God forbid while out in public I should do something that doesn’t represent Jesus very well, my tshirt would give me away. That’s a bad look for the church. The woman in my story was selfish but had she not been wearing a shirt with the name of Jesus on it no one would have been able to associate her selfishness with Jesus, Christianity, or the church. Maybe no one did, but we’ll never know and that’s the point.

She chose to let a tshirt be her witness instead of her life. Who knows if that did any damage. Hopefully not. But a life well-lived never does.

I get the impulse many Christians have to want to influence those around them for Jesus. And maybe a Jesus tshirt starts a conversation with someone. I just hate to think there are Christians out there who think witnessing for Christ is something we do by what we wear instead of by how we live.

So, this is a general call for fewer Jesus shirts and more transformed lives.

What troubles me most about Bible readers is when they don’t question content they clearly should. People raised in certain types of Christian subcultures often express feeling badly when they question content in the Bible. But I tell them, “Actually, the fact that this content troubles you is a good sign. It means you have a healthy conscience. If you didn’t question it, that would be troubling.”

It is troubling when well-meaning Christians overlook places in the Bible where God is accused of murdering children, for instance, or when slaves are told to endure harsh treatment with a “well-I-guess-God-had-his-reasons-and-who-am-I-to-question-God” piety. For anyone whose image of God has been shaped by the revelation of Jesus Christ, these scenes should be at least somewhat unsettling. Instead of thumbing through them with ease, we should stop and begin asking critical questions. Why is this here? What does this mean? How is this profitable to my Christian faith?[1]

What the Apostle Peter says about slaves and wives is a good example. In 1 Peter 2:18-25 Peter commands slaves to “accept the authority of your masters…even if they are cruel.” He writes, “God is pleased with you when you do what you know is right and patiently endure false treatment.” And to be clear, by “false treatment” he appears to mean being beaten.

“God called you to do good,” he says, “even if it means suffering.”

Even this ought to be difficult for the average Bible reader but then Peter connects the logic to women in marriage. The very next section begins with the words, “In the same way, you wives must accept the authority of your husbands.” The implication, of course, is “even if they are cruel.” God is pleased with you when you do what you know is right and patiently endure false treatment, including being beaten.

If the command for slaves to patiently endure beatings at the hands of their masters isn’t unsettling, I would certainly hope the implication that wives should do the same is. That can’t really be what Peter is saying, right?

I don’t think it is. Or at least I don’t think that’s how modern Christians should use it.

First, Peter also commands husbands to “give honor” to their wives. Assuming men follow that command, no woman should ever endure “false treatment” including of course being beaten.

But then again, what are the odds that all men will follow Peter’s command at all times?

Slim.

So, what should women do when men fail?

And should we restrict “false treatment” to physical abuse? What if a woman endures chronic emotional, verbal, or psychological abuse? What if a husband is loving and kind on the surface but turns out to be living a double life? What then?

Should we take Peter’s words to mean that to be “faithful” a woman should “patiently endure” these things, no matter what?

Second, there is the issue of liberty. Slaves in the first century did not have the liberty to break free from their arrangements. They were slaves for a reason, typically to pay off a debt, and to leave was to essentially break the law. Women in contemporary western culture, on the other hand, are free to enter or leave a marriage at will.

In that context, Peter’s advice becomes more understandable. He compares the plight of the mistreated slave to that of Christ. Just as Jesus endured mistreatment without retaliating with violence, so you must. You can’t control your situation, you can’t leave, but you must not respond with violence.

That’s what he means when says to slaves they must, “patiently endure.” He means something like, “I’m so sorry this is happening to you. It isn’t right. I wish you could just leave. But since you can’t, do what Jesus did and patiently suffer the wrong. God will take care of you.” Peter is concerned with slaves who call themselves Christians engaging in acts of violence against their masters, which is precisely the opposite of how Jesus responded to mistreatment.

In that regard, his logic should hold for women in marriage. If you’re being mistreated do not respond in kind. Do not respond to violence with violence.

But that does not mean a woman should necessarily stay. She may choose to stay, but it would be wrong to compel her to stay using Peter’s words as justification, to paint staying and “patiently enduring” whatever mistreatment she is suffering as the only faithful or Christlike response.

She can also non-violently walk away because in our context she has the liberty to do so. If slaves had the freedom to walk away, I suspect Peter would have said, “If your master mistreats you, just leave.” In fact, the Apostle Paul gave that exact advice to slaves in the city of Corinth.[2]

This isn’t peripheral or tangential stuff. Christians all over the world struggle with moral decisions because of how they’ve been taught to handle the Bible. I know women who have endured considerable mistreatment at the hands of their husbands but who “patiently endured” it believing that was the most faithful response.

You may choose to patiently endure mistreatment by another person in the hopes that person will change or in the hopes that doing so will give you an opportunity to show them or share with them the love of Christ. That is your choice and if you have the strength to make it for a time, God’s blessing on your efforts. But to the degree that you are not obligated to do so, doing so may not be the best decision, for you or the other person.
   
   [1] 2 Timothy 3:16 says that ALL scripture is inspired by God and “useful.” One of the most important questions to ask when reading the Bible is, “How can I use this passage of scripture to motivate greater faithfulness to Jesus.” The Bible is not a master to follow but a tool to be used by God’s people to shape our commitment to Christ.
   [2] 1 Corinthians 7:21

I acknowledge that my speaking often has a polemical edge to it. So does my writing. In fact, I chose to publish my first book directly through Amazon because while several conventional publishers expressed interest in it, they wanted me to soften my critique of evangelicalism (I’m guessing not to alienate their customer base) and I wasn’t prepared to do that.

But I admit their suggestion did make me question my tone. Was I being too harsh? Could I be more charitable? Am I being unnecessarily divisive? Is this good for the church?
I often wonder these things. I don’t want to add to division in the church. I hate the thought that someone out there refuses to join a church because he or she perceives the church can’t love its own people.

That being said, I like to think my critiques are prophetic in the sense that I offer them as an insider (I critique evangelicalism as someone who grew up inside of it) and for the purpose of reforming whatever it is I’m critiquing. I don’t want to see evangelicalism crumble. If you’ve read my book, you know I think it will accomplish that all on its own. I want to see it reformed. I want to see the beautiful spirit of evangelicalism directed by a more informed approach to scripture and tradition.

In addition, I don’t see how the church moves forward in healthy, God-honoring ways without its members critiquing one another. The truth is that people within the church often have ideas or develop beliefs that are not in keeping with traditional Christian faith and are damaging to its healthy development. When that happens, for the sake of the church it is necessary for other Christians to call it out.

This has always been the case. I’ve been reading through Paul’s letters the last month or so and what has stood out to me more clearly than any other time I’ve read through Paul is how consistently and directly he calls out people he perceives to be damaging the church by their false teaching. Here’s a sample.


If you’re keeping score, that’s every one of Paul’s letters minus Philemon. And I’ve only included one verse from each letter. He rarely limits his critiques to one sentence. One of the biggest issues in the early church was distinguishing between what was true and right and good for people’s faith development from what was false and damaging. There were a lot of different people traveling around teaching all kinds of different things. Paul had no choice but to publicly challenge what he believed to be false and harmful. He did it for the sake of the church and its future. He wasn’t trying to be divisive. If anything, he was railing against those who were.

And he would go so far as to say in his letter to the Corinthians that this kind of infighting is necessary to ultimately prove who’s right.[1] The Corinthian church was beleaguered by quarrelling and division. Its members were siloing off based on their preference for certain speakers. “I follow Peter.” “I follow Paul.” “I follow Apollos.”

One of the main reasons Paul wrote to the church was to settle their disputes so there would be no division in the church but to do that he had to critique their position. He had to argue against them to get them to stop arguing with each other. There was just no other way to do it.

This process did not abate in the centuries that followed. The first 400-500 years of the church are marked by massive internal fights over moral and doctrinal issues. On the surface that looks “unloving,” but on a deeper level these conflicts were necessary for the love of the church and for the love of the world whom the church serves.

I love the church. I also love the world. When I critique camps within the church it is for love of both. There are so many beliefs that pass as orthodox in pop-Christian circles that are anything but. They actually distort the truth, producing a faith that is a shadow of its true self. When and where I perceive that, to the extent that I think it is profitable for the people whom God has entrusted to my care, I will continue to critique it. And I welcome the same from others. If you really love the church and the world you should be willing to always question and challenge your own ideas.

I recognize my challenge of others sometimes has a tone that some think could be softened, but when I compare it to some of the things Paul said, I’m being gracious.
     
   [1] 1 Corinthians 11:19

I returned to the office today after a two-week vacation. Beyond just getting to spend quality time with friends and family and some healthy rest from work, this time of year, and specifically the chance to get away, is also the time God usually reminds me what life and ministry are all about, as if to encourage me for another year.

Ministry is probably similar to other career fields (I don’t know for sure because this is the only career field I’ve ever known) in that people can inappropriately attach their sense of identity to it.

I AM a pastor.

Once you do that, your sense of worth comes from whatever metrics are most commonly used to evaluate that role. If you ARE a banker, your worth comes from closing more accounts or growing the bottom line. If you ARE a surgeon, your worth comes from how many patients you successfully save.

The metrics most commonly used to measure pastoral success are the number of people attending the church (this is usually the first question I get asked about our church by someone unfamiliar with us), the amount of money raised, the size of the facility, the number of people getting baptized or regularly attending small groups, or the number of new churches your church has planted.

But God spoke to me when my ministry career was still very young to get me thinking differently. When I first started working in vocational ministry I was obsessed with the metrics. How many students were coming to our program. How many were registered to attend camp. How many were accepting Jesus, and so forth. But if I’m being honest, I didn’t care about the metrics because these students’ lives were being changed. I cared about the metrics because they meant I was doing a good job. A numerically growing ministry made me look good, which made me feel good.

It was vanity.

But then I had a very painful experience when trying to build a relationship with a particular high school student and I heard God say to me, “Mike, you can’t reach everyone and you can’t save anyone.”

In other words, “Mike, this isn’t about you,” or at least it’s not about how “successful” you are at the work.

What it IS about is who I am becoming in him. It’s not about the work I do for God. It’s about the work God does in me along the way.

God graciously reminded me of that again this year. During my regular morning reading times over the last few weeks I read both of the following verses from the Apostle Paul.

Paul had a unique calling. Jesus chose him to carry the message of “the Good News about the wonderful grace of God” to those outside the Jewish faith. Pretty much all of Paul’s theology and writing captured in the New Testament is declaring, explaining, or justifying the belief that in Christ God was bringing Jew and Gentile together, finally fulfilling his ancient promise to Abraham that through his seed (Jesus) he would bless the whole world. It was an important work, one Paul selflessly gave his whole life to, including enduring much suffering.

In one sense, Paul was driven by the need to do what Jesus had called him to do. Nothing wrong with that.

But Paul was also driven by the need to become who Jesus had called him to become. His life may have been worth nothing to him unless he finished the work given to him, but the work in the work, or the work behind the work, the work that fueled the work, was the work Jesus was doing in him in the process.

Paul wasn’t just sharing words with people. He was sharing a way of life, a way of life evident in his own life. He was inviting people into a way of being that he was modeling. What people heard in his words they saw in his life. Had that not been the case, not only do I suspect he would not have been nearly as “successful” numerically, but it wouldn’t have mattered even if he had been.

As Jesus once said, “What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world but forfeits his very self.”

Paul knew that. He knew that the only real work Jesus required of him was to believe in him, to trust him, to yield to him in life. And he did. Over and over again, whether his ministry was “going well” by external appearances or not.

For the last twenty-five years God has graciously reminded me every year of the same truth. None of this is about success, vanity metrics. It is about who I am becoming in Christ, always. You can really only minister to other people out of who you have become in your own life. You can only give people what you yourself have. The only work Jesus requires of any of us is to trust him and become more of ourselves in him.

Like Paul, I will continue to do the work of proclaiming Jesus because that is what I believe God has called me to do. I honestly can’t imagine doing anything else. But if I’m going to get “credit” for anything, I want it to be for what people can see in my life. Not what I’m able to say, but how I live.

That is the work. It is the only real work worth doing. Here’s to another year.

Following his resurrection, Jesus asked a couple of his disciples, “Wasn’t it clearly predicted that the Messiah would have to suffer all these things before entering his glory?”[1] The question sounds rhetorical on the page, but it obviously wasn’t. The text then says Jesus, “took them through the writings of Moses and all the prophets, explaining from all the scriptures the things concerning himself.”[2]

If the scriptures clearly predicted what happened to him, Jesus would not have had to explain them. That he did have to explain them (and his followers would go on to do the same) suggests that while the scriptures are predictive, they are not predictive in the way we popularly understand the concept.

David wasn’t consciously predicting the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Isaiah wasn’t consciously predicting the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. They spoke and wrote about events in their own context, but their words took on a deeper level of meaning and significance—to use Jesus’ words, a “fulfillment”—when read through the lens of his life, death, and resurrection. David’s poetic utterance about God not allowing him to rot in the grave found its fulfillment in God raising Jesus from the dead. Isaiah’s reference to a woman giving birth found it’s fulfillment in the virgin birth of Jesus. Isaiah’s suffering servant found its fulfillment in Jesus’ suffering and death.

That’s one way to understand how prophecy “works.” Like Caiaphas prophesying that Jesus would die for the nation, prophets consciously understand their words to mean one thing, but they take on a fullness or completeness in Christ, a fullness or completeness the prophets themselves could not have imagined.

In this final post of my prophecy mini-series, I want to talk about one more way to understand how the writings of Moses and all the prophets “clearly” predict the Messiah would suffer and die before entering his glory: the motif of the rejected prophet.

The scriptures “predict” Jesus’ suffering and death by narrating a recurring pattern that Jesus “fulfills.” The pattern is the rejected prophet. God’s people rejected every prophetic messenger God sent to them. In the same spirit, they would eventually reject his son.

This appears to be how Jesus understood the predictive quality of his scriptures. In other words, when he said the scriptures clearly predicted what would happen to him, the motif of the rejected prophet is likely what he had mind. When Luke’s gospel says that he “took them through the writings of Moses and all the prophets, explaining from all the scriptures the things concerning himself,” I imagine him citing prophet after prophet whom their ancestors rejected and killed and then saying to his disciples, “in the same way they killed the Son of Man.”

And he tried telling his disciples this before he died. He told a parable about a landowner who left his estate in the hands of tenant farmers. At the time of the harvest, the landowner sent a representative (think: prophet) to collect his share of the crop, only the tenant farmers refused to honor the agreement. They beat the messenger and sent him away. The landowner sent several more representatives (prophets) and the tenant farmers did the same thing. Finally, the landowner thought to send his son. “Surely they will respect my son,” he thought. But they did not. They saw killing the son as their opportunity to permanently seize control of the land. So, they killed the son just as they had killed the previous messengers.

The scriptures clearly predicted that God’s incarnate son would suffer and die at the hands of the elders, chief priests, and teachers of religious law because that’s what happened to all of God’s previous representatives. What they did to God’s messengers they were doing to God. So, what would they do if God himself came to be with them?

Jesus was even more explicit about this theme in an exchange recorded in Luke 11. 
Their ancestors killed the prophets, and they were now threatening to kill God’s one and only Son. Right on script. And consequently, Jesus says, they will be held responsible for the murder of all God’s prophets because their murder of God’s Son is the fulfillment of that motif, the fullest or completest example of their rejection of God.

I think the motif of the rejected prophet is also how Jesus’ disciples went on to “reason from the scriptures” that he was the Messiah. I’ve already mentioned this was their primary strategy, at least when trying to share the good news with Jews. In most cases the reader is simply told this is what they did but not given the actual content of the reasoning. For example, Acts 17:3 says the Apostle Paul “explained the prophecies and proved that the Messiah must suffer and rise from the dead,” but it doesn’t tell you what Paul actually said. What was his explanation? How did he prove that Jesus had to suffer and rise from the dead?

I think the answer is the motif of the rejected prophet, and one of the reasons I believe that is because of Stephen’s speech in Acts 7. Stephen is considered the first Christian martyr, but before he was stoned to death he gave a speech to his accusers. In that speech he recounts a good bit of their history as God’s people. He cites God’s covenant with Abraham, the betrayal of Joseph’s brothers, and Abraham’s descendants becoming slaves in Egypt. But his rhetorical point seems to be to get to the figure of Moses who rescued them from Egypt but whom they continually rejected. The hinge or turning point of Stephen’s speech is Moses’ prediction, “God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among your own people.”[3]

God will raise up a prophet like Moses, someone who will save you but whom you will reject.

I think Stephen’s approach in Acts 7 is representative of how Jesus’ earliest followers “reasoned from the scriptures” that Jesus was the Messiah and that it was predicted he would suffer and die before entering his glory. And I think they learned that approach from Jesus himself.

This explains to me how it is fair to say the scriptures “clearly” predicted what would happen to Jesus. But it also explains to me why some people were persuaded but others were not. If the scriptures clearly predicted what would happen to Jesus in the way we conventionally think of that term, everyone should have believed. But if they predicted what would happen to Jesus in more of a “pattern-fulfillment” sort of way, sharing it would feel more like you were trying to prove something to someone, which is how the New Testament documents describe what they were doing.

In my pastoral experience, people struggle with prophecy. Either they struggle to accept the claim that the scriptures predicted the Jesus event with crystal ball accuracy (which I believe they are right to struggle with) or they uncritically accept that the scriptures did predict the Jesus event with crystal ball accuracy but swallow a number of interpretive problems along with it.

As for me, understanding the predictive quality of “Moses and the prophets” in terms of fulfillment, either their words taking on fuller, more complete meaning in light of Jesus or as fulfilling a specific pattern—the pattern of the rejected prophet—makes far more sense.
   
   [1] Luke 24:26
   [2] Luke 24:27
   [3] Acts 7:37

In my pastoral experience, people struggle with the topic of prophecy. Either they struggle to accept that earlier biblical writers were precisely predicting future events (which I think they are right to struggle with) but then not knowing how to think about prophecy, or they uncritically accept that earlier biblical writers were precisely predicting future events not realizing the interpretive problems that causes.

To be clear, I do believe Old Testament scriptures are predictive. Jesus said they were. I just don’t believe they are “clearly” predictive as Jesus said they were, at least not in the way we tend to think of predictive. I’m not saying Jesus was wrong. I’m saying our understanding and expectation of “predictive” is wrong.

When we think about someone predicting the future we imagine that person seeing future events in precise detail, being able to tell us dates, times, locations, and specifics. We then apply that definition to Old Testament passages and conclude, “See, Isaiah was talking about Jesus when he wrote about a virgin giving birth,” or “See, Isaiah was writing about Jesus when he described the suffering servant,” or “See, David was writing about Jesus when he talked about God not letting him rot in the grave.”

I’m not saying that way of looking at certain Old Testament passages is wrong. As you’ll see by the time this mini post series is over, I believe all scripture points to Jesus even if the biblical authors themselves didn’t consciously see their writing as having that function when they wrote. Consequently, it’s a perfectly valid interpretive move to say that David was writing about Jesus, as we saw in the last post Peter did. In a sense, David was writing about Jesus even if he didn’t think of it that way.

I also think this way of interpreting certain Old Testament passages can have rhetorical, evangelistic power (if done thoughtfully). The reason the Apostles used this strategy was because, at least at first, evangelism mostly involved reasoning with other Jews, which meant reasoning “from the scriptures” they shared. It made sense for Peter to say to his fellow Jews, “Hey, consider what David wrote in the Psalms. Doesn’t it make sense that he was writing about someone else? David did die after all and remained in the grave. But Jesus didn’t.” He was essentially inviting his Jewish listeners to consider that their sacred texts had a different or deeper meaning than they previously believed.

Another great example of this is the Apostle Paul in Acts 17. In Thessalonica Paul “explained the prophecies and proved that the Messiah must suffer and rise from the dead.” The story says some of the Jews who were listening were persuaded.[1] Some.

So much for “proving.”

But Paul was inviting the Jews in Thessalonica to do the same thing Peter was inviting Jews in Jerusalem to do; consider the possibility that these prophetic texts have a different or deeper meaning than you previously believed. Could they be pointing ahead to this man named Jesus? When Paul tried the same strategy in Berea the story says the Bereans “searched the scriptures day after day” to see if he was “teaching the truth.”[2]

What did that look like? It’s not like they had a decoder ring and what they were doing was assessing if Paul’s words matched their fool-proof decoder ring sequence. They were painstakingly reviewing texts they thought they understood in light of Paul’s testimony and asking themselves if they could indeed mean what Paul was suggesting they meant.

All of this reinforces the idea that while Old Testament passages are predictive, they are not clearly predictive, at least not in the way we typically think of predictive. We need to change the way we think of predictive.

Let me offer one option before closing this post, which I’ve already kind of alluded to. Certain Old Testament passages are predictive of Jesus in the sense that they can be read with a different or deeper meaning in light of his life, death, and resurrection. In other words, the biblical authors were not consciously referring to Jesus when they wrote but their words take on a different level of meaning, a greater fullness when applied to Jesus.

Jesus himself said that he came not to abolish the law and the prophets but to fulfill them, a word that means something like “to make complete.”[3] Jesus’ life gives all of the words in the Hebrews scriptures their fullest or completest meaning.

I think this is what Jesus means when he says in John 5 that the scriptures “point to him.”[4] They don’t point to him with a one-to-one correspondence. We’ve already said they are predictive but not clearly predictive in this way. But looking back, because his life gives them their fullest or completest meaning, it is fair to say that they point to him, that they were pointing to him all along without anyone knowing it.

At least that is how prophetic speech plays out in the New Testament. For example, consider the prophecy of Caiaphas. Caiaphas was the Jewish High Priest involved in Jesus’ execution. John 11 says that he was led to prophesy that Jesus would die not only for the entire nation but to bring together all the children of God scattered around the world.[5] That makes it sound like Caiaphas understood the purpose of Jesus’ death and his participation in it was a good thing. I don’t think that’s what’s going on here. I think Caiaphas believed Jesus needed to die, that his death would save the nation from suffering a Roman crack down, but that it had nothing to do with forgiveness, atoning for sin, or reconciling the world to God.

But after Jesus’ death and resurrection, his words came to be understood in that fullness or completeness.

John 12:16 says, “His disciples didn’t understand at the time that this was a fulfillment of prophecy. But after Jesus entered into his glory, they remembered what had happened and realized that these things had been written about him.” John wrote these words in reference to a specific prophecy, but I believe they can be applied to all prophetic speech as a way of understanding how prophecy “works.”

The people speaking and writing as prophets did not consciously believe they were speaking or writing about future events or persons. They very much believed they were speaking and writing about present events and persons, which is what gave their words meaning and significance for the audiences that received them. But following Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection his followers reread these texts and began to interpret them as having larger, fuller, more complete meaning with reference to Jesus.

In that sense, they were “about” Jesus and had always been “about” Jesus even if the authors themselves did not know that. The scriptures “clearly” predict Jesus in the sense that when read in the light of his life, death, and resurrection they point to him. In this way, Jesus is the fulfillment of all prophecy.
   
   [1] Acts 17:3-4
   [2] Acts 17
   [3] Matthew 5:17
   [4] John 5:39-40
   [5] John 11:49-50

Today is the first post in a little three-part series on a topic that’s been coming up lately in my life different ways in: prophecy.

Traditionally—that is, how people in the Old Testament understood the concept—prophecy was about speaking the words of God. A prophet was someone who was perceived to have a special sensitivity to God so that he/she received words from God meant to be spoken to the people. The prophet was God’s mouthpiece.

When various Old Testament texts say that a person was filled with God’s spirit and began prophesying, the reader should not imagine he started uttering unintelligible words or predicting the future. It most likely means he began doing what we might call “street preaching.”[1] When prophets spoke to people on behalf of God it was always with intelligible words for the purpose of getting them to take action. “Repent of your sin and turn to God!”

Occasionally a prophet’s warning included a prediction of some future event. Jonah famously told the Ninevites that if they did not repent of their sin and turn to God, they would be destroyed. And that’s pretty representative of the predictive quality of prophetic speech. In other words, prophetic predictions are typically pretty vague. Prophets do not typically say things like, “On June 6 a man wearing black will ride into town on a white horse and set fire to the sixth house on the left.” Instead, they say things like, “If you don’t stop what you’re doing, God will bring judgment on you.”

The reason I bring this up is because it seems many Christians today assume that prophecy = this more exact form of future telling. Like prophets predicted specific future events. I’m guessing the primary reason for that is because some NT figures seem to interpret some OT passages in this way. For instance, in his first sermon following Jesus’ resurrection and the receiving of the Holy Spirit, Peter cites a text written by King David in the Psalms in which David says God will not leave his soul among the dead or allow his body to rot in the grave. Peter tells his audience that David was essentially predicting the future.


Peter’s take is that David was a prophet and as such could look into the future and write about what would happen. David wasn’t writing about himself. He was predicting Jesus.

And in my pastoral experience, that has become the way the average Christian thinks about prophecy. David wasn’t writing about himself. He was writing about Jesus. When Isaiah referred to the “suffering servant,” he wasn’t writing about himself or Israel, he was writing about Jesus.

To be clear, I don’t deny that is possible. It is distinctly possible that God gave prophets the special spiritual sensitivity to see or perceive future events; visions, dreams, etc. But there are some problems with that way of thinking about it.

First, no one at the time, including David, understood it that way. Had they, Peter’s explanation would not have been as revolutionary as it was. It may not even have been needed. Or if it was needed, all Peter would have needed to say was, “We all know David was looking into the future and anticipating God raising someone from the dead. We just didn’t know who that was. I’m here to tell you it is Jesus!”

In other words, the very fact that Peter has to tell people that David was looking into the future is evidence that no one understood it that way, including David. If you could travel back in time and ask David, “Who were you writing about in this poem,” he most certainly would say himself. He would tell you about all of the people who were secretly (and not so secretly) trying to kill him and then he would say, “But I know God will rescue me from this pit. God will never allow me to rot in this grave.”

There are many times in the Gospels and Acts when someone, including Jesus, asks almost rhetorically, “Did not the scriptures clearly predict?”[3] The answer, of course, is no! If the scriptures clearly predicted anything, Jesus and his followers would not have had to work so hard to help people connect the dots.

That does not mean the scriptures don’t predict anything. Jesus said they do and his earliest followers would go on to not only affirm that but, as we just saw with Peter, interpret scripture in that way for their evangelistic purposes. The scriptures do predict.

Just not clearly, not in the way the average person seems to think they do. If they did, the earliest Christians, especially when reasoning with Jews in synagogues which was their initial strategy, would not have had to “persuade” people, often with mixed results. The very fact that the earliest Christians had to “prove” Jesus was the Messiah by referencing these texts and arguing that they were predictive in nature is pretty convincing evidence that they were not clearly predictive in nature.

The other major problem with thinking about prophecy as “clearly” predictive of Jesus is that the prophets’ words would have had no import for the audience that first received them. If Isaiah’s suffering servant was always Jesus and everyone knew he was talking about someone who would come in the future, those words would have been essentially useless to people at the time. But they were not useless. The very fact that they survived means people found them very useful precisely because they understood them to have import in their own lives, not just as predictions about the future.

Christians look back on OT passages from the vantage point of Jesus’ resurrection and see in them anticipations of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. They are right to do that. Jesus did that. His earliest followers did that. But that does not mean those passages were originally about Jesus in the sense that the original authors understood they were writing about future events or that their audience believed that’s what they were doing.

It just means that in the light of Jesus their words take on new significance.

In the next two posts I’ll offer a couple of ways of thinking about prophecy that I think are more consistent with how Jesus and his disciples understood and applied it.
 
   [1] See for example 1 Samuel 10:10
   [2] Acts 2:29-31
   [3] For example Luke 24:25-26

In my current teaching series, “Think Again,” I’m critiquing popular views of salvation in light of Easter.

Jesus rising from the dead forced his disciples to think again about what it meant to be saved. I’m arguing in this series it should compel us to do the same. Many Christians have uncritically accepted pop versions of salvation they’ve never seriously held up to the light of Easter.

The conservative evangelical view is that salvation is avoiding judgment and securing one’s place in an afterlife paradise. The liberal view seems to be bringing heaven to earth through social engagement.

These popular understandings of salvation are popular because they emphasize an important aspect of salvation. The conservative evangelical view, for instance, emphasizes our need for forgiveness while the liberal view highlights the importance of bringing God’s kingdom to earth as it is in heaven.

But neither provides a substantial enough framework. Securing forgiveness and a place in heaven is clearly not sufficient. Jesus’ favorite teaching topic was the kingdom of God and most of his teaching involved moral imperatives. We are called to follow Jesus, not just transactionally believe he lived, died, and rose from the dead so we can “get in.” But laboring to “make the world a better place” doesn’t fully capture it either. It seems no matter how hard we work we are never free of sin and its destructive consequences. And, let’s be honest, you don’t really need God to be a good person and make the world a better place. That much is just observable.

The view of salvation I advance in this series is participation in the life of God, or as the Apostle Peter once framed it, becoming “partakers in the divine nature.”[1] Or as the patristic Irenaeus is credited with saying, “He (Jesus) became what we are that we might become what he is.”

Salvation involves forgiveness, but Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection is not a forensic transaction so that a God previously unable or unwilling to forgive would be freed to do so. Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection is the very incarnation of God’s mercy. In other words, if the same God who has been forgiving human sin since the beginning of time were to take on flesh and dwell among the very people he created, his forgiveness would look like living a righteous life, humbly suffering mistreatment, and repaying that mistreatment with a continued offer of life and love. As I’ve said many times, Jesus didn’t die FOR God. Jesus died AS God. His death and resurrection IS the very expression of God’s mercy whose character is, has always been, and forever will be mercy.[2]  

But it is God’s mercy toward us that invites us into a new way of being; God’s way of being. We were created in the image of God, meant to reflect God’s merciful character in the world. That is only possible as we submit ourselves to Jesus and obey his leading. Having been loved by God through Christ we should want to love God in return and that love should express itself in our love for one another, just as Jesus commanded.

We should want to see God’s kingdom come to earth as it is in heaven and we should be willing to suffer for that purpose. Because that is what loving response looks like. That is what God looks like. God suffered to give us life. We suffer to give life to the world.

Salvation is not getting something from God. Salvation is getting God. It is the gift of getting to live in real life. Jesus said it this way, “Put your trust in the light while there is still time; then you will become children of the light.”[3]

Put your trust in the light and become children of the light. That is salvation. We put our trust in Jesus, and we become the people we were created to be.
 
I had a brief conversation with someone in our lobby yesterday after service. She was responding to a comment I made in my message about how faith understood properly casts out fear. There should be no anxiety in Christian faith. We are forgiven, called, and welcomed in Christ, not because of anything we believe or do but simply because God is merciful. She mentioned that while she no longer feels anxiety toward God, worried that if she doesn’t believe or behave properly God may leave her out, but that she still senses something she describes as fear; a fear of not becoming who God created her to be.

I told her she’s beginning to understand what salvation really is. When your deepest concern is not becoming the person God created you to be, not because you’re worried God will lock you out, but because you love God and want to experience the full and abundant life Jesus lived, died, and rose from the dead to give you, you’re just becoming Christian.

Jesus became what we are that we might become what he is. Put your trust in the light and become children of the light.

Salvation is becoming a child of the light.
   
   [1] 2 Pt 1:4
   [2] See Walter Kaiser’s book Mercy: The Essence of the Gospel and the Key to Christian Life (New York, NY: Paulist Press, 2013).
   [3] John 12:36

Last week I began working on my next book. I’m sharing a bit about it in this post mainly to hold myself accountable to keep working on it. Feel free to ask me about it if/when you see me next.

Like my first book, All the Way Down, the idea for this project came from my experience pastoring real people. In other words, I think what I’m aspiring to write will be really helpful.
More specifically, I think it will be helpful for people laboring through the process of faith reconstruction.

Our church has become something of a haven for people in this space. There are historic reasons for that, but how we got here is largely unimportant. It’s simply who we are now. As we say on our website, “When the old answers stop working, you don’t have to give up on faith.”

And we’re discovering it’s a much-needed space. There are lots of people for whom the old answers have stopped working and very few churches positioned to help them. The result is a lot of people giving up on faith, or at least organized religion.

What makes faith reconstruction so daunting and difficult is that everything connects to everything else. You can never just rethink one topic. Like water spilling over from one bilge bay to the next until eventually the boat sinks, when you begin rethinking one belief it isn’t long before you sense the need to rethink another, and then another, and then another until your entire faith system is “sunk.” That is understandably scary and for that reason many people stop engaging the process. I understand and appreciate that.

But for those willing and able to push through the anxiety, it’s still just a difficult process. If you being rethinking atonement,[1] for instance, you’ll have to rethink sin, humanity, the incarnation, and even what it means to have eternal life. That’s just a lot of connections to make.
 
 
What I’m trying to say here is that what makes faith reconstruction so difficult is that you set out to rethink one topic and soon realize you have to reconstruct an entire faith system. Everything is connected to everything else in a system that makes it all makes sense. Rethink one piece and it no longer makes sense in the old system.

This is why we have the theological discipline known as systematics. Systematics is a way of doing theology that presents all the relevant topics within a coherent framework so that everything can be understood with reference to everything else. Here’s what we believe about sin because here’s what we believe about God, or here’s what we believe about Jesus and atonement because here’s what we believe about creation, humanity, and sin. Many systematics assume these topics exist in some logical, self-evident, almost linear order but that’s typically because they tend to move through each topic from left to right as it appears in the Bible. We start with God and creation including our understanding of humanity, then discuss the problem of sin, God’s response plan, and so forth and so on. In truth, however, these topics are connected more like a web or mind map and “where to begin” is theologically subjective.
 
When people enter the world of faith reconstruction because they felt compelled to rethink one topic, they can become easily overwhelmed realizing they may need to replace their entire systematic.
 
But I’ve also found there’s hope in this. Without realizing that this is what is going on, what often compels a person to begin the process of faith reconstruction is that he’s been handed a systematic that launched from a fundamentally flawed starting point and, like someone polluting a river upstream, it’s contaminated everything downstream, which he eventually begins to notice.
 
Deal with the upstream mistake and cleaning up the downstream consequences becomes much easier.
 
That’s what I’m hoping to do with my new book.
 
I’m aspiring to write an accessible systematics for the average layperson, a replacement framework that “explains” all of the relevant theological topics in a more coherent way.
 
I’ll argue that our starting point must be Jesus. Not God or the Bible, but Jesus. In fact, I’ll argue that our starting point already is Jesus, we just don’t acknowledge it. Even when Christian theologians profess to begin their systematic with the God of Genesis, they’re interpreting that God’s words and actions through the lens of Jesus. They have no choice. They’re Christians! Their understanding of everything has been informed by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, including their understanding of the Bible and everything written in it.[2]
 
I then imagine each chapter (which I hope will be no more than 10-12 pages so the reader can work through it in one sitting) having an “eat this not that” structure to it. There were a series of books published a while back under that name. The idea was to get healthy by focusing on micro-wins each day. At each meal, for instance, replace an unhealthy choice with a healthy one. Instead of ordering the fried chicken, get the grilled chicken instead. If you’re going to each potato chips, try the baked version. Over time, you’ll see a significant increase in your healthy and well-being.
 
I want to do something similar with theology. I’ll start each chapter with a popular take on a specific topic. Take atonement, for instance, which I’ve already mentioned. You’ve heard it said that Jesus died on the cross to pay the death penalty for your sins. Then, I’ll lay out a few reasons why that understanding is “unhealthy.” Then I’ll replace it within my Christ-centered framework with something “healthier.”
 
By the end of the book the reader will have a new web that makes sense of all the relevant topics in one location. And since the goal of the project is to make the book short, simple, and easily accessible, it can function as a resource. I’ve found that even after spending considerable time rethinking things, old ways of thinking hang around and you can find yourself asking, “Wait, I know this isn’t right. How should I be thinking about this again?” That’s when I usually get a phone call or email from someone. But if you have this book on your shelf, you can simply return to that chapter and refresh your memory.
 
It’s an ambitious project. Most systematics are thousands of pages and multi-volume. This will not be that. But condensing material and making it accessible for people who may not have formal theological training is equally if not more difficult.
 
My experience, however, tells me something like this is needed. So, I’m going to take a shot at it. Be praying for me. Ask me how it’s going. Share with me content or perspectives you believe need to be addressed. I’ll even take title suggestions.
 
Many people, both Christians and non-Christians, have been handed a bad story. I’m going to write a book that attempts to give them a better one.
 
   [1] Atonement is the doctrine that seeks to explain how Jesus’ life, death and resurrection function to reconcile us to God. In my experience, this is one of the most common inroads to faith reconstruction. The most common view in evangelical circles is what is popularly known as Penal Substitutionary Atonement, the belief that Jesus died to pay the death penalty for your sin so that you could be forgive and have access to eternal life. This doctrine sells well in a culture obsessed with violent, retributive notions of justice but it is fraught with theological problems, which many people eventually come to sense.
   [2] This is one of the primary arguments I make in my first book All the Way Down: Rebuilding Christian Faith from the Rubble of Evangelicalism.

In his book Unconditional Love, John Powell, S.J. asks, “Is loving really the way to human fulfillment? If I choose love as my personal life principle, will I find satisfaction and true gratification?”

This, he argues, is THE crisis facing contemporary society.

“Is a life of love, which involves a permanent and unconditional commitment to the happiness of another, really the way to personal satisfaction and human fulfillment?” As opposed to remaining unencumbered from all relationships so that one is free to pursue all the pleasure, power, and sensation life has to offer?

Powell obviously believes love is the way to personal satisfaction and fulfilment, and I agree, but if I were to critique Powell’s position it would only be to say that if he’s correct, the real crisis is that this is a crisis at all.

Because the answer is obvious. It stares us in the face every time we attend a funeral. In those moments, no one cares to talk about what you owned, the places you went, or even what you did to earn a living. What they DO care to talk about is the person you were, how well you loved them.

If you’re paying attention, at funerals you realize people are all that really matter in this world. A life well lived is a life well loved.

We know this, and yet we spend so much of our time chasing a dream or chasing a dollar. As far as dollars go, you’ll never have enough. And as far as dreams go, they ought to be as close as the nearest person.

People continue to buy into the lie that wealth, fame, and power are the pathways to full and abundant life. They are not. They may make life easier in some regards, but they do not ultimately satisfy.

The only thing that does satisfy is a fierce commitment to the well-being of others and a willingness to use one’s time, talent, and money to serve them.

Find a way to give your life away to others. It could be your spouse and kids. It could be to people through your employer. It could be to families in your neighborhood. Everyone wants a full and satisfying life. The lie is that you realize that life by turning inward, focusing on your self. The truth is that you find meaning, purpose, and satisfaction by turning out, focusing on the well-being of others.

We are the most informed, connected people who have ever lived on planet earth. Love should not be a crisis facing our society.

This will be my final post reflecting on Christian Smith’s book Why Religion Went Obsolete. If this is a topic that interests you, I would highly recommend you pick up a copy.
Smith’s explanation for why traditional religion has been in steady decline in America for decades is that it slipped into a state of unplanned obsolescence. People who once found it relevant or helpful no longer do and therefore younger generations are unlikely to even consider it an option.

Traditional religion has been replaced.

By what?

By whatever “works.”

We saw in my last post that people today tend to think of themselves as entirely self-contained, what Carl Trueman calls a “psychological self.” People approach life like it is a customizable self-actualization project. We are who we decide we are. We can be whatever we choose to be. In a reality like that, if people happen to come across traditional religion and it helps them achieve whatever subjective version of self they’ve chosen, great. But not only is it increasingly less likely for younger generations to encounter traditional religion, even if they did, many of the uncritically accepted “contours” of what Smith calls the “millennial zeitgeist” are simply incompatible with it.

In other words, even if someone were to try traditional religion, he would most likely conclude it will not “work” for him.

So, what is traditional religion to do?

I have a couple of thoughts here. There is overlap between the subjective quest for self-actualization and traditional Christian theology. Christian orthodoxy affirms that life is a journey. If the average person senses or feels like he’s moving toward some kind of actualized end, that’s because he is.

But where Christian orthodoxy challenges this aspect of the millennial zeitgeist is to say that the destination is not self-chosen or self-constructed. For Christians, we are created in the image of God and what the world calls actualization we call salvation, which is nothing less than participation in the life of God.

And if we’re correct, if what people operating under the millennial zeitgeist are truly after is “participating in the divine nature,” to borrow a phrase from the Apostle Peter—or as Saint Augustine famously said, “we are restless until our hearts find rest in thee (God)”—they aren’t going to arrive at that destination by pursuing cultural alternatives to traditional religion. They can participate in a self-constructed deity or spirituality, but that is not the same as participating in the inner life of God; Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
And it will never quite satisfy.

People are still interested in issues of “ultimate concern.”[1] We all feel the ache of longing for transcendence. As long as that is true, traditional religion will have its place. The church simply needs to remain alive and vibrant so that it can be here for people when, like the bleeding woman who turned to Jesus after spending all she had trying to get better elsewhere, they realize all the roads they’ve traveled in search of actualization have led to dead ends and traditional religion is the only path left not taken.

So, as it relates to the world, the church will have to do more honoring of people’s lived experiences. Not that preaching at the world has ever done any good, but it will be even less effective influencing the millennial zeitgeist. Instead, the church needs to meet people where they are, affirm their felt need to self-actualize, but offer in its shared life a more compelling and satisfying alternative.
 
Which brings me to the second focus for the church. While we need to meet people outside the church where they are, honoring their experience, we also need to carefully and thoughtfully challenge the millennial zeitgeist inside the church. If anything will draw people into traditional religion it is the people who currently occupy the pews. Our lives have to be good news.
 
But to the degree we are controlled by the same zeitgeist, we have nothing to offer the world it doesn’t already have. The church has to become a place that produces the kinds of people other people look at and think, “that’s the kind of life I want.” If the church were a business, you don’t grow it by hiding a bad product under good advertising. You grow it by having a great product. If the product is good, people will find it.
 
And the product in many churches is not good. I recently watched a documentary on Netflix called “The Twister.” It’s all about the E5 tornado that destroyed Joplin, MO in 2011. One of the interviewees in the documentary is a man named Cecil. He was a junior in high school in 2011. A major part of his story was growing up in a church in Joplin where he says his greatest fear was being left behind following the rapture.[2]
 
So shaped was he by teachings related to the rapture that he admits during the tornado he was concerned the rapture had come and that he would be left behind. I understand people wanting to speculate about end times and what it will be like when Christ returns, but to teach dogmatically about something no one understands or can perfectly anticipate, to the point where young people growing up in your spiritual care are fearful for their well-being, is ministry malpractice, and as long as this is the garbage that people are being taught in churches, traditional religion has no hope.
 
People will always hunger for God but they will be left with no choice but to try and find God outside the church.
 
Churches need to make first things first. We have to focus on what it looks like to be disciples of Jesus in our culture. We have to help people engage practices that form their characters in love. We have to teach them how to have the “mind of Christ” so they can more thoughtfully engage the world and their own experiences. So long as the church is adopting the millennial zeitgeist and pumping out people who look and act nothing like Jesus, there is no reason we should expect people to join us and we should probably hope they don’t.
 
That fewer and fewer are suggests we should spend less time trying to “reach” culture and more time getting our house in order.
   
   [1] A phrase used by psychologist James Fowler to name the focus of religion.
   [2] The rapture is a doctrine based on a collection of NT passages. The prevailing assumption is that when Christ returns he will gather to himself those who are saved (presumably being caught up with him in the air) and those who are not saved will be “left behind” to suffer upon the earth.  

Christian Smith argues that traditional religion in America is suffering from “cultural mismatch,” a discordant relationship with general culture that is pushing it into a state of unplanned obsolescence.

In other words, there was a time in western society when traditional religion and general culture fit hand-in-glove; people sensed the need for traditional religion to support their way of life.

That is no longer the case. People aren’t anti-religious as much as they simply don’t see the point anymore. People aren’t anti-typewriter. They just don’t use them anymore because in world of personal supercomputers, other than nostalgia, what’s the point?
But if general culture no longer supports traditional religion so that the latter is perceived by most to be unnecessary, what are some of the features of contemporary culture that are so hazardous to traditional religion?

Smith leverages the German word “zeitgeist” to answer this question. Zeitgeist means something like “spirit of an age.” Think, for instance, of the “roaring twenties.” Certainly not every moment during that decade was a party, but when thinkers look back on it, especially in contrast to previous and later periods, they can see that it was mostly an age characterized by a carefree, optimistic spirit.

Every period of time has a zeitgeist.

Smith refers to the present age as the “millennial zeitgeist.” The reader should not mistake that term to mean “those damn millennials,” as some Boomers and Gen Xers are fond of thinking. For starters, Smith argues that what he calls the millennial zeitgeist began developing during previous generations, it merely hit a tipping point in the decades that flanked the turn of the century when the oldest millennials would have been teenagers. As with most things, millennials merely took what they learned from their parents and grandparents to new, though logically consistent, extremes.

While Smith is wise to point out (especially for people like me whose formative years came during this period) that the mood shifted as American society moved from the 1990’s to 2000’s—the 1990’s feeling generally unbonded and optimistic while the 2000’s felt generally gloomy—the “spirit of the age” was consistent.

And many of the “countours” of the millennial zeitgeist focus on culture’s view of the individual. Here are few examples:

Each individual possesses a distinctive, essential selfhood that they need to discover, cultivate, realize, and express.[1]
                Neglecting one’s unique selfhood is irresponsible.[2]
                Distinctive selves should be expected to change over time.[3]
                Growing up means “becoming one’s own” person.[4]
 
Authentic selves are continually at risk of being denied, twisted, or repressed by both external forces of organized conformism, including parents, school, religion, workplace, peers, and media, as well as internal forces of insecurity, doubt, fear, self-judging, emotional dysfunction, and laziness.[5]
 
To discover one’s “true self,” individuals must rely on their own subjective intuitive responses to their own experiences.[6]
 
These empirical insights confirm Carl Trueman’s observations in his book The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, which I’ve written about elsewhere on this blog (you can access post 1 of that series here). Trueman argues that what has made it possible for someone to say something like, “I am really a man trapped in a women’s body” is nothing short of an evolution in our understanding of what constitutes a “self.”
 
Smith is describing that evolution. The millennial zeitgeist includes a version of selfhood that is largely incompatible with traditional religion. It assumes that every person is an individual on an entirely customizable self-actualization project. Each person gets to decide for him or herself who or what he/she wants to be. Experience, then, is the realm of factors and influences that may or may not “work” in helping the individual self-actualize in whatever subjective way they’ve chosen.
 
This means that syncretism will be normal. Syncretism means “to borrow.” For instance, it is highly common in today’s culture to see Christians more knowledgeable about and engaged in mindfulness than prayer or for atheists to be all about Buddhist meditation.
 
Whatever “works.”
 
It also means that novel tends to be more capturing than historical and traditional. The average person is far more likely to engage in mindfulness than prayer because prayer seems antiquated where mindfulness is perceived as new and fresh, perhaps even empirically “proven.”
 
And lastly it means that life is lived almost entirely in that Charles Taylor calls the “immanent frame.” Life is about here and now. When we talk about what “works” we’re almost always talking about what addresses a problem in our lived experience. Does this make my current life better?
 
This view of the self is largely incompatible with traditional religion. Traditional religion certainly believes that every person is an individual soul with inherent dignity and worth, but that’s about where the overlap ends. Yes, traditional religion would describe our lives in the present age as a journey but not toward some subjective vision of self-actualization. We do not decide who or what we are. We are made the image of God and self-actualization is participation in the life of God.
 
Which means that what “works” is not self-determined. If I get to decide for myself who or what I’m going to be then I also get to determine if something is working toward that end or not. But if who or what I am supposed to be is determined for me, a created reality that I am called to live into, what “works” in terms of helping me toward that received future will likewise be received, from sources like tradition, revelation, and others.
 
General culture imagines each individual as a self-contained automaton. Traditional religion says you are interdependent; you only become yourself through others.
 
It’s not hard to see why traditional religion feels entirely foreign to so many. Social institutions like churches tend to be viewed as inherently oppressive; places that will threaten your self-made authenticity rather than as places that will help you become who you were meant to be.
 
When you weren’t meant to be anyone, no one can help you but you.
 
Jean Twenge in her book Generations would agree with Smith’s analysis. Hyper-individualism is one of the factors she sights pushing younger generations into mental health crisis. In his position paper, “My Parting Prescription for America,” former US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy says something similar, calling younger generations to re-prioritize deep, robust networks of interdependent relationships versus rugged individualism and isolation.
 
But while this new, uncritically accepted view of the self is incompatible with traditional religion, making traditional religion seem unnecessary at the moment, perhaps what’s old will be one day be new again. Smith notes that people are not moving from traditional religion to secularity. There aren’t just two options. On the contrary, what we’re seeing is the budding of all manner of different “spiritualities.”
 
People are still interested in issues of “ultimate concern.”[7] We still feel the ache that traditional religion used to address.
 
Traditional religion can begin with the reality of that ache and make the case for why it has the healing balm. People today expect institutions like the church to have to prove themselves, to have to make their case. So, let’s make it.
     
   [1] P 298
   [2] P 299
   [3] P 299
   [4] P 301
   [5] P 300
   [6] P 302
   [7] A phrase used by psychologist James Fowler to name the focus of religion.

This is Part 4 in a blog series I’m calling “Why Religion Went Obsolete,” a synopsis of and reflection on Christian Smith’s 2025 book by the same title.

Smith argues that a multitude of macro and micro forces coalesced in the 1990’s and 2000’s to form a cultural “perfect storm” that effectively put traditional religion out of business. It isn’t that most people today are anti-religion. Quite the contrary. The dominant cultural view today is, “if religion works for you, go for it.”

It’s just that religion doesn’t seem to be working for most people.

But not because they’ve tried it and found it wanting. That is no doubt true for some. Western culture has seen a dramatic increase in the number of people who identify as “dones,” meaning “I’ve tried religion and I’m done with it.” Most young people, however, and this is becoming truer with each new generation, have no experience with religion because they’ve grown up in a post-religious culture, perhaps raised by “dones.”
If traditional religion went obsolete in the 1990’s and 2000’s, most young people today have simply never experienced it. Again, it’s not that their anti-religious. It’s simply that religion has never been a viable option for them. If you are a religious person that may be hard for you to get your mind around, which is why Smith spends an entire chapter offering his readers a number of metaphors that help those of us who take traditional religion for granted appreciate the cultural waters people are now swimming in.

For instance, traditional religion’s decline in the cultural world might be compared to “species decline” in the natural world. In the same that that species decline can typically be traced back to causes such as pathogens, parasites, diseases, invasive species, habitat loss, pollution, overharvesting, or climate change, we might trace traditional religion’s decline to analogues in the cultural world. What “invasive species” have moved into traditional religion’s “territory,” competing for resources? Are there “pollutants” in the cultural air making everyone “sick?”

Just as an avalanche is the result of snow, ice, and rock breaking off a mountain at just the time and coalescing to produce a movement with inertia and momentum capable of sweeping up everything in its path, Smith argues that the perfect combination of cultural factors “broke off” from a previously stable reality creating an avalanche that simply changed the cultural landscape.

What that means is today we have what theorists refer to as “cultural mismatch.” Cultural mismatch is a theory that seeks to explain why certain students underperform in certain environments relative to their objective intelligence. The idea is that culture plays a major factor. If my native culture is communal, “disorganized,” and loud I may struggle in an educational environment shaped by cultural values such as individualism, independence, and self-direction.

My wife, Kari, is an 8th-grade math teacher. She did her student teaching at a school where most of the students came from cultures different from her own. They planned to take a field trip to a local concert hall. To help prepare students, she told them they wear nicer clothes than they might typically wear to school. She told them to wear “church clothes.” She expected khakis and polo shirts. She was shocked when all of her students showed up to school the day of the concert wearing suits and formal dresses.

That’s cultural mismatch.

If traditional religion is the “student,” it flourished when cultural values, norms, assumptions, and expectations matched its own. That is no longer the case and traditional religion is struggling to perform. Not because it isn’t “intelligent” or “talented” but simply because it is being asked to perform in a world that operates according to different take-for-granted assumptions and speaks an entirely different language. And Smith argues that because most people are now growing up in that cultural world, a culture mismatched from the values, norms, and expectations of traditional religion, traditional seems entirely foreign to them and therefore a non-thought.

If you’re a Christian person, for instance, have you ever seriously entertained the idea of becoming Muslim or Hindu? Probably not. You may have considered an alternative form of Christianity but probably not joining a different faith altogether.

That’s what it’s like for most people growing up in western culture today. They’re not anti-Christian anymore than you’re anti-Buddhist. They simply haven’t grown up Christian, and due to cultural mismatch, they entertain the prospect of becoming Christian about as seriously as you entertain the prospect of becoming Wiccan.

Culture today is shaped by what Smith calls the “Millennial Zeitgeist,” taken-for-granted norms, values, assumptions, and expectations that are mostly at odds with traditional religion so that traditional religion simply does not “vibe.”[1]
 
In my next post of this series I’ll highlight some of what makes up this Millennial Zeitgeist before spending my last post reflecting on what traditional religion ought to do in a moment such as this, but I find this concept of cultural mismatch both helpful in explaining my experience as a traditionally religious person (and cleric) in contemporary western society, and hopeful.
 
Christianity has been adapting to different cultures, many of which have been hostile, for 2,000 years. This is our specialty. It’s what we do. It’s just that American Christians have never had to. We’re looking at the changing cultural landscape and crying “the sky is falling,” but the truth is the comfortable reality we once knew is simply changing. We may not like that, but instead of trying to get culture to return to whatever “stable” condition we thought it once had, which I suspect will only make the current avalanche move down the mountain with greater force, we have to adapt.
   
   [1] To use a word that expresses one of the components of the Millennial Zeitgeist, how truth is more felt than intellectually worked out.

Christian Smith argues that traditional religion in America has gone obsolete, meaning most people feel it is no longer useful or needed because something else has superseded it in function, efficiency, value, or interest.

Traditional religion has been “put out of business.”[1]

But traditional religion’s obsolescence, Smith says, was unplanned.
 
Some obsolescence is planned. Apple plans for the iPhone 10 to become obsolete because they intend to design the iPhone 11 and so forth. And that planned obsolescence leads to other types of planned obsolescence. The lightening jack is now obsolete because newer phones use a USBC port. Eventually the USBC port will be replaced with something else, and we’ll all have to order a 12-pack of new wall plugs. Until wall plugs go obsolete and we’ll all be charging things some other way.
 
This kind of planned obsolescence is economic strategy. For companies like Apple to stay in business they have to selling us newer, cooler, faster, more functional products, rendering the older products (which may still work just fine) obsolete. There’s a great picture of this in the movie Joy starring Jenniefer Lawrence. Joy invents a self-cleaning mop she boasts will never have to be replaced. When she pitches her idea to a manufacturer they tell her they don’t want a mop that doesn’t need to be replaced. They want mops that need to be replaced, that way they can sell more mops.
 
Planned obsolescence.
 
Smith argues traditional religion’s obsolescence did not come about that way. There were no secular or atheist architects sitting in a conference room plotting to take religion down or to replace with newer, cooler, faster, more functional religions.[2] According to Smith, traditional religion became obsolete due to an unforeseen conflation of causal forces (both macro and micro) over time. This conflation eventually produced a cultural “perfect storm” that wiped traditional religion off the map.
 
Here’s a list of the some of the causal forces Smith identifies.
               Higher education for the masses
               Women entering the paid workforce
               The deinstitutionalization of marriage and family
               Declining participation in face-to-face membership organizations
               Neoliberal capitalism and mass consumerism
               The end of the cold war
               The digital revolution
               Pop post-modernism
               The rise of intensive parenting
               September 11, 2001
               The New Atheism
               The third sexual revolution
               Religious pluralism
               Multiculturalism (especially in education)
               The disappearing “American Dream”
 
And you can add to this list all of the ways traditional religion hurt itself, especially in the two-decade period Smith identifies as the tipping point. Smith includes a five-page appendix that lists all of the religious leaders who were accused, charged, and indicted for either serious financial or sexual abuse scandals (or both) during this period. And the appendix doesn’t include the names of Catholic priests because it would make the list too long to share!
 
As you can see, traditional religion doesn’t have a whole lot going for it, culturally speaking.
 
I have a few high-level takeaways from this part of Smith’s book. The first is that my work as a religious professional is subject to macro-level cultural forces I have little to no control over. If it ever was, helping someone in today’s culture to know Christ and grow up into Christian maturity is not as simple as getting him to read his Bible and pray more. People are simply being influenced too consistently and pervasively by forces bent against God.
 
That leads me to both greater grace and also increased resolve to do the work well. If Jesus recognized 2,000 years ago that people didn’t know what they were doing (and prayed for God’s mercy because of it), how much truer is that today. People aren’t just out there consciously choosing sin. They are under the influence of forces they don’t recognize or understand. That compels me to have more grace.
 
It also compels me to do a better job. You would think that in a culture like this a pastor should conclude, “What difference is a sermon going to make?” And in one sense that’s probably true. But where else might a person here something that can open their eyes to the forces at work on their lives, perhaps encouraging them and equipping them to more consciously engage those forces? Words make worlds. Sermons are important, especially sermons that thoughtfully and respectfully bring Christ and culture into the light.
 
My second reflection has to do with unintended consequences. Not everything on Smith’s list was a conscious “choice.” In fact, very few of them were. But the ones you might be able to argue were intentional decisions, like the turn to neoliberal capitalism in the 80’s and 90’s or the invention of birth control, people pushed for what they believed to be good, noble reasons. Neoliberal capitalism was going to open markets and make it so more people could create more wealth. And it did just that. Birth control was going to make it possible for women to have more independence, which it did.
 
These are not bad goals.
 
But both had unintended consequences. Neoliberal capitalism made it possible for more people to create more wealth, but it also created an economic culture where generating wealth was the point. That, in turn, led to more and more people needing to higher levels of education, creating greater educational debt. Finding and securing high-paying jobs became the primary factor determining where a person would live, often resulting in people leaving their friend and family support systems, spending all of their time at work, or investing all of their free time and money securing for their kids the kinds of experiences that would set them up for similar “success.” All of this wedged out the time or need for traditional religion.
 
Birth control gave women increased independence, which they used to enter the workforce (following the siren song of neoliberal capitalism). That move in turn delayed marriage and children, which in turn led to the deinstitutionalization of marriage and family, key institutions that drive participation in traditional religion. Birth control also, ironically, contributed to the sexual exploitation of women. Birth control was originally thought of as a win for the women’s lib movement but once the prospect of pregnancy was decoupled from sex, women became even more subject to sexual objectification, which didn’t help the establishment of healthy marriages and families.
 
My point is that socio-cultural moves, regardless of what originally motivates them, will always have unintended consequences. It is imperative that advocates of any socio-cultural reform think deeply about what might happen if society moves in their preferred direction.
 
And this is especially important for followers of Jesus. My last reflection on Smith’s list is that often Christians were not sitting on the sidelines watching these things happen as passive observers. They were active participants, often advocating for certain reforms in the name of Christ.
 
You better believe evangelical Christians were strong advocates for neoliberal capitalism. And I’m sure more liberal Christians were strong supporters of birth control. Both groups had what they perceived from their limited frames of reference to be good reasons. Ironically, however, the very reforms they supported eventually contributed to their own demise. I’ve said this many times but we are living in a cultural moment that demands Christian leaders who are not just people of moral integrity but significant wisdom.
 
We need Christian leaders with minds at work, people who can tap into the rich history of the church, both theologically and culturally, and prophetically imagine where culture and society will end up depending on which levers which choose to pull. I’m not sure how many leaders like that we have. I perceive they are almost entirely missing from evangelicalism, and most progressive Christian leaders seem to be merely echoing culture.
 
The Catholic Church certainly has the wisdom and the tradition but because of its scandals I’m not sure it has a credible voice. Pope Francis did much to change Catholicism’s public perception and it would seem that there is something of a revival in the Catholic Chruch globally. That’s good news.
 
And to end on a note of good news, people who grow up in chaos tend to crave order. We’ve created chaos. If we think of culture like an atmosphere, we’ve created a world that feels like storm upon storm upon storm, no reprieve, with fewer and fewer things for people to lash themselves to. If people left traditional religion because they no longer found it helpful, perhaps having built a world of chaos they might find it helpful again.
 
And return.
   
   [1] Smith, p. 4
   [2] Though that is effectively what happened.

Despite some recent signs of revival, the headline remains true: traditional religion in America is spiraling.

In his latest book, Why Religion Went Obsolete, sociologist Christian Smith ventures to explain why. He argues that a number of different social forces and influences combined in the 1990’s and 2000’s leading to a cultural tipping point that pushed traditional religion into a state of unplanned obsolescence.

In other words, most people simply don’t find traditional religion useful. For younger generations the thought of “using” religion is about as unlikely as the thought of using a typewriter.

Not because it doesn’t “work,” but because it is no longer a widely supported cultural “technology.” People aren’t anti-religion. In fact, one characteristic of what Smith calls the “Millennial zeitgeist”—his term for the spirit of the present age—is a “you do you” attitude. If traditional religion helps you, go for it.

But most people aren’t going for it, and Smith argues that is because they perceive it doesn’t or can’t help them.

If that is true, however, it must mean that Americans either once did find traditional religion helpful or at least imagine it could be but perceive that it isn’t. And it turns out, when asked, Americans have some pretty strong and clear opinions about what religion is good for. In other words, even when people aren’t “using” religion they have expectations of religion. Part of Smith’s story is that many people distance themselves from traditional religion because they don’t see it living up to those expectations. More on that in a future post.
For now, however, I want to name the most common expectations and then reflect a little on this whole topic.

From his research, Smith identifies six expectations that the average American has of traditional religion; qualities that in the average American’s mind make traditional religion good.
A few thoughts on this list. Most people recognize that religion does have or should have or could have both interpersonal and intrapersonal benefits. Religion can make me happy, help me cope with hardship, and instill in me good morals. Religion can also help us live together in peace and harmony, maybe even serve as a galvanizing force in our national security and identity.[7]  

That’s probably good news. In the Christian faith, at least, love of God is always connected to love of neighbor. Those who subscribe to traditional Christian faith ought to find it a resource for strengthening their own sense of well-being as well as a guide to caring for others. That the average person perceives traditional religion should do that is a good thing.
 
A shadow side to that fact, however, may be the average person’s goal. As I mentioned a moment ago, a key characteristic of Smith’s “Millennial zeitgeist” is a “you do you” attitude. The uncritical assumption that the average person carries around in contemporary American culture is that he is on a personalized, customized self-actualization project, deciding for himself who and what he will be.
 
If he happens to be want to be happy, calm, able to cope with life, self-assured, decent, and honest and he finds traditional religion to be a great resource in helping him to self-actualize in those ways, he’ll use it and most other people in his culture will affirm his use of it for those reasons.
 
But notice he doesn’t want religion to become too weird, extreme, or fanatical. He wants religion to serve him, not challenge him. And religion cannot be used to judge others—it should only be used to help us live in peace and harmony—because that would violate the Millennial zeitgeist of “you do you.”
 
In other words, the average person may think religion is good when it helps him become who or what he’s decided to be (and not good when it doesn’t) and when it doesn’t make it difficult for other people to be whoever or whatever they’ve decided to be.
 
Commitment to traditional religion ought to produce a genuine, proactive love for one’s neighbor. The average American seems to acknowledge with their lips that they believe religion is good for that purpose, but this could just as easily (and perhaps more likely) be apathy masquerading as a desire for love. In other words, what the average person might really be saying is, “I don’t care enough about you to get involved in your life and I don’t expect you to care enough about me to get involved in my life. I’ll do me. You do you. If traditional religion helps us all leave each other alone so we can become who or whatever we want to be, I’m all for it.”
 
Perhaps one of the reasons the average person does not want to engage traditional religion is because it doesn’t take long inside traditional religion to realize it isn’t good for that.
 
My last reflection on this list is that it doesn’t include the notion of truthfulness or meaning. People think religion is good because it might help them to be good or to live in harmony with other people but not because it’s true or because it’s true it helps them to understand who they are and what life is all about.
 
Smith notes that while pastors like me might like to believe people are committed to religion because they believe its core doctrines, that simply isn’t true for most people. Certainly for some, but most people are leveraging religion like a technology in a self-actualization campaign. If it helps them achieve some interpersonal or intrapersonal outcome, the theology just isn’t that important.
 
And that will go a long way to explaining why so many people have walked away from traditional religion and why fewer still are joining up. As I said a moment ago, traditional religion should (and does) have both interpersonal and intrapersonal benefits. But so do yoga, mindfulness, Crossfit, book clubs, Buddhist meditation, hiking, and bonfires. When a person’s commitment to traditional religion has little to do with the truth claims that religion is making but more to do with its perceived social benefits, if that person achieve those same benefits elsewhere without having to deal with some of the inconveniences of traditional religion, it becomes much easier to walk awa from religion.
 
And if enough people who were using religion for these kinds of social benefits begin to realize they can achieve the same benefits more easily or efficiently elsewhere, eventually religion becomes obsolete.
     
   [1] Smith, 44
   [2] Smith, 48
   [3] Smith, 50
   [4] 52
   [5] 54
   [6] 55
   [7] Later in the book Smith will note that most people today do not believe religion has the capacity any longer to hold our nation together. Maybe it once did and it might be nice if it still could but most believe it can’t.

I recently finished sociologist Christian Smith’s latest book Why Religion Went Obsolete: The Demise of Traditional Faith in America and I’d like to spend a few blog posts distilling his argument (for those unlikely to read the whole book) and reflecting on its implications.
Smith starts by revealing what many other researchers confirm: “Traditional American religion is caught in a spiral of decline…That much is evident.”[1]

By “traditional American religion” Smith means “a person identifying with one specific tradition and becoming a member of a local congregation in which they participate and invest at least minimally.”[2] And while you’ve probably seen some news stories highlighting “young people” returning to faith and church in this way, the larger declining trend simply has not changed. Despite encouraging signs of sporadic revival, it remains true that rates of both belief and belonging continue to decline while the number of Americans identifying as either “not religious” or “spiritual but not religious” continues to increase.

Not only is this truer with each new generation but it also becomes truer for older generations the older they get. We’re all breathing the same air and it’s affecting everyone.

THAT this is happening is well known and well documented (and Smith shares all the latest data). WHY this is happening, Smith says, is less clear.

His argument is essentially that a number of different social forces and influences combined in the 1990’s and 2000’s leading to a cultural tipping point that pushed traditional religion into a state of unplanned obsolescence.

In Smith’s words;
Smith’s argument is that a combination of cultural innovations, incompatible larger trends, and perceived changes in functional needs—forces that began well before the 1990’s and 2000’s but that Smith argues combined into a “perfect storm” of cultural mismatch during that specific two-decade period—resulting in most people no longer seeing traditional religion as useful or necessary.
 
By the end of the first decade of the 21st-century, it wasn’t that the majority of Americans had become anti-religious—though struggles with traditional religion is one of the influences Smith addresses in the book—but that they had simply left it behind. In the same way that most people are not against typewriters but in a world of computers simply don’t think about them and would never dream of using one, most Americans today aren’t against traditional religion. They simply don't think about it and would never dream of using it.
 
Smith is quick to point out that obsolete does not mean failed, as if traditional religion’s obsolescence is because it has proven to be objectively bad. Obsolete just means one thing has been superseded by another. The Walkman didn’t fail. It was just replaced by the Discman, which was then replaced by the iPod. Some people prefer to still listen to music on a Walkman, just as some people prefer to still engage in traditional religion, but most have moved on to what they perceive to be better “technology.”
 
And one main reason for that is because most technologies depend on a broader system of “tools, ideas, products, and practices.”[4] You might like using a typewriter or watching movies on VHS, but what happens when your typewriter needs more ink or your VHS player starts eating your tapes? The supporting systems that make those technologies viable are harder and harder to come by resulting in fewer people using them.
 
This is the heart of Smith’s argument. His book focuses on a wide range of causal factors often ignored by other attempts to explain the decline of traditional religion in America. In other words, no one planned traditional religion’s obsolescence, Smith argues, but it happened because the cultural “tools, ideas, products, and practices” that have historically supported traditional religion have changed making traditional religion a far less-likely option for the average person.
 
In the following posts I’ll share and reflect on some of the “causal factors” that Smith identifies, I’ll look at some of the analogies he uses to describe the complex relationship between traditional religion and culture, and I’ll offer some thoughts on how all of this influences how Christians ought to live and minister.
 
Before I get to those issues, however, in my next post I plan to focus on some of what people used to find helpful about traditional religion that they apparently no longer do. If traditional religion has become obsolete, meaning people no longer pursue traditional religion because they no longer find it helpful, that must mean they once did find it helpful. What did the average person “use” traditional religion for that today some alternative has made more efficient or effective to achieve?
 
That people initially approach religion or faith for selfish reasons is obvious and understandable. But if people can walk away from religion because they no longer find it useful, that suggests perhaps they were using it for the wrong reasons.
 
If there is hope in Smith’s analysis, it is that people are walking away from traditional religion, not necessarily faith, spirituality, Jesus, or God. That poses its own set of challenges and problems, but it also leaves open the door that if people found in Jesus all that they most deeply desire, religion would always be useful, because the only way you receive Jesus is from people who already know him. And the only way there can be people in every generation who know Jesus is if they are being nurtured and sustained by a tradition.
 
   [1] Smith, p. 1
   [2] Smith, p. 3
   [3] Smith, p. 4
   [4] Smith, p. 5

In my sermon on Sunday, I used the phrase “the common gospel” to distinguish between what I believe to be the actual Christian good news from those popular renditions of the Jesus story you will likely hear if you attend a garden-variety Protestant church, especially one of evangelical bent.

As I understand it, the Christian good news is that in Christ God is reconciling the whole world to himself.[1] By his life, death, and resurrection Jesus has defeated sin, death, and the devil, and one day he will return to usher all of creation into eschatological glory, including all people.[2]

By contrast, the common gospel reduces the Jesus story to an if/then transaction. While it can be told in a number of different ways, the basic framework is the same: Jesus did a thing and if you believe he did that thing you will receive a reward.

And just to assuage myself of the concern that perhaps this is an unfair caricature, I heard (actually read) a megachurch pastor communicate the Jesus story in exactly these terms as recently as this Easter.[3] One line from the sermon summary is, “Jesus conquered death and has made a way for us to be forgiven and to experience eternal life.” As I mentioned in my sermon, the average listener won’t bat an eye at that kind of language. Forgiveness, after all, is a central feature of the Jesus story. But this kind of language not only reduces Jesus’ ministry to brokering a transaction between us and God, but it also imagines God having some kind of forgiveness problem. The was only possible for God to forgive us IF Jesus died. Prior to Jesus’ death, God either didn’t want to forgive us but now he must (IF we believe) or he couldn’t forgive us but now he can.

Either way, it implies that God’s essential character is changeable and that is far from good news.

But I know why this common gospel is so attractive: it’s easy to do.

And we like easy.

To borrow language from the prophet Ezekiel, the common gospel functions like a “magic charm.”[4] Prior to your acceptance of Jesus as your Lord and savior you are “dead in your sins,” awaiting judgment and condemnation. But then the pastor or priest waves over you the “Jesus died for you” wand and all is magically well, or at least it can be. All you have to do is say the magic words.

Or to borrow different imagery, also from Ezekiel, the common gospel produces a faith that is like a flimsy, whitewashed wall.[5] Saying yes to Jesus “covers” with you with a fresh coat of paint, making you look acceptable to God where before you did not, even though the wall is structurally unsound.

In either case, you say the magic words. You accept the covering. And immediately you do experience catharsis that is based in a very real truth: you are forgiven. It is true. God does not hold your sins against you. But that was true before you heard about Jesus and believed the message. You just didn’t know it was true before you heard the message about Jesus and believe the message.

But the point of hearing the message about Jesus is not to receive a forgiveness that was previously being denied to you. Forgiveness is yours in Christ whether you presently realize it or not. The purpose of hearing the message about Jesus and believing it is that having been forgiven you might begin to live faithfully with the God of love who has forgiven you.

The point of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection was/is not to facilitate a transaction whereby saying some magic words you can be assured that despite how you have lived, are currently living, or will continue to live that all will be well for you in the end. Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection is the revelation of God inviting you to join your life with his.

Yes, just as two people getting married have to say the words, you have to respond to the Jesus story with an Amen (yes), but the point of the yes is to accept a covenantal relationship. It is to reorient yourself to reality, now as someone who pledges his allegiance to Jesus.

That is hard. And we don’t like hard.

We want to cash in on the transaction by saying the words, and we’re happy to go on using God to prop up a life that may actually have nothing to do with him, but we don’t want to reorient our lives according to him.

There’s a simple litmus test to identify the common gospel. Is the implied problem God? In other words, did Jesus life, die, and rise to reconcile you to God or God to you? Pay attention. In most popular renditions of the Jesus story the implication is that Jesus lived, died, and rose to reconcile God to you. But God doesn’t need to be reconciled to you. God is not the problem and God does not have a problem. In addition, if you believe what you’re hearing, are you promised to receive something FROM God, or are you promised to receive God? The good news is never that you get something FROM God. That is the common gospel. The real good news is that you get God.

Ezekiel railed against religious leaders who told people a false story. It is still happening.
   
   [1] 1 Cor 15
   [2] Philippians 2:10-11, John 12:32
   [3] See the “He is Risen” sermon excerpt from Rolling Hills Community Church in Frankling, TN. https://rollinghills.church/media/
   [4] Ez 13:20
   [5] Ez 13:10

Anytime I give a sermon like the one I gave on Easter Sunday, I know there will be some people wondering about judgment.

“If what you’re saying is that God will ultimately redeem all people, what place does judgment have? Will anyone be judged? If so, what will that look like?”

These are good and important questions.

First, I believe in judgment if for no other reason than because the church professes it. “We believe he will come again to judge the living and the dead.”

But I also believe in judgment because it will be necessary for God to accomplish what I understand to be God’s ultimate, good ends. Sin and evil can have no place in God’s eschatological kingdom, which means that any sin or evil still residing in me or in the world must be dealt with.

And as I read it, the New Testament declares that it will be (or already has been).

John the Revelator paints a vivid (though metaphorical) picture of God doing battle against the forces of evil, ultimately sentencing the unholy trinity of Satan, “the beast,” and “the false prophet,” to the lake of fire and burning sulfur.[1] Again, this is not strict, literal imagery and the reader should not take it to include sinful people. People are not being condemned here. Evil is.

But as far as sinful people are concerned, there are a number of ways to think about this. First, if you grew up in a Christian tradition that was fond of thinking about Jesus’ death as a vicarious punishment for human sin (e.g. Jesus took your place on the cross and suffered God’s judgment on your behalf), while I don’t subscribe to that position myself, if you couple that conviction with the belief that all of humanity was “in Christ”—that is, just as everyone is implicated in the sin of the “first Adam” so too is everyone included in the righteous life of the “second Adam”[2]—then all people have already been judged and ultimately exonerated. No person was left out of what Jesus did.

That does not mean that when any individual person stands before God he or she may not still have sin that needs to be acknowledged and dispensed with. That will certainly be true. There are many people who do not care at all to honor Jesus in this life and whose lives are full of sin. But there are also Christian people who desire to honor Jesus but who, like the Apostle Paul, still find themselves routinely doing that which they don’t want to do.[3]

That is to say, while all people have already been judged and exonerated in Christ, that does not mean the sin in their lives has just been magically removed. Christianity is not magic and we do a great disservice to people when we talk about Christ’s atoning work as accomplishing something that approximates to magic (as when we tell people that the moment they accept Jesus as their Lord and Savior God wipes away all their sin, past, present, and future as if none of it ever happened).

God forgives us in Christ, for sure, but the only way sin is “taken away” is when we stop doing it. And that is the effect God’s forgiveness is supposed to have on us. When we see our sin for what it is and experience God’s incredible mercy, it is supposed to set us on a path of new life whereby sin has less appeal to us and less hold on us (over time).

Many of us have already had that experience when we encountered God in the face of Jesus Christ, but I believe it will be complete for all people upon judgment, because in that moment all of us will still have some things in our lives that don’t belong in God’s kingdom. I think the prophet Ezekiel paints a great picture of this dynamic. Here’s the full section.
First, Ezekiel imagines a day when God’s people will obey God, a day when they will stop worshiping their idols. They will not only bring God proper sacrifices, but they will have become the proper sacrifice themselves. During my Easter Sunday message I was channeling this conviction when I declared, “You are a part of what God is doing. You will be part of what God is doing. So, be part of what God is doing.” Ezekiel was talking about Israel, of course, but he imagines the day when all Israelites will completely and voluntarily submit themselves to God. I simply expand that conviction to include all people.

But second, Ezekiel does not imagine Israel’s redemption as magically bypassing or overlooking their sin. God will honor his name by treating them mercifully, but it is in the very light of God’s mercy, perhaps because of it, that they will look back on all the ways they defiled themselves and they will experience something like self-hatred for the evil they perpetrated.

Now, I want to be careful here. This is Ezekiel so we’re talking pre-Christ. Just because he imagines something does not mean it is fully consistent with God’s revelation in Jesus. I know there to be strains of Christianity that leverage self-hatred to keep people on the strait and narrow, but I know those approaches to faith to be toxic and ineffective at really helping people cope with the stuff of life.

A Christianity driven by self-hatred does not lead to spiritual health or maturity.

So, I don’t want to take Ezekiel’s prediction at face value and imagine us all at God’s merciful feet self-flagellating because we finally see ourselves for the utterly horrible creatures we’ve always been. The picture we have in the New Testament of creatures in the presence of God is not them self-loathing but worshipping.

Nor do I think our face-to-face with God will be like the scene from the movie The Goonies when Chunk recounts to the Fratelli’s every terrible thing he’d every done since he was born. God once promised to separate us from our sin as far as the east is from the west, [5] and there is some sin in your life where that has already happened. There are sinful things you used to do that you no longer do, that you can no longer imagine doing. There are sinful thoughts and desires you used to have that you no longer have, that you can’t imagine having.

These sins used to be part of your life, but as you have followed Christ you have been separated from them as far as the east is from west.

I don’t think God will need you to revisit them.

But assuming some sin remains in your heart, soul, and life when your day of judgment comes, I imagine experiencing the mercy of God in that face-to-face context might cause a little heartache (maybe a lot of heartache). I suspect you might feel remorse over the things you continued to cling to.

But I also imagine that remorse being a good and necessary part of your redemption process, something you will need to feel before you are ready to finally let your sin go and give yourself completely and voluntarily to God, just as Ezekiel imagines.

Hoping in the restoration of all things and all people does not preclude judgment. If anything, it demands it.
   
   [1] Revelation 20:10
   [2] Romans 5:12-21
   [3] Romans 7:15-20
   [4] Ezekiel 29:39-44
   [5] Psalm 103:12

Dustin Schmidt addressed the topic of “the crowd” while preaching at our church a few days ago on Palm Sunday. He pointed out that the same people who praised Jesus when he rode into Jerusalem hurled insults at him as he carried his cross out.

“The crowd” plays a prominent role in Jesus’ crucifixion. They don’t “pull the trigger,” so to speak, but neither do they stay his execution. One minute they hail Jesus as their Messiah, and the next minute they’re trading him for a convicted murderer.

And therein probably lies why they did what they did. They wanted Jesus to mount an insurrection like Barabbas had. They wanted him to kill Romans like Barabbas had. If Jesus wasn’t going to do that, best to send him to his death and get Barrabas back.

But you get the sense when reading the Gospels “the crowd” isn’t acting as an individual might. “They” ARE acting as one, but not as one rational soul under the influence of God’s spirit.

“They” are being moved by a collective force that exists between them.

One of God’s first words to Jeremiah the prophet was a word of protection from the very people he would be sent to speak to.   
   [1] Jer 1:8-10 NLT

I inherited the name of our church when I started here fifteen years ago and I’ve never loved it. It’s better, in my opinion, than the original name—Waterville Open Bible Church—or something even stranger like “The Tabernacle of Victorious Believers,” but it’s still not great.
It’s long, which means it doesn’t roll off the tongue easily, but neither is it easily abbreviated. JC Penny became JCP and that seems to work. Maybe it’s just me but WCC isn’t as catchy.

I like that our name emphasizes community, but I don’t love that its focus is exclusively on Waterville. Yes, we’re located in Waterville, but for those familiar with the area we think more in terms of the entire Anthony Wayne community if not all of northwest, OH.
But despite my lack of enthusiasm regarding our church’s name, I’ve never seriously considered trying to change it. Rebranding is a mine field: there’s a chance you could navigate it safely but not likely. Just ask the people at Twitter or Cracker Barrel.

That being said, if I were doing some exploratory research on a possible new church name I might start with Remnant Church.

Remnant is a prominent theme in both the Old and New Testaments. Prophets like Isaiah and Jeremiah predicted that a remnant of Israelites would be left behind in the land following the Babylonian exile but that a remnant would also eventually return.
Out of the masses would survive a remnant people who would remain obedient to God.
The Apostle Paul picks up on this theme in his letter to the church in Rome, writing that not all Israel is Israel, meaning that not all people who self-identify as religious truly love and worship God.

Remnant is how the church survives. Not all people who identify as Christians are seriously interested in following Jesus. But there are always some within the church who are.

They are the Remnant.

Now, an obvious problem with this church name is its implied arrogance, and that might be reason enough to strike it as a legitimate option. Some might take the name to imply that we think we’re the only real Christians.

I certainly wouldn’t want to communicate that. I don’t believe that.

But if the name Remnant Church focused more on some of the things our church is trying to preserve and pass along as minority positions in a majority Christian culture, that could be really powerful and energizing. In other words, Remnant Church could communicate, “we’re trying to serve the larger church and the future church by emphasizing things that seem to have been forgotten (or never learned).”

A Remnant Church preserves and passes along remnant convictions; truths left behind but which one day might return.

For instance, as odd as it should sound, most Christians don’t seem to believe that God is just like Jesus. For the average Christian, God is a mysterious pastiche of Bible verses. But the earliest followers of Jesus clearly believed that he was the fullness of God’s self-expression in the form of a human person.[1]

How do we know what God is like? We look at Jesus. The early church built the entire movement on that belief. Many contemporary Christians seem to have lost it, or never had it to begin with. Our church is trying to preserve and pass along this most fundamental of Christian convictions.

Second, again as odd as it should sound, lots of churches do not clearly name for their people the goal of Christian spirituality. The de facto goals end up being securing a spot in an afterlife paradise or transforming culture through activism. And without wanting to devalue either of those objectives, neither have ever been the goal or telos of the Christian journey.

The goal of faith is union with God.[2] We are to become partakers of the divine nature.[3]

And that means our journey on earth is a journey of being conformed to the image of love. Love is the goal of Christian spirituality. If God is a relationship of persons—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—or as the Apostle John says it, “God is love,”[4] becoming partakers of God’s nature is to become love ourselves. As we are loved by God we grow in love for God which expresses itself in our love for our neighbors, extending even to our enemies.[5]

Again, the earliest followers of Jesus understood this and embraced it. It seems many Christians today do not. Our church is trying to preserve this conviction and pass it along to future generations.

And lastly, today’s church seems to have lost the hope that God will one day make all things new. Most Christians seem to uncritically accept that in the end God will save some people and condemn others, either because he didn’t want to save all people or because he wasn’t capable of it. But the grand vision of the New Testament authors is that eventually every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus is Lord.[6] Jesus himself said that when he is lifted up on the cross he will draw all people to himself.[7]

Not some people. All people.

In the end, after God has destroyed sin, death, and the devil, he will make all things new.

That idea, as I have painfully learned, is not only foreign to many Christians but unwelcomed. It seems many Christians today want some people to suffer interminably.

But I think the church began with a much larger hope than has become the stuff of popular Christian teaching and belief. Our church is trying to preserve that hope and pass it along to future generations.

This is just me riffing. I’m not seriously entertaining changing our church name (though I would be interested in hearing feedback from anyone reading this), but the more I think about what our church has become and the kind of church we aspire to be, Remnant Church would be a strong candidate.

Again, not as a way of communicating we’re the only real Christians around here, but as a way of communicating our intent to serve the wider Christian movement by making sure that certain convictions and truths that drove the earliest Jesus followers but which have become minority views in today’s church are preserved for future generations when perhaps their time for broader acceptance will return.
     
 
   [1] Heb 1:3
   [2] Jn 17:20-26
   [3] 2 Pt 1:4
   [4] 1 Jn 4:7-12
   [5] Jn 13:34-35, Lk 6:32-36
   [6] Ph 2:10-11, Rm 14:11
   [7] Jn 12:32