Why Do We Try to Change the Culture?

The idea of cultural change is not new among Christian believers.  Exactly how the change should be pursued and implemented is a source of constant debate, however.  But at least we mostly agree that cultural change is something that should be pursued in the midst of a pagan-cultured world.

Racism is one of the cultural changes that most people agree about.  Yes, there are still fringe groups on every side of the issue who don't want change, or even want change in the wrong direction, but these are even less than a minority report among Christian believers. I've recently been thinking about the 'why' part of this change, and trying to re-orient my thoughts about it (as I've done with my thoughts on a lot of cultural issues) around the idea of gospel-centeredness.

To summarize my thoughts, I think I can safely say it this way: The reason we need to change the culture of subtle racism within the Church is not because it is mean to ___ people (fill in the ethnic/racial group of your choice, black, hispanic, or any other group), or because it is insensitive, or because it is illegal; rather, because it is sin.(1)

I firmly believe that we ('we' as in Christians, or 'we' as in Americans) have no moral right to force people out of their racism, whether that racism be thoughts or words. In fact, I don't think we can. I still think the first amendment got it right, and without the first amendment we are left with things like blasphemy laws, which destroy freedom at every turn. I do think the government has a right, and a duty, to make sure that racism is contained to the areas of thought and word, and not allowed to become deed.  Behavior is within the purview of government enforcement. Unfortunately, our government seems to regularly lose sight of these facts, opting instead of enforcing behavior to trying to implement and enforce laws against the way people speak, or even think, about racial issues. These attempts will always be counterproductive and even dangerous. But that's for another post.

Where we as Christian believers do have a moral right, and indeed a moral obligation, is to speak out against subtle(2) racism in the church. If we can refocus our thinking on racism from a so-called social-gospel issue (i.e., we shouldn't be mean to blacks because of what they suffered under slavery or under poverty) to a real gospel issue (i.e. we shouldn't think, say, or do racist things because it is a sin against God's image-bearer, and thus against God Himself; and more importantly, we should joyfully share the gospel with everyone), I truly believe we could almost eradicate racism in the church in short order.

Now, I understand that this kind of argument carries no water in the secular cultural world.  That's fine; it doesn't need to carry any. We can't control what a pagan culture thinks, says, or does. But we can control what we believe as followers of Christ by staying always focused on Scripture and a scriptural basis for our attitudes and actions. And if we succeeded in eliminating racism (practically) from the church, we would make a much larger impact on a pagan society than many would think. The parable of the wheat and the tares tells me we can never fully eliminate racism, or any other kind of sin, from the visible church. Jesus will take care of that at the end of the age. But we can certainly minimize it.

Why should this practically matter to any of us? For one, the local church would be much more effective in local ministry if the subtle racism were to be tossed out the back door of the meetin' house. Take a look at churches in racially-diverse neighborhoods.  It is hard to find very many that really look as diverse as they should. And if they don't, they are not ministering to the folks that live around them as well as they ought to be. Until we do something about the attitudes within the church that keep this the status quo, our churches will continue to fail to look like their surrounding communities. Someone will automatically argue that their church isn't racist. Other than a few weird sects, I agree that most churches are not overtly racist. But the subtle racism is still there.  Walk into any one of about 70% of the churches in America and see if the church looks like the community where they are found. If it doesn't, there is something wrong.

We can't force this to happen. R. C. Sproul is fond of the saying, "A man convinced against his will is a man unconvinced, still."  I agree.  By attacking racism as the sin that it is, rather than (only as) an issue of civil rights or of moral decency, we move away from the current platform of coercion (which seems to have too many illegitimate grandchildren) toward a program that changes the hearts of the people. I've heard quite a few folks say that only the gospel can save our culture. This is a bit vacuous of a phrase until it gets some shoe-leather, and once we get practical, it is not so difficult to see the inherent truth in the statement.

Then the question-behind-the-question looms:  Is our culture worth saving?

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(1) Why do I call it sin? Read 1 John chapter 4 if you need scriptural support for this proposition.

(2) What do I mean by 'subtle racism'? This isn't the kind of racism that says, out loud, "I don't like black people" or "I don't like white people." It is the kind of racism that seem to be built into every fallen human heart, where we don't want to associate with people that don't look like us.

A Woman's Letter to Her Church

This is one of the best blog posts I've read in a long time.  It needs no comment; just go read it.

A Great Worship Experience

This afternoon, my church hosted Praisefest, which is an event where choirs from area associational churches get together and sing a couple of their best numbers.  The public is invited, and a few show up, but it's mostly an inter-choir event. (My mom showed up along with six or seven of her friends from the Palo Duro retirement village...that was a nice treat.)

The highlight of the event is always the song at the end.  Each choir was good, and each song was worshipful.  But at the end, all the choirs sing one number together.  This is unrehearsed, so it has to be a 'classic'...a song all the choirs know.  If you have been around Southern Baptists a few times, you know there are some songs that are ubiquitous.  Today we sang one of the very best of them:  At the Name of Jesus.  (I was once told that if your church doesn't sing this song at least twice a year, you aren't really a Southern Baptist church.)  This song is an adaptation of the kenotic hymn in Philippians 2.

Well, when the combined choirs from FBC Amarillo, FBC Canyon (my church), South Georgia Baptist Church, Trinity Baptist Church, and the Panhandle Singing Women all put their voices together on At the Name of Jesus, it was a powerful, moving worship experience.  I'm not sure I can find the superlatives that would do it justice.  You just needed to be there.

Unforgettable.

(If you don't know the song, or would like a copy of it, here's a link to a 99-cent version on Amazon.com done by the Choral Ridge Presbyterian Church's Chancel Choir...this is one of my favorite renditions that I can find.)

If'n God's Name Was 'Jerry'

Living in Texas, one can be overwhelmed by the amount of football in the culture.  It's certainly not all bad, and I enjoy a great deal of it, especially the nicer side of 'Friday Night Lights' (the high-school football world) and college football.

 Will Boren (my son), Canyon HS 2011 WR/FS

The whole high school football culture here (yes, it is a culture:  when I was in high school, the coaches said, 'There's only two sports in Texas...football and spring football') is fun.  Small towns of a thousand people have stadiums that seat three thousand, they they are full every Friday night.  The backroads, sometimes thirty or forty miles between towns, are bumper-to-bumper at 5pm and again at 10pm on Fridays.  It's a sight to see.  (Yes, there are some bad aspects, but for the most part, sanity reigns and it is a lot of fun.)  The Class 4A state championship game was played in front of over 43,000 fans!

Southlake Carroll Dragons- Class 5A State Champs

College football in Texas can also be fun.  Texas is different than many other states, as there are more Division I programs here than most states can boast.  Some of the best are less than a hundred miles apart (shoutin' distance in Texas), much like the 'golden triangle' of basketball near Raleigh, NC.  The most recent brouhaha with Texas A&M leaving the Big 12 for the SEC has certainly upset some of this, and mostly for the negative for Texans, but that's another story.

Pro football, on the other hand, isn't quite so much fun.  The Houston Texans have finally made the playoffs, which is great, but they'll go in without some key players and likely won't last long.  In any case, the Texans will always play second fiddle to the team in Dallas.

As Matt Chandler once put it, the largest pagan temple in America sits in Dallas.  Every other Sunday, a hundred thousand people show up to worship there.  People that would be loathe to put $20 in the plate at their 'other' church will throw down six- or eight-hundred bucks at their worship service at Cowboys' Stadium.  Those who would complain about sitting through a 15- minute sermonette will sit for four-plus hours absorbing the sex and violence before them at the pagan temple.  If you've ever been to Jerry's house, you know that the scantily-clad Cowboys' cheerleaders on the largest TV screen in the world does indeed qualify as, 'sex'.  I'd tell you what my 12-year-old daughter said about it, but this is a family venue, and I'd be embarrassed to print it.

All that's to say, I've gotten a pretty big kick out of the angry rhetoric coming out of Cowboys' fans the past few days.  The 'Pokes lost to the Giants and will miss the playoffs.  People are angry at Jerry, the god they seem to worship (follow the money!), for not stepping back and letting a GM run the team.  Everything he touches seems to turn to gold, albeit with a bit of an amoral slant.  His team just gets worse.  (They still make him a fortune, though.) If Jerry Jones is really interested in fixing the Cowboys' woes, he needs to treat himself just like he treated Tom Landry back in 1989 (he fired him unceremoniously).

The irony is, these folks will still plunk down their kids' college-money to watch Jerry's team (and line Jerry's pockets) Sunday after Sunday.  The level of commitment is staggering.  Just imagine if Jerry actually did something good for them.  It makes me wonder why we don't see the same level of commitment from those who claim to worship Yahweh, who has indeed done good for us.  In fact, many who worship Jerry every Sunday are some of the same folks who claim to worship Yahweh, but if you look at where they attend fellowship on Sundays, and where they spend their money, it's hard to accept the claims.

I've stepped on enough Texas toes for now.  We'll see how the off-season goes. 

At least with the God I worship, He'll never need to fire himself to make things better.

Some More on Age-Segregation in the Church

I've posted on this topic, age-segregation in the church, in both April and August of 2010.

Now, Tim Challies has posted this very interesting review of a movie made by a group opposed to age-segregation in churches.  Its a great example of how to take a good idea and add an 'ism' and make it a bad philosophy.

It is also clear from the comments posted after Tim's article that a lot of people think the division of the church by age is a bad idea.  I agree.  But dividing the church over a division in the church is also a bad idea.  Making age-integrated church an exclusive thing, with no separate programs ever for kids, teens, moms, middle-aged vegetarian lego-lovers, etc., is a form of legalism* that will be as destructive, long-run, as teen-exclusive worship services have been in the recent past. 

It was also a nice eye-opener to me about how things I say could be taken to an extreme, even unintentionally.  We all have a bit of that fundamentalist thought pattern rooted into us, even liberals, and I'm no different.  So I hope what I've said about this in public isn't so extreme as to make it a test of faith or fellowship.  Its not.  It is important, but not a test of faith or fellowship.

All things in moderation, as they say.


*Legalism- making firm prohibitions where there are no biblical prohibitions...R. C. Sproul's definition.

Calvin and the Church

In my historical theology class, we were asked the following discussion question(s): 

First, re-read (or read!) the section in McGrath on Calvin and the church (205-6). I'm particularly interested in what you think of Calvin's proposal of the visible and the invisible church and how they relate. For example, in the last paragraph (206), McGrath notes that Calvin stipulated:

"Wherever we see the Word of God preached purely and listened to, and the sacraments administered according to the institution of Christ, we cannot doubt that a church exists."

McGrath interprets Calvin to mean that, it is "thus not the quality of its members, but the presence of the authorized means of grace [that is, the sacraments], which constitutes a true church."

Where does faith fit into this theological construct? How would a typical Baptist (if there is one!) react to that? Or, how would your faith tradition react? Does election totally outweigh faith? How does McGrath's interpretation of Calvin relate to ethics?  Could we participate in the sacraments, receiving grace as it were, and still be unsaved?

My response was (briefly)-

Calvin's views as summarized in the brief passage in the text are a necessary, but not sufficient, description of the church.

I strongly agree with Calvin on the visible and the invisible church concept.  I have no proof (obviously), and my biases make even a close determination impossible, but I'd guess that somewhere between 20% and 50% of the members of my local congregation are unregenerate.  I imagine the numbers are similar in other congregations.  This is clear empirical evidence that Calvin was right about the two 'churches'.  I am not dogmatic about this...it is my impression based on what I know about biblical descriptions of true believers and about the people in my congregation.  I've talked to a number of pastors, and they think along similar lines (at least, as much as they'll open up about this topic).

Think about the opposite of what Calvin says:  If the Word of God is not preached, and the sacraments (or ordinances, if you prefer) are not (rightly) administered, do you have a church?  I don't see how.  And, with McGrath, if the local congregation cannot be a true church unless the quality of it's members is universally high (with regard to righteous living), then I don't think there's such a thing as a true church.

As one of my former pastors once told me, "If you ever find the perfect church, don't join it.  You'll mess it up."  He was right.

I don't think the 'typical' Baptist would respond well to this, as the 'typical' Baptist is strongly Arminian in outlook, and has been corrupted by the misuse of the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers (which, if you ask, they will call, 'the priesthood of the believer').  The typical Baptist is anti-creedal, pro-democratic-control of the church, and more methodistic than a typical Wesleyan (Methodist) in approach to evangelism.

The question, 'Does election totally outweigh faith' is a leading question.  Election is a necessary condition for faith (John 6:44), but we are saved through our faith, not our election (that is logically not clear, but I don't know a better way to say it).

As far as ethics, if we are unsaved, we cannot receive any more than common grace through the sacraments, as I believe 1 Corinthians 11:27-32 makes clear.  In fact, I imagine most (if not all) of us have received the common grace of not dying on the spot when we've taken the Lord's supper in an unworthy manner.  Of course, in many churches today that risk is minimized since many congregations don't observe the Lord's supper more than a couple times a year.  (And in the same vein, some of these churches don't preach the Word either...opting instead for a Joel-Osteen-like best-life-now approach to scripture).  I'll let you draw your own conclusions, based on Calvin's view or not, of whether these are 'true churches'.

I hope was wasn't being unfair to 'typical' Baptists (whatever that may be).  It is accurate according to my experience, at least.

Speaking of historical theology, I recently saw where a new textbook is about to be released.  This book is from Gregg Allison of Southern Seminary in Louisville.  It is a companion volume to Wayne Grudem's Systematic Theology, with chapters and sections that correspond.  It looks like a great resource, and is on my Amazon wish list.

Importance of Regenerate Church Membership- An Example

Thom Ranier, president of Lifeway, posted this blog on the importance of regenerate church membership.  He calls it, "Responding to the great distraction."

This is a great article.  I wish more churches would agree with this view of church membership.  Ranier says, "First, the standards of church membership have been low in many churches for many years. As a consequence our churches have more and more unregenerate members. Frankly, I would be not be surprised if some of the most vitriolic criticisms come from those who are not Christians."  I agree.  While we can't see regeneration directly, we can see fruit.  Some of the fruit I've seen has been pretty rotten at times, and it is all the more visible because of the contrast with some of the good stuff that is also very much apparent in others. As a member of a church where grumbling and nasty folks have been making the lives of some of the staff miserable, I think Thom has hit the nail on the head.

By the way, just out of curiosity, does anyone who reads this blog know of any scriptural reason why the church should be though of as a democracy?  I've heard arguments both ways, neither being well-supported by scripture; mostly the pro-democracy argument was an Americo-cultural view of what the church should be.

???

What Younger Believers Need (and Don't Need)

Every once in a while, I come across a statement in a book I’m reading that begs to be shared.  This is one of them.

“Younger believers don’t need another speaker to come in and tell them about dating, self-esteem, and relationships.  They need to have relationships with saints who have put on a few miles in the Christian life and have faced challenges to their faith and practice that younger believers have not.  And the lessons learned from these relationships need to be passed on to the rest of us in unplanned, unchoreographed, and unplugged conversations.”

This is from Michael Horton’s, The Gospel Driven Life, p. 197.  I highly recommend this book.  But since it is the sequel to, Christless Christianity, you’ll probably need to read that one (highly recommended as well) first.

We tend to over-think and over-react when we hear bad things going on with our youth.  I'm afraid that's part of the problem.  Saying we need to simplify things is easy, but doesn't give enough information.  This paragraph is an appeal to simplify, and it give all the information we need to do what is suggested.

We need to stop age-segregating our churches.

In the Mean Time: Being a Church Member between Pastors

The Pastor of my church, Dr. David Lowrie, recently resigned to take the pastorate of First Baptist Church in El Paso, Texas. Dr. Lowrie was an excellent pastor, a very good preacher who preached the gospel instead of the other nonsense that some churches have to put up with these days, and a good leader (he is the current president of the Baptist General Convention of Texas).

That means a couple things: we will have a mish-mash of fill-in pastors for a while, then, if we are a good little congregation, we'll get an interim pastor until a new one is found and called. According to some stats I've heard (second hand) that come from Nashville, a church should have an interim for 2 months per year that the last pastor was in residence. Since Dr. Lowrie was here for 9 years, that means, if we follow the rules, we'll have an interim for about 18 months. I'm hoping we can cut that short.

What do we garden-variety laypersons do in the mean time? In my experience, a group of us will use the excuse to leave the church for the next cool thing in town. Another group will pull strings and play politics and try to get involved with the pastor search committee and have some say in who the next pastor is. A few will just fade into the background and not really do much of anything.  Worst of all, a few will talk bad about people or things and cause some trouble.  As Kevin DeYoung said in his 2010 NEXT conference talk, the Church is the bride of Christ, so why are there so many people who want to *diss Jesus' girlfriend?*

Here's what I think (and wish) we would all do-

(1) We should pray daily for the man God has planned for our church.
(2) We should pray daily that the man God is calling to us will be gospel-centered.
(3) We should continue to serve where we've been serving.
(4) We should 'pick up the slack' in personal ministry where we see a need.

Here's what I think (and hope) we should NOT do-

(1) We should not be busybodies with the search committee and try to give input that isn't needed or welcome (those of us who prayed for the search committee know there's a reason God did not see fit to have us on that committee).
(2) We should not try to change the nature of our church in the interim time...God gave church leadership to pastors and elders, not laypersons.
(3) We should not gossip about the process around town.
(4) We should not give up on God in the process.

Our church has been struggling lately with the ideas of becoming contextual or relevant; mostly because we've seen a decline in membership (or at least, a failure to grow at the same pace as the community). This time is certainly promising in terms of providing an opportunity to re-focus on the gospel as our source relevance and method of contextuality. It can be hard to maintain continuity with guest preachers, but on the other hand, as we saw two weeks ago with Michael Kelley, we can hear some outstanding exposition of the gospel from folks we don't normally hear from.  My boss, Wayland President Dr. Paul Armes, spoke last week and did a great job.  Several of our staff members are also excellent preachers, so I look forward to the variety even though consistency is hard in the process.  [Update: Today (Sunday, the day after I posted this blog article) we heard from a former pastor, Dr. Charlie Price; and he did a great job...focused on the gospel and the kingdom, and not on fixin' our lives and other nonsense.]

I've been participating in the 10.02(b) virus prayer program for a couple months.  Every Tuesday and Thursday at precisely 10:02 am, my Outlook alarm goes off, and I stop what I'm doing to pray for workers for the harvest in our community.  The prayer time has morphed into praying for the search committee and the pastor-to-be as well.  I'm looking forward to what God is going to do in our church.

Community in the Church

I ran across this quote in Mark Driscoll’s blog today-

“If you’re cause-oriented, you get affinity. All the people who agree with you come together. If you’re Christ-oriented, people who disagree on a whole lot of things, they come together. That’s actual community. What passes for community in our day is pretty much affinity. Everybody like me hangs out and does what I like. Community is people totally unlike me, who don’t have much in common with me, come together with me, because we’re Christ-centered.” (M Driscoll, http://theresurgence.com/weird_teams_are_the_best_teams )

I’ve noted that oftentimes, people who go to church together don’t really like each other, at least socially, if not literally.  They don’t hang out together, don’t run in the same social circles, and generally have very little in common.  Not being ‘like’ other church members is to be expected in a biblical church…after all, we don’t get to choose our fellow believers in the body of Christ (Acts 2:42; 13:48).  God appoints the members of the body, and funny thing, he doesn’t always choose the way we would!

Now, I understand completely how a church of hundreds or thousands of members cannot all do the same stuff together very often.  Even Sunday School classes are sometimes too big to be socially active on a regular basis.  But does anyone besides me see a problem with ‘never’?  In other words, shouldn’t members of the body of Christ do some social things together on occasion?  (I’m not talking about church functions, or even socials put together around a SS class or group…these things are good, and we should do them…but I’m talking about strictly personal, social functions.)  If we don’t, how are we ever going to get involved in each others’ lives?

That's one of the problems with Arminian theology...we tend to convince those who are like us (look like us, act like us, hang out with us, etc.).  We don't seem to be very convincing to those who don't look like us or think like us.  That's one reason why the evangelical church in America is so demographically homogeneous.  If we approached evangelism in a scriptural way, knowing that God was going to do all the 'convincing' (that is, regeneration and saving faith), I think the church would look more like the culture in terms of ethnicity.  I know I'm imposing a bit of statistical constraint on God's work, and I don't mean to do that...what I'm trying to get at is the fact that scripture talks about people of every tongue and every nation being part of the elect, and most every tongue and every nation is represented right here in the good ole USA.

This brings me back again to a fellow churchmember's comment a few weeks ago about us as individuals and families living out our Christian calling…in my mind, we should live it out together, in community.  In the 8th grade bible study group that my wife and I host at our house on Sunday nights, we’ve leaned heavily on the kids to meld together as a peer group to support each other when temptation comes during their upcoming high school years.  I strongly believe in positive peer pressure (because I’ve seen it work so positively in my life).  It is interesting that we tell this to our youth, but don’t seem to model it for them as well as we could.

This isn’t meant as a criticism…I know some folks run the race well, with fellow believers around them at critical times.  Women seem better at this than men.  Men have a hard time making the kind of friendships that women make (who knows?).  Throw in the apparent tension of the call to live outside our church network (get into the lost community, right?), and the balance is difficult to strike.  But it needs to be struck.

Saving the Local Church

My local church leadership is in a bit of a quandry right now- they are aware of the changes in demographics in the community and aware of the drop in numbers over the last few years at the church.  The question then is, "What do we do about it?"

Even asking the question is full of pitfalls.  When we talk about the culture and the church, and how they do/should intermingle, we bring multiple perspectives into play, and many time folks end up arguing points without having any agreement on what terms mean or where the focus should be in making changes.

Our church does not seem to have any agreement on some basic building blocks from which to create a plan for dealing with the negative changes.  For example, do we believe in a regenerate worship, or an evangelical worship?  It seems that we need to establish that fact before we start talking about how to engage our local community.  And, where do we believe the emphasis comes from in moving the lost toward the cross...is it from common grace that God gives all to be able to come to Christ, or is it from saving grace God gives to the elect that brings them to Christ?  I don't see how we can come up with a plan to evangelize our city until we agree (at least in principle) on that belief.

These are hard questions.  There are sincere believers on both sides of the above arguments, and getting all these to an accord on these important questions is daunting.  I was speaking to the pastor this past Sunday about one parallel issue, age-segregation.  It seems, based on comments in the meetings we've had, that one of the few things almost everybody agrees on  is that we want age-segregation to stop in our church.  Yet, the solution to that is seemingly unobtainable.  We have two vastly different worship styles in our two main services (contemporary and traditional), and the median ages in the two services are probably close to 40 years (an entire generation) apart.  We have age-graded Sunday School, separate worship services for our children and college students, separate ministers dedicated to age-delimited groups (youth, college, senior adults), and so on.  In other words, the entire church is built around age-segregation.  It would appear we need to dismantle most of the church's structure to get away from age-segregation.  That's not an easy task.

My point of emphasis that I've tried to say in multiple ways through this process is, we need to change the methods to reach our culture, but we cannot change the message of the gospel.  The gospel itself is our true relevance to the culture around us, not our ability to look like the culture around us, or relate to its participants.  This is one facet that I hope we have enough wisdom to cement into place as we look for ways to reach our culture for Christ.

Being a Reformation Fan in a Baptist Church

I am currently teaching through the book of Hebrews in my Sunday School class. I teach the Adult 10 class at the First Baptist Church. Thanks to folks like R C Sproul, Wayne Grudem, Michael Horton, James R. White, John Piper, John MacArthur (and quite a few others) I have come to a realization of the truth of the doctrines of grace and the essential nature of the pure gospel in the life of the church.

Teaching the doctrines of grace in a Baptist church can be a challenge. While many of the founders of the Baptist faith were Calvinistic in their outlook early in the church, the Baptist faith has been long dominated by an Arminian outlook on the world. I grew up in another denomination (church of Christ) that is even more Arminian in nature, so I have seen that side of the theology coin very clearly. Both aspects (Baptist history and my background) add to the challenge of teaching the doctrines of grace (the TULIP) to my class.

However, I've seen the negative effects of the substitution of a form of the Law for the Gospel on my current denomination, and I feel a strong calling to be a part of the solution to this problem. In Hebrews, we are in chapter two, and if you recall, verse 9 of chapter 2 is a great teaching moment for the idea of definite atonement ('limited', if you use the TULIP). This lesson is coming up on October 4th. I am very grateful I have the Logos system in place to help prepare for this lesson, as the volume of material is overwhelming. Logos makes the volume manageable.

This won't be the last time one of the TULIPs comes up in Hebrews. It is an interesting, but worthwhile, challenge.