My Students In Penang
July 2nd, 2010 § 1 Comment
by Matthew Raley
Today, after sixteen hours of teaching over four days, I said goodbye to my students. It was difficult for me to do.
I didn’t know what to expect of the class when I arrived. I wondered how extensive their Bible knowledge would be, whether they would have an understanding of doctrine, and what their English level would be. On all points, I was impressed.
To a person, they were deeply engaged in the subject of how to tell biblical stories. Most were experienced teachers, and articulated many problems of teaching the Bible. Their questions showed a keen interest in how to interact with their listeners effectively. They know the Bible well. There was little that was unfamiliar to them, in terms of the basics of biblical history and of hermeneutics. They were ready to move ahead.
I feel that I worked them pretty hard. My ways of analyzing biblical texts to discover meaning and application are in some ways different from established procedures. I ask different questions than many pastors ask. But the class pushed through the concepts and, I believe, understands them quite well.
Several came to me with projects they were working on, or problems they were having in teaching. The issues ranged from preaching to established congregations to developing stories for the children of dockworkers in Taiwan. It was clear that both younger and older students were using my grid to solve their problems, and that was highly encouraging to me.
Between classes, I was able to interact with an American missionary who had been in China for thirty years, and who expressed frustration with Western modes of teaching. For the first time, she said, she found some of the tools she was looking for. One of the most common problems I hear from missionaries is the disconnect between the way Westerners are trained to teach and the way most peoples of the world learn.
Another student was a young architect, who audited the class, sitting perfectly still, watching and listening intently, missing nothing, but absolutely silent. During one lengthy break, she began asking me probing questions, and we discussed the professional world she lived in, and the insular world of churches. She was exceedingly well informed about developments around the world. The fact that Malaysian Christianity has people filled with such cultural curiosity and professional savvy bodes well.
There were young men preparing to be pastors while working to provide for their families, like one young man who is here from South Korea, or caring for parents, like another who was taking his mother for cancer treatments between classes and sermon preparation.
Most of the students were preparing for lay work, which also will be a tremendous source of strength for churches. Many lay people do not have the zeal to gain real skill in God’s Word. But these do, and they are succeeding.
It was hard to leave them today. I am energized by this level of dedication.
An Hour With a Hero
June 30th, 2010 § 1 Comment
by Matthew Raley
This afternoon I met a man who has planted many underground churches in a closed Asian nation. He is now in exile, permanently banned from his country.
Shielded from the intense sun in an outdoor restaurant, he bounces up to greet me. He is short, muscular, powerful. He throws his arms wide when he talks, and his voice is resonant.
He tells me stories of defiance of the government, and the resulting crackdown. There were beatings by the police. When he posted on the internet the names of those jailed, the government released them, but hired thugs to beat them up again. Some were hospitalized, and one nearly died.
This veteran believes open defiance is a mistake. Christians can achieve more by planting many churches quietly. His voice tightens when he talks about “extreme daring.”
I begin to understand his attitude as he describes his church planting effort, and its results. His work is fast, driven, urgent.
He dismisses the systems of some denominations. “They make someone wait too long to be a deacon. Six months they make them wait! Six months!” Six months after conversion.
He starts testing new believers in leadership right away, giving them small tasks and training them for larger ones. He strips them down to the bare essentials of church: the Word, song, the Lord’s supper, and baptism.
He sets them in a bare room — no lights, no fans, no chairs — and says, “Okay, let’s do church!” When someone stands up to get a hymnal, he says, “No, just sing a song you know.” When someone stands up to get a Bible, he says, “Let’s study the Bible without a Bible.”
His people memorize forty passages of scripture and forty songs so that they can do church empty-handed. “What if you’re in prison and they won’t let you have anything? How are you going to keep up your faith if you don’t meet with other believers?”
This man trains believers to advance the work without any resources. They do communion with water and a cookie if they have to. To baptize, they use barrels, or holes that they dig and line with plastic, or sewers.
Over the last few years, he has planted 5 churches outside his country among migrant workers, plus 3 outreach stations that cannot yet govern themselves. These ministries gain about 1,000 conversions among migrants every year, about 250 of whom persevere in the faith. As workers have returned home, they have planted 11 underground churches inside their closed nation.
This man is waging war. How do you prevail over a man who doesn’t have to be present to advance his work, and from whom you cannot take anything because he needs almost nothing?
Simple: you don’t prevail.
Remarks to Supporters of North Valley Christian Schools
May 26th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
by Matthew Raley
Here is the text of a speech I gave last Thursday, May 20th, at a luncheon for supporters of NVCS.
One of the first words a child learns is mine. As parents, we try to loosen a child’s grip on his stuff, mainly to stop the squabbling. We try to teach him another word, share.
But we Americans have an insight into that word mine. The first draft of the Declaration of Independence said that every person is endowed with “the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of property.” The more famous version that George III read, “pursuit of happiness,” only tells us more about what the founders thought of citizenship. A citizen is happiest—and does the most good—when he governs the property he owns.
James Madison wrote of our constitution that Americans have “an honorable determination . . . to rest all our political experiments on the capacity of mankind for self-government.”[1]
The founders believed that we could govern ourselves, which means America’s success of failure depends on whether her people understand the words mine and share.
What does self-government look like? Self-government happens when a person takes care both of his own property and what his community shares—not because he is told to do it, but because he knows he must.
Jane Jacobs gave us a good example in her 1961 classic, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. One day an alarming scene unfolded on the sidewalk across the street from Jacobs’ building in New York. A man was trying to get an 8-year-old girl to go along with him, and the girl was resisting. Jacobs wrote:
As I watched from our second-floor window, making up my mind how to intervene . . . , I saw it was not going to be necessary. From the butcher shop . . . had emerged the woman who, with her husband, runs the shop; she was standing within earshot of the man, her arms folded and a look of determination on her face. Joe Cornacchia, who . . . keeps the delicatessen, emerged about the same moment and stood solidly to the other side. Several heads poked out of the tenement windows above, one was withdrawn quickly and its owner reappeared a moment later in the doorway behind the man. Two men from the bar next to the butcher shop came to the doorway and waited. On my side of the street, I saw that the locksmith, the fruit man and the laundry proprietor had all come out of their shops and that the scene was also being surveyed from a number of windows besides ours. That man did not know it, but he was surrounded. Nobody was going to allow a little girl to be dragged off, even if nobody knew who she was.
Jacobs added, “I am sorry—sorry purely for dramatic purposes—to have to report that the little girl turned out to be the man’s daughter.”[2]
The people in that neighborhood knew the word mine.
Self-government happens when people invest in their own place, with their own money, time, and ingenuity. When they invest, they care. When they care, they budget, maintain, and guard.
But the people in Jane Jacobs’ neighborhood also knew the word share. Self-government is not done by loners. It’s the action of a community. All the owners on her street knew that they shared the sidewalk, that what happened on the sidewalk affected them, and that they were responsible for keeping it safe.
As a pastor, let me tell you what bothers me about our country today.
Many of us are vigilant over what is our own. We’re eager enough to assert the word mine against Washington, D. C. or Sacramento. But we are not vigilant enough over the property we share. Our communities are not governing themselves.
Consider the reality of our shared life as Christians. The two issues I’m going to talk about have brought heartache to everyone in this room. I’m discussing them not to stigmatize people, but to help us face problems we all share, and to tell you that there are powerful solutions.
The Barna Group has repeatedly found that evangelicals divorce at high rates. In its most recent study of this problem in 2008, 33% of the American adult population has had at least one divorce, and the same is true of 26% of evangelical adults. While the evangelical divorce rate is lower than the national average, it still shows that more than a quarter of people who profess to follow Christ have broken homes.
This statistic is more than a public relations black eye. When we consider what our divorce rate means in practical terms, our cultural weakness becomes alarming.
Divorced people with children are automatically under the thumb of the family legal system. They no longer control their schedules, their practice of parenting, or even, in extreme cases, their most basic interactions with their children. They are vulnerable to inspection by county officials, to restraining orders, and a stream of court dates.
About essential parts of their lives, they can no longer say mine.
Nor is divorce the end of our entanglements with the state.
Illegitimate births are common among evangelicals, as any pastor can attest. I haven’t been able to find specific studies of evangelicals in this regard, but I do not lack stories. The trials of Sarah Palin’s family are common among us, and Palin’s handling of her daughter’s pregnancy won her strong identification from evangelicals for this very reason.
But a child born out of wedlock is likely to end up under the indirect supervision of social workers, with a young parent, grandparents, and pastors often struggling to safeguard a Christian parenting ethic from official intrusion.
A hidden impact of divorce and illegitimacy in churches falls on grandparents—those crucial links in the transmission of values from one generation to the next.
Evangelicals in their fifties and sixties, who would normally be entering a time of greater freedom in life, are frequently raising their grandchildren. So the resources grandparents would otherwise put into their churches, they devote to their families in crisis. Further, they struggle to demonstrate godliness to grandchildren growing up amid the moral chaos of a wayward adult and the psychologized ethics of social workers.
All this can leave people in the prime of life heartsick.
For all practical purposes, then, a large proportion of evangelical families and their children are under the management of the state. The state’s system may be necessary: there are dangers to children during a divorce. The state’s workers often do the best they can to bring some order to children’s lives, and we should be grateful that there are Christians among them shining some light. But we have to face facts. Evangelical parents in this system are not as free to pass on their beliefs, even when they’re competent to do so.
Here’s the reality of our shared life.
If you have 400 people in your church, figure that 100 of them are (or have been) in the family court system. Their finances are almost entirely devoted to maintaining two households where there used to be one. And unless they have an unusually high personal income, they are not keeping up. Their emotional strength is spent trying to survive the strife and the loneliness. They have little time or energy to devote to their walk with the Lord.
100 people. Even when the economy is good. And the ripple effect spreads the weakness.
We have to be frank about our failure to govern ourselves and what that failure means. It means that the loss of American identity is not happening in Washington; it’s happening here in the tri-counties. The loss of the dignity of self-government is not Sacramento’s problem. It’s ours.
My parents have already decided who they’re voting for in 2012. The bumper sticker on their car says, “Reagan for President.”
In the stadium where he accepted the nomination for president in 1980, Ronald Reagan said, “At the heart of our message should be five simple familiar words. No big economic theories. No sermons on political philosophy. Just five short words: family, work, neighborhood, freedom, peace.”
He delivered on that vision of self-government, and his legacy has come to us. What have we done with it?
I can speak for our church, and I believe I can speak for everyone in this room. We are determined to govern what is our own, and also what we share.
We are not going to allow children to be dragged off into a godless system. We are not going to let children be labeled victims by a system that offers no hope. We’re not going to let adults suffer the trials of divorce or illegitimacy alone. What happens to the least of these, happens to us.
People in our region are coming out of their doorways to challenge what happens on our sidewalks. They are building the tools to reassert self-government, and our church is contributing three.
One tool our community needs is churches that know their business. We have decided that church time is Gospel time. It is not time for politics, or hot-button issues, or slick entertainment. Furthermore, church time is not therapy time, where we focus on our “issues.” The time we spend together in the name of Jesus Christ is devoted to him, to preaching his Word, and to exalting the transforming power of his grace.
Do this at your church. Recover the Church’s true business. It’s the Gospel.
Second, our community needs a tool for discipleship. The core of our ministry is called SoulCare. It puts believers from many churches alongside each other to be equipped with the Gospel. There is nothing revolutionary about it; it’s just hours of face-time in the Word of God. We see this ministry as a tool for self-government through the Gospel, the body of Christ doing its work.
More and more believers from many churches are being trained to equip others in the Gospel, and to counsel families in crisis. We don’t win them all. Sometimes we are a resource for those trying to be godly in the midst of family break-up. But over the last 4 years, 26 marriages have been rebuilt by God’s grace, many of them pulled back from the brink of divorce. That’s 26 families that are not governed by social workers, but that govern themselves in the power of Christ.
At your church, find ways to recover the power of Christ’s body. Release that power.
Third, as a church we are investing heavily in North Valley Christian Schools. For single parents and for grandparents who want their children to know who they are in Christ, to know that they come from the grace of God in Christ, and to know that they are headed toward the Kingdom of Christ, this school is a critical resource.
At NVCS, both children and parents find connection, a shared life, with other believers. Material, emotional, and spiritual needs are met by the body of Christ on a daily basis, simply because people like you have come out to govern our sidewalk.
Our church has entered into an agreement to share facilities with NVCS because we want every dollar in our ministries to have maximum impact. We support the schools with dollars, with leaders, with hours. We’re doing it because we must go beyond taking care of our own, to take care of what the larger community of believers shares.
Thank you for coming out of your doorway and reasserting the dignity of self-government. Let’s be the region that finds once again the meaning of the word ours.
[1] The Federalist, No. 39.
[2] Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), pp 38-39.
A Community’s Agony Over the Schatzes
March 24th, 2010 § 5 Comments
by Matthew Raley
Kenneth and Elizabeth Schatz pleaded not guilty last Thursday to charges of torture and murder in the death of their 7-year-old daughter Lydia. The D.A. cited an autopsy concluding that she died of “‘blunt force trauma’ over a period of hours on Feb. 5, which caused a breakdown of muscle tissue fatally damaging her kidneys and other vital organs.” The defense attorney said he is “exploring extensively … other explanations for the death of this child.”
For me this is not a news item or an abstract legal issue, but a regional agony.
I do not know the Schatzes. But I know and love many of their friends, a group that includes some of our church’s families. This wide circle of people is grieving for Lydia and for her surviving brothers and sisters, whose lives have been upended.
Friends of the Schatzes are also grieving for the parents, praying for them and trying to understand how they could have committed such crimes. These friends cannot match the picture of the Schatz home that has emerged in news reports with the family they thought they knew.
I can empathize with their sorrow, and I have no desire to add to it.
There is a larger group of local believers. The vast majority of Christians I know are sickened and enraged by Lydia’s death, and by the “not guilty” plea. They have no personal acquaintance with Kenneth and Elizabeth Schatz, and feel at liberty to vent.
It is tempting to hold one perspective as more pure than the other. Friends might feel that they’re maintaining love toward two sinners, no matter how extreme their sin. The wider community might feel that such love is twisted. Both perspectives have problems.
How should Christians conduct themselves in relation to the Schatz family? Some thoughts:
1. In their grief for the accused parents, the friends of Kenneth and Elizabeth Schatz are not defending or rationalizing child abuse. Anybody whose loved one has committed a crime knows the feelings of watching justice be done — understanding that it must be done, but also mourning over the personal losses. Friends have a right to grieve over this couple without their motives being impugned.
2. The community’s expressions of rage against the Schatzes are understandable but unhealthy. Comments that I have read on local news sites are frequently violent, profane, and hysterical. (If this describes you, don’t bother venting off-topic here. I am now moderating all comments.) The surviving Schatz children will eventually be exposed to the community’s rage against their mom and dad. The children can’t be shielded from it. Their grief will be long and complex, and they will not feel in the least comforted by the braying of a mob. Christians in particular should not join in. Justice is cool and deliberate for a reason.
3. I would urge friends of the Schatzes that this is not a moment for wishful thinking. Some may offer conspiracy theories about trumped-up election-year indictments or persecution of Christians in the media. These speculations blur the issue. The defense attorney’s suggestion that there could be a cause of death besides the beatings will stand or fall on evidence. But it in no way invalidates the claim that there were beatings. This grim reality, reportedly established by the autopsy, is not now in dispute. We have to face the horror of the abuse. The glare of media attention on it is right.
4. There is inevitably the foolish person who wants to find “the good that God is doing” through Lydia’s death. If you are this person, let me advise you as a pastor, and as a firm believer in Romans 8.28, that this is an excellent opportunity to keep your folly to yourself. Flippant applications of that verse are never a balm to those in mourning. There are times to grieve, to feel the bite of loss. This is a time for our whole community to feel the loss of a 7-year-old girl — a loss that will not be restored in this life. Grief is good for us.
Our hope for Lydia and for ourselves is not in some repair of this life, but in the redemption stored up in the next.
Michael Pearl’s Response To Critics
March 4th, 2010 § 10 Comments
by Matthew Raley
Here is Michael Pearl’s response to those who have been warning about his teachings: laughter. You’d never know from his post that a girl had been killed. This is all about him, apparently.
By the way, what’s up with this “our children” thing? Does he think he has millions of children?
You can read a devastating take-down of Pearl’s statement to the Paradise Post at TulipGirl, who has been doing serious work on this issue.
Is Michael Pearl Responsible For a Girl’s Death?
March 3rd, 2010 § 47 Comments
by Matthew Raley
A few weeks ago, a prayer request went out at church for a family whose child had died suddenly. We later learned that the unnamed family was that of Kevin and Elizabeth Schatz, now charged with the torture and murder of their 7-year-old adopted daughter Lydia.
The couple will enter pleas on March 18th.
Many of our people know the Schatzes personally through home school groups, so the story has already hit them hard. Could the couple really have done this? What could have motivated them?
But Butte County D.A. Mike Ramsey asserts a “direct connection” between Lydia’s killing and the teachings of Michael Pearl, raising the killing to another level. The story has been picked up by Salon, which had already run a critical examination of Michael and Debi Pearl in 2006.
Many of our people read the Pearls. Privately, I have been asked several times over the years about the Pearls’ teachings, and my answer has always been, “They’re authoritarians. Run away.” I give the same answer about Bill Gothard and Gary Ezzo, other child-rearing gurus. Since Lydia’s death, however, I have been looking more closely at the Pearls’ teaching, and I need to make my views public.
Before doing so, I want to be specific about where I think Michael Pearl’s responsibility lies in relation to Lydia’s death. Local law enforcement investigators and national journalists have not accused the Pearls of advocating child abuse, being careful to quote Pearl’s warnings against doing physical harm to children.
These critics are making a different argument, namely that Michael Pearl irresponsibly encourages abusers, even if the encouragement is unintentional.
I agree, and I want to show you that the encouragement toward abuse is in Pearl’s theology. His false gospel imposes mandates on parents that go far beyond what God requires.
1. Michael Pearl does not believe in the imputation of Adam’s sin to all human beings.
He writes, “When a descendent of Adam reaches a level of moral understanding (sometime in his youth) he becomes fully, personally accountable to God and has sin imputed to him, resulting in the peril of eternal damnation.” Pearl adds, “When man reaches his state of moral accountability, and, by virtue of his personal transgression, becomes blameworthy, his only hope is a work of grace by God alone.”
This seems like a minor quibble, but it is profound. The Bible’s teaching that all human beings have an inherited sin nature means that no human institution has the ability to purge sin and do away with guilt. Only Christ can change our nature. Throughout history, teachers consistently attack this doctrine in order to tell their followers, “If you put yourselves under my authority, you can learn the secret to getting rid of your sins.”
Pearl imposes on parents the mandate to form godliness in a child before the “age of accountability.” Pearl believes that parents have a direct role in saving children. The “hope” he offers in “a work of grace by God alone” is for those whose parents failed.
2. Michael Pearl believes that spanking delivers a child from guilt.
Because Pearl does not believe you inherit a sin nature, he articulates a new doctrine of salvation that is dependent on a parent’s will. In his article, “In Defense of Biblical Chastisement”, he writes,
When a child is bound in self-blame and low self-esteem, parents are not helpless. God has given them the gift of the rod. The rod can bring repentance, but it goes much deeper than that. The rod in the hands of a righteous authority will supply the child’s soul with that moment of judgment that he feels he so deserves. Properly applied, with instruction, it will absolve the child of guilt, cleanse his soul, and give him a fresh start through a confidence that all indebtedness is paid [my italics].
That simply annuls the atoning work of Jesus Christ. Notice that forgiveness is granted only on the basis of the punishment of the sinner, and that a human “righteous authority” is the source of this “gift.” “All indebtedness is paid,” Pearl says, not by Christ, but by the rod. No parent can believe this statement without also believing that he or she has the authority to cleanse a child of guilt.
Pearl goes much further:
To the child, a righteous parent is a surrogate god, representing the rule of law and the bar of justice. When the child is yet too young to fathom God, he is nonetheless able to relate to his parents in the same manner that he will later relate to God. The properly administered rod is restorative as nothing else can be. It is indispensable to the removal of guilt in your child. His very conscience (nature) demands punishment, and the rod supplies the needs of his soul, releasing him from his guilt and self-condemnation. It is the ultimate enforcer, preserving the child in authority and discipline until he is old enough to submit himself to The Eternal God.
These statements are the logical and inevitable application of his semi-Pelagian view of sin. Before the age of accountability, O parent, thou art a god.
(For another detailed treatment of Pearl’s teachings, cf this analysis.)
To spank a child as a reasoned limitation on his or her behavior is one thing. But to imagine that you are purging the child of the guilt of sin, and that the pain is psychologically purifying, is to cross into another rationale entirely. In the wrong mind, it forms the imperative to “give” more and more pain. Such a mind would ignore Pearl’s warnings against abuse, to be sure, but not necessarily his logic.
The news accounts of “quarter-inch plumbing supply line” sold by Pearl are chilling, but nowhere near as disturbing as the doctrine he sells.
The Political Role of Churches
February 24th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
by Matthew Raley
The religious right asserts that America must be turned back to biblical values through legislation and judicial decisions. It assumes that correcting the laws will free a godly citizenry to restore American culture. Thus, today’s social conservatism tends to be defined by what politicians will do.
Over a series of posts (starting here), I have rejected all three points.
Start with the assumption that evangelical Americans are godly, and therefore have the capacity to restore the nation. Nothing could be further from the truth. Evangelicals have shown little capacity even to restore their own churches, much less America.
If the assumption about a godly citizenry is mistaken, then the religious right’s whole strategy is flawed. Without citizens who actually follow Christ, the legislative and judicial changes sought by the religious right will not restore our culture.
Even further, what the religious right proposes is not conservatism.
Anglo-American traditionalism of the Burkean variety does not put up with abstract principles. Genuine social conservatism says, “The state must deal with the culture it actually governs, not the theoretical culture it desires.” The ethics and ways of the people rule the nation. This is not only the view of conservatives from Burke to Eliot, it is the basic view of the state taught in the Bible.
Conservatives know that healthy cultures change through strong mediatorial institutions, especially families and churches. Conservatives call them mediatorial because they stand between the individual and the government. These institutions pass on and enforce ethics. They nurture relationships that mold people through influence rather than punishment. If the state tries to change a culture by force — and the law is force — it will only twist people’s ways.
In this analysis, the ruinous effect of political liberalism has not been to impose sinful patterns on a citizenry that would never otherwise choose them, but to weaken the mediatorial institutions that, for evangelicals, pass on the Gospel. The pastor has been replaced by the therapist, the church by the welfare agency, and the family by the social worker.
I agree that our nation needs to return to the biblical worldview. But it will never do so until those who profess the name of Christ actually follow him, and follow him institutionally. If evangelicals want a political impact, they need to do what the founders of America envisioned: they need to govern themselves.
Therefore, I see two political goals for churches in American society.
1. Churches and families must campaign and vote for the preservation of their liberties. Aggressively, they should make the case that freedom of association is foundational to a healthy, peaceful society. No faction should be allowed to impose its principles on the consciences of others. The approach has complications. But if we base our arguments about specific issues on this principle, we will find broader agreement, and we will preserve our local spheres of influence.
2. Churches must not only grow, they must govern themselves with the Gospel. They should stop trying to be malls, and return to their natural mandate, both from the New Testament and from Western culture at large, of being strong mediatorial institutions. If churches return to the calling Christ has given them, a cultural and political impact will follow.
The religious right’s populist tactic of blaming elites for our cultural problems is tempting, but it is not conservatism. Conservative Christians must come to grips with the fact that the departure of the nation from a biblical worldview is not a failure of the federal government, but of self-government. If we govern ourselves once again, there can be a return of our culture to Christianity.
The Colossians 1.28 Plan, Concluded
February 10th, 2010 § 1 Comment
by Matthew Raley
The tired line on ministry is that it’s not our job to produce results, only to be faithful. Unfortunately, I hear this most often from people who agree with me theologically.
I am convinced that God alone produces spiritual life. I hold and teach the reformed understanding of salvation, that Jesus Christ has purchased a finished redemption for his people, and that he sovereignly works out this redemption in their lives. This includes opening our eyes to his truth and enabling us to believe him.
Life is God’s alone to give.
But some pastors in this doctrinal camp, when discussing the practice of ministry, misapply these truths. They’re too quick to explain a lack of spiritual growth in their churches as God’s problem, not theirs. Many failings of craft can be responsible for people not growing in Christ. If a pastor doesn’t make truths clear but masks them in technical language, people will not grow. If he purposefully opens the Bible to both mind and emotions, life will blossom in most.
The sovereignty of God should not be twisted into an excuse for inattentive, self-satisfied workmanship.
God has given congregations tasks to do. He declares that he will give spiritual life in Christ through specific methods, like preaching. Devoting ourselves to these tasks with fervency is at the heart of what I am calling the Colossians 1.28 plan. I am so crass as to call it a business plan: we can direct resources into this toil and expect a return on the investment, namely, maturity in Christ. We should be bold in this expectation because God has declared that he is in this business.
So, I have laid out five outcomes for which we should toil (here and here), sketching the nature of the resources that need to be directed to toward them. I believe that, without these outcomes, church life is mere words.
Here is the final outcome I see as essential:
6. Public integrity in spiritual governance.
Spiritual governance consists of the actions and systems by which elders help restore people from specific sins. Jesus teaches his process for restoring people in Matthew 18.10-35. The purpose of confronting a sinful action or pattern is to arrive at forgiveness and repentance. The purpose is not to punish (which is why I increasingly feel the common label “church discipline” is inaccurate).
When spiritual governance is effective, the average church member understands his or her responsibility to keep relationships clear of breaches, lies, and grudges, doing everything possible to give and seek forgiveness. In this atmosphere, there is an informal ethic that limits gossip. Individuals seek counsel how to resolve their conflicts respectfully. Personal conflicts, in the vast majority of cases, do not break out into public feuds.
I am not talking about theory. In ten years here at Orland, this is the ethic the congregation has demonstrated over and over. Our life together has never been without conflict. But we have seen continuous restoration.
This is long-term, constant, exhausting work. In Orland, it has the been fruit of many senior pastors striving against bitterness over many decades. I teach on this issue regularly, and the elders are constantly advising people about conflict resolution. The counseling and discipleship systems I described last week are essential.
Because churches have committed so many resources to entertainment, they have no time or energy left for this labor. They simply are not governing in the way Christ called them. Pastors are continually “putting out fires” rather than teaching people how to keep from starting them.
The outcome of governance has to be public integrity. Part of this integrity is the leadership’s record of discretion and achievement in helping people be restored to each other in Christ. Another part of it is simple justice. Known sins that go unaddressed, hasty judgments, inaccurate public statements, vendettas, and ignorance of Scriptural application will harm the leadership’s public integrity. The aim of governance to build a confidence, even amid many imperfections and mistakes, that leaders are going to initiate restoration in appropriate ways, at the right levels.
The word for this is trust. Without it, the whole spiritual life of the church degrades into mere words.
Here is the heart of what I have been saying over the past few months.
Local churches have been fooling themselves that they can accomplish God’s business by toiling in politics and entertainment. As a result of this confused planning, churches are closing. Let churches toil at God’s business again, and we will see amazing results.
A final thought about how this relates to genuine conservatism next week.
The Colossians 1.28 Plan, Continued
February 4th, 2010 § 1 Comment
by Matthew Raley
I believe churches need to have a business plan to reverse their decline, a plan that directs resources toward the New Testament goal of moving people to maturity in Christ (Colossians 1.28-29).
The reason local churches are in decline is that they have confused goals, and incoherent business plans. They direct resources toward activities and programs that contribute nothing to a person’s spiritual maturity — even detract from it. Consequently they get zero New Testament return on investment.
Last post, I gave three outcomes that a church business plan needs to produce. I think we either “toil” to produce this kind of maturity in Christ, “struggling with all his energy that he powerfully works” within us, or else admit that our church life is nothing but words.
1. Submission of heart-and-mind to the Bible. Evangelical churches say they want this outcome, but mere pep talks will never produce it. Significant resources have to go to preaching. A pastor has to labor in scholarship, and in honing his rhetorical craft.
2. An individual, daily practice of worship. Again, churches say they want this. But ask leaders what operations they have put in place to produce it and the response tends to be vague.
3. Obedience to the fifth commandment. Many evangelicals don’t want to honor older people. There is little emphasis on it, much less any clear operational thinking on how to teach it, much less any resources devoted to it. Indeed, I’ve never heard an evangelical leader say that honoring parents is a decisive part of nurturing healthy congregational life.
I also promised additional outcomes. And here are two:
4. Daily faith in God financially.
The people I know who are gaining Christ-like maturity are trusting God economically. I have found that people who want godliness without growing in their practice of work, giving, and spending restraint are deluded.
People must be apprenticed in trusting God with money, and this can’t be done solely in a classroom. Trusting God economically is learned through counseling, or through a trusted friendship, or through that great but neglected teacher, an employer. I am convinced that churches need to become junctions of faith, work, and entrepreneurship.
Much of our discipleship in Orland actually happens on the job. Our leaders invest their personal time and finances heavily in job creation. Many of our people, some profoundly weak in crucial skills, have been trained by our employers spiritually. These employers do not put up with excuses. The process takes hard, daily, purposeful, prayerful work. It can only be done by employers who believe Christ transforms people.
A promising young guy named Matt moved to Orland without a job several years ago to attend our church with his new wife. We were just starting WestHaven Assisted Living, and our hard-nosed-employer-in-chief, Wade, offered Matt a job. After a few short years, Matt is a skilled manager, churchman, husband, and father. He is a self-controlled director his time and money, and a multi-generational asset to this community. He will tell you that God’s power working through his boss is a major factor in his growth.
Building a community to provide this kind of organic discipleship costs money, hundreds of hours of paid and volunteer time, expertise, and requires a willingness to say no to many decent but ultimately frivolous activities that dissipate energy. It is also slow going. But …
Return on investment: By apprenticing people economically, the church gains disciplined volunteer workers and generous financial givers. Capacity for ministry expands here.
5. Gospel-focused spirituality within the trials of divorce.
Divorce is today what slavery was in the 1st century: a common form of servitude for Christians. But if a church uses its resources wisely, it can toil in the power of the Spirit and succeed at producing godly people even amid the emotional, sexual, and financial losses of divorce.
To accomplish this, a church must reject the lie that divorced people are hopeless, and believe that Christ will use them to build his Kingdom. A church must deploy staff both to offer intensive crisis counseling and to train people in the congregation to equip each other biblically. Orland began putting resources into this kind of equipping system years ago, even putting one of our women through a M.A. program in biblical counseling. The work is slow and costly, but …
Return on investment: we have a growing team of lay disciple-makers, a documented crisis intervention system that has successfully interacted with welfare and court systems, and a lengthening roster of saved marriages. And we are a small church.
More outcomes next week.
Reverse the Decline of the Local Church
January 28th, 2010 § 2 Comments
by Matthew Raley
As we’ve seen over several weeks (starting here), three trends contribute to churches’ loss of mission:
1. Politicization: the alliance between evangelicals and the religious right has confused the purpose of church life. Many now view churches as centers of political activism to “redeem the culture.”
2. Media dependence: Many churches are vendors for conferences, videos, and books from parachurch organizations. Such churches do not have a mission developed locally, but purchase a mission from Focus on the Family or Rick Warren. This trend has degraded relationships, as media-focused living always does.
3. Weakened gospel: Many evangelicals are hocking the messages of political change and personal fulfillment, which, while salable, are not the message of the New Testament. The Gospel of the apostles is about the resurrection of human beings from the dead in the righteousness of Jesus Christ. This message can only be communicated effectively by a church with profound and stubborn focus. No focus, no Gospel.
A business plan for local churches has emerged from these trends. Attract a lot of new people. Give them activities that are fun and broadly Christian. Try to motivate them toward believing in Jesus.
Like any business plan, this one says that investment will yield a return. The investments required for attracting masses of people — in snap-crackle-and-pop media, high-energy staff, well-designed activities that people want to join — will yield maturity in Christ over time. That return on investment will then power the church into more growth.
Three problems.
This business plan is expensive in both time and money. Furthermore, this expensive plan has been designed to serve a confused mission. Finally, it does not deliver the promised Christian maturity. The failure to deliver a return is now a documented fact, published by, among other sources, the eminence grise of church growth, Willow Creek.
In business terms, investment plus unprofitability equals closure. Churches are closing because they operate on poor business plans designed to support a confused mission.
The issues are both spiritual and practical. The goal of the New Testament has to be restored in its brilliant clarity: move people toward completeness in Christ (e.g. Colossians 1.24-29). The spiritual requirement for this restoration is depth of experience in relationship with Jesus Christ and his teaching. Leaders must have this depth, and they must bring congregations along.
But the practical requirement is just as important. If there is no business plan to advance the New Testament mandate, then church life deteriorates to mere words. How is your church going to move people toward completeness in Christ? What resources of money, personnel, and time are you going to devote to the task corporately? And how are you going to measure the return on that investment?
I believe that no business plan to direct the investment of church resources will yield a return today unless it produces the following outcomes:
1. Submission of heart-and-mind to the Bible.
Churches need to devote money and time to the exposition of Scripture from original languages at weekly worship. This teaching must be effective enough to spur one-on-one discussion of the Scriptures among the congregation. The scholarship must be fresh, the applications specific, and the presentation excellent. The financial cost is the salary of a preaching pastor. The time involved is also costly: few educators have to produce brand-new material every single week.
Return on investment: the deepening and stimulation of the congregation’s intellectual and spiritual life. (Don’t underestimate how important this is: a community needs a clear agenda.)
2. An individual, daily practice of worship.
Individuals need to be apprenticed in the spiritual disciplines. This requires a financial investment in staff and in lay leadership training so that the intensive mentoring is being done by lots of people. Here, too, the time invested is costly: apprenticeship is about face-time with individuals and small groups.
Return on investment: intensifying the vitality of people’s relationship with God and experience of the Gospel. This refreshes a person’s motivation to serve God, which in church life is the first thing to dry up.
3. Obedience to the fifth commandment.
This requires the programmatic decision to mix generations intentionally rather than segregate them. If there is no reverence cultivated in younger people for elders, church life is mere words. This should not cost a lot of money that a church wouldn’t otherwise spend. It need not cost any. But it does cost time in focused planning.
Return on investment: Reverence for your elders refreshes motivations again with love and regard for prized relationships, and it establishes a natural form of ethical accountability.
There are several more crucial outcomes I’ll outline next week, along with specific methods we have found useful in Orland toward these ends.
But I’ll sign off with this: criticizing the religious right, media-driven culture, or the church growth movement is not enough to reverse the local church’s decline. Dippy stewardship is not overcome by preaching or prayer alone, but by stark realism. And that means taking a hard look at business plans.
