aintsobad

The Loss of Community

   Tell me, what is harder. Is it harder to get a church member or to get a church member back?

   It is harder to get a church member back. When someone leaves they usually have a reason to leave because people do not actually like to change. People who change do so because someone gives them a good reason to change.

   The reasons may not be as good as the leaver thinks or as bad as the abandoned person feels. The reason(s) for leaving may include loss of interest, feeling discarded or some variation on this theme. The foundation problem is loss of community, I believe.

   Some churches are like the dying denominational apparatus to which they may be attached, however loosely. Conventions and associations are trying to decide how to reverse their undeniable declines.

   To elect or appoint another ineffectual committee to decide on how to share the unpalatable with the uncaring will probably not suffice. Committee action will probably not include the hard choices necessary to deal with the rotting dinosaur carcass in the parlor. To reinvigorate dying democracies, one will probably need to offer things like:

• Votes that matter
• Jobs that count
• Understandable, consistent policies
• High quality policies
• High-mindedness and nobility

   These things are probably not forthcoming from a status quo committee action. In fact, critical care is needed.

   There is a loss of community in the religious world, in particular among Free Church entities, who must choose to cooperate in the first place. No less a worthy than George Mason called for an end to "side taking" in a recent convention sermon in the Southwest. He sagely noted the confrontational approach of the last thirty years. Left unsaid is how the politicizing of the electoral process has ended the collegial community of the past, replacing it with an adversarial metier sure to continue for a generation.

   In point of fact, it is almost certainly too late to cry for a return to the old ways in the near future. In fact, it is unlikely the old organizations will survive, let alone thrive. What will replace them?

   Someone will have to find a way to tie people together. I advocate doing what we can for ministers, in hopes that healthy ministers will help churches, as conventions and associations seem unable or unwilling to do.

  

Who Takes Care of the Minister?

   I am going to take a few days to talk to you about your ministers. That is, the preachers, the staffers, the "lovers of your soul." We do not have enough to go around now. More and more are leaving the formal work to pursue another kind of ministry. Still others are pushed out to nothingness.

   Please understand what happens to a Free Church minister when he or she is suddenly unemployed, for whatever reason. Do not sugarcoat your dismissal of this person. In so doing, you ruin his life.You do not do this thing for him or for his good. You simply ruin his life.

   I have friends who are invited to be staffers at large churches. Large churches build in a clause in the employment agreement that says a staffer can be dismissed without reason on the action of his or her supervisor with one month's severance. My friends will not serve on a large church staff for this reason. They know such a dismissal will ruin their life.

   Please do not tell me "God still knows their address." This is no excuse for wreaking destruction on the ministry of a human being and his family.

   In fact, do not bother with any of the cliches usually applied to Free Church ministers. The fact is churches often do a poor job of vetting the minister before they call him or her. Their help to determine him is often provided by some outdated, ineffective form from the office of a denominational representative who knows little about what it takes to flourish in local parish ministry.

   So, who takes care of the minister? Who protects the staff member from the ravages of the senior pastor who needs to sacrifice a staffer to protect his own place? Who defends the minister from the lunatic who would rather see the Old Building protected than the Kingdom advanced?

   Let me suggest, since I will, anyway, the conventions are in bad shape because the healthy churches will have less and less to do with them. The unhealthy churches (their name is Legion) pile up asking for some miracle program to bring them back to their glory days. The churches suffer because the ministers suffer. As in football, where it all comes back to the quarterback, the health of the church comes back to the minister.

   How can you help your minister(s)? I want to make some suggestions. You will not like most of them, which makes me think they are right.

   To Wit:

• Throw money at him/her. His child needs some shoes for gym or a guitar for music class. He cannot afford them. She has not had a new dress in a year or so. Throw money at him or her.
• Give him a break. I mean a break and a real one. If he has a funeral a week and a wedding each weekend, you are watching him burn out in front of you. Give him a Wednesday away. You do the devotional that week (sermonette for Christianettes).  After you get over swallowing your tongue, imagine giving a minimum three major speeches each week for a year. Then multiply by ten.
• Examine your holiday traditions. You do not plan to make all the holiday things at the worship place. He will make them and ignore his family in the process. What will be the result?
• Take the fear out of the work for him/her. He/she sees what needs to be done to make things better. If he/she dares speak out truth, he/she will suffer. So, a few lunatics, a few haters, rule the day. Naturally, the churches suffer because of the tyranny of the mentally and emotionally unstable.

   In the next three days, I am going to examine the care of care-givers in ministry. I want to spend some time with community and its loss and with the death/rebirth of cooperative missionary activity. In the new year, some of us will organize a democracy of care-givers to provide for a ministry to ministers. There is just not enough done for these people.

   My presupposition is simple. Conventions are dying because churches are dying. Churches are dying because ministers are not healthy. If we take care of the ministers we will go a long way toward taking care of the churches and healthy institutions will arise from the cooperative work of healthy ministers and churches.

   One large state convention has put in place a committee (who woulda thunk it) to determine how to entice people to return to their events. I have to tell you, only the most faithful attend funerals. This thing will not get fixed on the convention level. Healthy ministers, who know their strengths and weaknesses, who work on their own health, who work at their calling, who continue education that counts, these ministers, men and women of all generations, will make a difference.

Tomorrow: The Sickness of the Church as a Loss of Community

How Long Should We Follow Those Who Cannot Actually Lead?

   Frank Farley studies courage. He identifies three kinds of courageous persons.

   There are those who are professionally courageous. That is, there are those persons whose jobs and training take them into harm's way. They show courage, as in running into a building others are leaving. They are routinely courageous and occasionally exhibit phenomenal courage when the occasion arises.

   Then, there are situational heroes. These are the persons who suddenly rush the cockpit of a captured jet liner, announcing, "Let's roll." They enter history as free men and women.

   Finally, there are those Farley calls "sustained altruists." This is Gandhi, or Cicely Saunders or Malcom X or Aung San Suu Kyi. These are persons who adopt a noble cause at great personal sacrifice or risk. They give up a life of freedom and comfort.

   I do not see many of these in religious life, per se, though many of the sustained or situational altruists have a faith background.  Too often, it seems religious persons have adopted the focus of the TV preachers, who tell us to send money to God but give their own address.

   My question is one in need of addressing. That is, how long will we follow those who cannot lead? At least, one would admit much of the current religious leadership is incapable of leading anywhere that matters. The great cause, the noble cause, is lost to product placement and some oddball program or other. Exactly how much longer can we afford to follow those who cannot actually lead?

   Evil has enormous powers to use as ammunition. Fear of exile or of punishment, deprivation of rights or privileges, pain, death. Evil is unquestionably a leader.

   Good has its problems. Good people are those who will most often question their own goodness, or their motives or their actions. Good people are those most likely to ask, "Who am I?"

   Evil just moves in to take over. Evil asserts its own right.

   Good men must hold their own salvation in their hands with fear and trembling. Good men are more easily torn down than evil men because evil men strike, back and forth, without worrying much about who questions their actions. Evil does not care what you think about his motives.

   Good men have to assert themselves to do right, or to do as much right as they can find. In so doing, they must ask the dead to come to life. This is not easy. Men understand evil. Good is harder.

   Let me suggest a good leader is one who pulls together. He knows our fears and foibles but appeals at least one level above them. He shows us what we ought to be and makes us believe we can be that thing we ought to be.

   At least, he inspires us to try to be good.

   Such a man may appear infrequently. He may disappear quickly if he cannot speak in the accepted religious cliches. He may suffer the condescension of posterity, wherein he is forgotten before he is buried.

Who Takes Care of Ministers? Who Takes Care of Churches?

   Who takes care of ministers?

   Well, no one, really. In the Free Church, whose genius is its congregational autonomy, the minister is defended, supported and beloved, until he/she is not. Then the minister is reviled, condemned, cast forth into outer darkness. He/she has little hope of professional redemption.

   More to the point, who helps the minister get the 10,000 hours he/she needs to be competent in what he/she does? Who points to the reading, study, prayer, fellowship and work habits he/she needs to be competent at his/her craft?

   Well, no one. Free Church ministers go largely unevaluated, alone, unprotected. The Free Church minister lives the life of the soccer goalie: quiet and settled while the ball is in the other end, followed by moments of sheer terror when the ball approaches his goal. He can never win. He can only hope to not lose, though he knows, for certain, he is not perfect and the ball will finally settle in the goal behind him.

    The ball will find the net more often the longer he stays in the game.

   "I worry about you pastors," one of my basketball referee friends told me. He is a good church member.

   "Let's say you stay somewhere twenty years, as we all say we want you to do," he continued. "Let's say each of those twenty years you make one enemy. In twenty years that is twenty enemies, plus all the other people they can influence."

   "That is a lot of enemies," my deacon-referee friend finished. "I cannot imagine getting up in front of a group of people three times a week, knowing there were more than twenty people in the crowd who disapproved of you. I think it would be very tough."

   Who helps the minister? The state conventions can barely provide for their own survival. They are no help, none at all. The association cannot help, for they cannot be seen as being pro-minister. The ministers will change often but the church remains and it is the church that gives money to the association, not the minister. The association is no help at all to the minister.

   Does the congregation help? Well, no. Too many of the members are related to the unhappy persons, or do business with them or have known them for years. As congregations have grown more corporate in nature the minister is increasingly on his own.

   I spent some time recently with a minister who was under pressure to leave his church. His crime? He had discovered illegal practices on the part of his treasurer. Church funds were not available for ministries because they were simply not available for anything. The church treasurer, however, had been treasurer for some years. The minister was going to lose this one. He was going to be turned out of his pastorate with no place to go.

   This is death for a Free Church minister. It is tough to go somewhere from somewhere. It is almost impossible to go somewhere from nowhere.

   Who rescues the rescuer? well, no one.

   Who protects the churches from the pedophiles, the predators, the liars, the church killers, the lazy? Who does the spiritual work, the psychological evaluations, the background checks?

   Let me ask this more pointed question. If pastorates are lasting less than three years, if ministers are being forced out in disgrace in record numbers, just where does God fit in this thing?  Let us, finally, own our shame and strive for decency. Perhaps men/women no longer wish to do local church ministry because they have seen the job and find nothing much in it that is Christ-like.

   It is time for a change. The power is too much in the hands of persons who have proven clearly the inability of the system to do the job, to care for the ministers, who would then care for the churches.

   This the plan. We care for the ministers. The ministers care for the churches. It is organic, not corporate. Everyone benefits and no one bleeds the system dry for their own support.

We Will Not Create a New Level of Bureauacracy. We Will Replace Three Layers With One.

   I have posited the idea of a ministerial guild more than once in this blogsite. I guess I wrote it often enough some others have started to think it is their idea. This is a good thing.

   After the first of the new year, a dozen or more of us will meet to actually start the organizational work for such a guild. I hope to attract 100 ministers almost immediately. Our hallelujah goal will be 1,000 ministers, either senior pastors or staff, male or female, of the Free Church background we share.

   We do not intend to add another level of bureauacrats. We intend to do something entirely new and very needed. In so doing, we will change the face of the church in North America and then the world.

Virtue-The Church You Want to Join-Recognizable, Personal Survival

   Here is an absolute for you; one day you will be all you are going to be. You will live with what you are going to be for eternity. You will not cease to be you.

   You and I should work on us.

   By this, we mean we should cooperate with God as God remakes us. We are not pre-existent. Tennyson was wrong when he wrote:

Sunset and evening star,

  and one clear call for me!

And may there be no moaning of the bar,

  When I set out to sea.

But such a tide as moving seems asleep,

   Too full for sound or foam,

When that which drew from out the boundless deep

   Turns again home.

   Tennyson, with others, mixed Platonic mythology of the pre-existence of the soul, with Medieval Catholocism and Modern Idealism, to create a cult of death in which the human soul takes the place of God and the human body is condemned never to be redeemed. Simply put, Tennyson made poetic the vision of the lonely soul cast adrift to find its own purpose apart from any external source.

   Scripture teaches God intends for us to live in our skins. The First Witnesses recognized Jesus after His resurrection by the scars in His body and by continued mannerisms of His flesh. I will recognize you in the new earth. Between the passage from life to death and from death to life is the work of Jesus the Christ. If we would have life, we must cooperate with Him in our salvation.

   If we look back at Original Human Sin (only back and only at human sin) to impose damnation on unbaptized infants (inherited guilt), the awkward doctrine of infused grace (gratia infusa) make both (impelled) thoughts as if they are physically transmitted to the soul, freeing the spirit but condemning the body.

   The Free Church takes all this, accepts man as created being marred by personal choice and offers a vision of change by active cooperation, often mistakenly called "choice" or "free will." Cooperation is the result of a restored personal relationship with God, the "I-Thou," wherein each soul is forgiven, one at a time, to walk cooperatively with God.

   Yet, there are "parts" of us, the KJV's "members" of the body (organs) that remain remarkable uncooperative with God. Biology oft overcomes virtue. Religion is useless if it is only meant to keep us in line. At the very least, its ability to enforce discipline is a remarkable failure. Faith relies on grace for its rescue and only then discipline for its survival. Cooperation with God is not easy. God offers everything but He seems to require a great deal of us, as well.

   God is always going somewhere. Abram sojourns and the whole tribe is obliged to wander with him. The universe expands by the moment.We ride along with it, precariously perched on a tiny green dot.

   God is hard to catch. He takes long strides.

   An eternity of chasing Him may be required. One Unday in eternity, we may snap to, suddenly realizing God is not apprehended in what we do but in what we neglect, after a million Unyears or so.

Thanks, Brock Church

   I have loved my nine months (and counting) at Brock Church. This is our first Thanksgiving together. I want to say thanks to my church family. The way you love my basketball, accept my blog, welcome my family and accept the preaching of the real gospel is just a constant happiness for me.

   It is so good to be part of a congregation that has an exciting present and a promising future.

Virtue: The Church You Want to Join-Original Sin

       "Only our  concept of Time makes it possible for us to speak of the Day of Judgment by that name; in reality it is a summary court in perpetual session."

                                     Dr. Franz Kafka

   Of course, when we speak of Original Sin and link it to Adam and Eve, we really just mean original human sin. Angelic sin predates human sin, or there would not be a Satan to hiss. Angels, first, and then, men. It seems God has a terrible time keeping anyone in line. Or, perhaps, we just have a terrible time explaining how it all got to this...

                                  Rick Davis, Final Thoughts

   Original Sin-peccatum originalis-is the heady belief that all mankind arrives on this planet predisposed to wrongdoing. This is true, we think, however one describes wrongdoing. Greed and violence are hateful terms in all cultures and times, at least when another person takes my stuff or my life. We need some explanation as to why we do what we hate. We need some kind of explanation as to why we excuse in ourselves what we hate in others.

   Hence, Original Sin; Naked Forbearers bight Forbidden Fruit and everybody gets a belly-ache.

   Or is the Eden Story about Forbidden Fruit at all?

   Is it not possibly a way of saying there are serious consequences, even for the most obedient and innocent one-time servant? For no one denies Adam's innocence or his service.  Is the Fall about Apostasy instead of Originality?

   Let me state my bias. I do not believe I am held accountable for the sin of Adam and Eve any more than I am held responsible for the sin of Napoleon or Attila. I have enough sin of my own, thanks very much. I fit no particular school of thought here, so do not reach for your theological dictionary. I am an "impure," or "synthetic" thinker, at this (and most) points. I do not work for Corporate Christianity and so may state a studied opinion without much concern for how it fits the party line.

   i have noticed, by the way, how Corporate Christianity's party line most often reflects its concern for its own bottom line. I wish to fulfill my own spiritual responsibility here by noting the Corporate Christians who use a "fiduciary responsibility" as cover for non-Christian acts risk great loss: not only of their corporation, but their own soul.

   Really, what does it gain a man if he gets the corner office and loses his soul?

   Here is what you and I should think about Original Sin. We ought to look at it as the Doctrine of Ultimate Finality, not of Initial Predisposition or Individual Damnation. It is a statement of result, not of method. Original Sin is about our death, not our life.

   Original Sin is a fact of life, but it is about the end of life, not the start.

   We act in sins, we choose sins, we live in sins.  We finally die in our sin. When we do, we  die in a commonality of sin that afflicts us all. If death is the Great Equalizer, sin is the Common Companion. We all have it, we all choose it, all answer for it, over and over again in this life. Why do we think we will not answer for our sin in the next breath there after our last breath here?

   In short, the tendency to sin is a matter of trouble for here, yes, but one that requires reconciliation for what comes next.The problem with sin (or one of the problems with sin) is this; unforgiven, it clings.

   Eschatology (study of the last things) is like statistics; you can make it say whatever you want. If you want your eschatology to be about the bride and not a tramp, you have to let it be about moral accounting. That is, when we consider our sin, we ought to do so looking forward to what is to come, not looking back at what we come from.

   No? Then, please explain to me why Jesus is in Hell between His death and His resurrection, preaching deliverance to captive spirits there, many of whom could not possibly have known about His Prophecied Coming, let alone His Crucified Person. Along the way, catch me up on why Paul thinks God "winked" at sin between the Law and the Cross.

   Why do they get an advantage you cannot possibly obtain? Is it not because God is looking at the End of It All, not the Prior Problem?

   Nor can a last things view of Original Sin be called an affront to divine sovereignty, for it only illuminates how often (and powerfully) the ability to choose leaves off humanity. It is when our sins become a (seeming) wholeness of will that our sin takes over to make our entrapment complete.

  

Virtue: The Church You Want to Join-Distribution

   A just community distributes commonly the things it most prizes. Most communities prize power, rights and wealth. The earthly church is not different from other Man-stained organizations that apportion the treasures of earth, justly and unjustly.

   As the Church becomes Religion, Inc., it more efficiently sacrifices spiritual influence for the sake of the corporation. Right and wrong scarcely matter, let alone the deep things of God. Treasures in Heaven are fine for the earthly powerless. The greater good of the corporation is paramount.

   What do believers actually owe to Religion, Inc., and why?

   Not long ago, and not for the first time, a bulbous, blustery fellow told me, "If you think your money and time could be better used somewhere else with some other cause, you ought to just go."

   I did.

   Now, I seek to persuade others to go with me.

  I am not interested, as you might see, in adding another level of bureaucracy to an already crowded slate. I am interested in completely replacing the powers of the present with the hope of the future. I have a distinctly future-preferment modus vivendi.

  This change will be the winner in the future. The dinosaur corpse in the parlor already takes up too much room and stinks to high heaven.

   Buffoons, the mendacious, the nostalgic, the inexperienced, protect the old way. Buffoons take too much effort, liars too much care; the nostalgic and the inexperienced, ah, there's the crowd for us. The future beckons.

   What can we do, pipsqueaks as we are, in the face of Religion, Inc.? We can relearn how to distribute our prizes.

   Now, we think we distribute our prizes on the basis of necessity, or what some would call welfare.  This is why we meet annually to hear heart stories of someone helped by a local representative of the larger whole, in order to explain why the larger body (in only the most minimal way related to its local representative) needs our support.

   The necessity is so great, the welfare needs of real persons so acute, we are compelled to continue. We must distribute prizes because people have need. This is an unanswerable argument, until one stops to ask, "Is this the better way to meet needs?"

   In fact, can we actually meet needs this way, or is this tokenism of the lowest kind?

   Or, we distribute our prizes on the basis of freedom, what some might call individual rights or empowerment. Freedom must be respected, the story goes, so the rights of the individual must be paramount. Large government interferes with personal freedom, so some graft and corruption must be accepted as the price for lax regulation.

   People who want to argue necessity tell us of the greater good, so argue we must maximize the welfare of the many. Those who argue for individual freedoms mention respect of the person, so to fend off the cloying hands of encroaching central powers.

   They are both right, but both limited. The future belongs to those who figure out how to distribute goods according to virtue, what some might call justice.

   I am gone from where I was and good riddance, they say, never to return. I am now asking others to go to the future with me. The future is laden with a need for virtue, of which I have little, but plan to start with justice and learn virtue.

   If we distribute our prizes by measure of virtue or justice, prize giving is dependent not only on the need of the recipient (the poor you have always with you), neither on the right to succeed gloriously nor to fail dismally (if he does not work, let him not eat) but on the purity of the distributor (for by grace are you saved, through faith and that not of yourselves, but it is the gift of God, not of works, so that no one boasts of it). We cannot be good but we ought to try.

   I will not be around to see it. Yet, I do want to say, you younger folks who are floundering around with your emergent church thing, here is what you want. You want to find a way to distribute the prizes of the Faith without becoming just another corporate bully. You want virtue, not necessity, justice, not a deistic/laizzes faire Region, Inc., that reduces God to a five point proposition and an offering envelope.

   Your success/failure/peace/serenity will be determined by how well you learn to distribute the prizes.

  

  

  

  

Virtue: The Church You Want to Join-The Unacceptable

   "Christianity preaches an obviously unattractive idea, such as original sin; but when we wait for its results, they are pathos and brotherhood, and a thunder of laughter and pity; for only with original sin can we at once pity the beggar and distrust the king."

                                                       -G.K. Chesterton

   How do you determine what is unacceptable?

   If anything is unacceptable, who gets to decide how it is unacceptable?

   Is anything unacceptable?

   Jesus the Christ, the most forgiving of fellows, announced blasphemy against the Holy Spirit was unacceptable (inexcusable). Then He left us twisting in the wind, trying to decide exactly what is blasphemy against the Holy Spirit and why He used this phrase, since He had not yet publicly taught about the Holy Spirit and no one in the crowd was likely to have a good idea about the Third Person of the Trinity.

   Most of them had some qualms about Jesus as the Second Person of the Trinity just then.

   If we want a clear picture of what Jesus (may) mean, look at the things He (actively) disapproves.

   Self-righteousness, false piety, empty religion, corporate greed (tables go flying in the Temple), prejudice against women and strangers, hunger, thirst, serial monogamy, prostitution (not prostitutes) and, finally, death, all earn His approbation. Jesus hates this stuff.

   Jesus finds somethings simply unacceptable. It is a matter of His virtue to hate some of the acts of man.

   Milton gave a short list of the things blindness makes a man miss, in Paradise Lost (Book Three):

Thus with the Year

Seasons Return, but not to me returns,

Day or the sweet approach of Ev'n or Morn,

Or sight of vernal bloom, or Summer's Rose,

Or flocks or heards,

or human face divine.

   "What do we do,"  myfriend asked me recently, "with the corpse of a dinosaur?"

   She was referring to a large denominational organization, dead for a short time, but still decaying in the parlor. You cannot ignore the body. It is too big. You cannot tolerate the stench. It is too powerful.

   Somethings are unacceptable. Blindness is not a crime but it is an inconvenience and no one practices it voluntarily for long.

   At least, people do not practice blindness physically as a habit. It is too hard.

   Emotionally, intellectually, spiritually' these are different kinds of sightlessness. In the heart, blindness is more acceptable than sight, if the sight we have to see is the dead T-Rex in the kitchen.

   How do I see again, Rabbi?

   How do I see for the first time?

   Who sinned, me or my parents, that I was born so spiritually lazy I am blind in my heart and mind?

   What is your theology of right and wrong? What does God make you see? What is it you must look away from God to put out of your line of sight?

   Scrooge begged the ghosts not to make him see anymore. He had to look away from his own pitiful life, lived without generosity, devoid of love.

   God wants to make you look.

   Let your theology be your ethics. Neither God nor ethics is designed just to keep you in line.

   God displays the divine wish that you become the kind of person God could hang with.