The Empty Tomb and the Empty Easter
March 25th, 2012 § 2 Comments
by Matthew Raley
For American evangelicals, the resurrection of Jesus Christ seems to have become a tall tale. We retell the story with gusto, but by Easter afternoon the resurrection fades to legend.
Evangelicals historically saw Christ’s rising from the dead as the volcanic core of the Christian life. He conquered death not just by rising, but also by pouring his life into his followers. To a person was hostile to God, the essence of spiritual death, Christ restored love. He replaced rebellion with willing obedience. Christ’s presence was the hot energy that transformed a believer’s motivations.
In other words, evangelicals used to emphasize Jesus’s teaching in the Bible about the new birth, that human beings must have a resurrection of God-loving energy and that nothing else can save us.
In the late 20th century, however, evangelicals’ concept of the new birth degenerated. The phrase “born again” came to describe a ticket to heaven, eternal life guaranteed by a single prayer. We focused on getting people to pray that prayer, and with some success. Many got their ticket.
But we had trouble motivating ourselves to spiritual vitality. Those who prayed that prayer — who in fact prayed it repeatedly, grasping for security with God — were rarely taught that the new birth radically changed their identities. We generalized about “a relationship with Jesus” as if it were a life-upgrade, a fix for whatever made us unhappy, rather than life itself.
So Christ’s resurrection became a mere story.
I meet countless believers who know that Christ’s power is not extinct, but who only see glimpses of it. The trivial new birth taught by churches has drained their vitality.
I hear three such trivialized versions of the Christian life.
Many believers describe being born again as a cathartic emotional high, a personal, authentic experience that gives meaning to life. Following Christ to them means striving to recapture the high — and failing. Their church has taught them existentialism with the name of Jesus attached on a post-it note. No one should be expected to build his life on such sand.
Others see the Christian life as maintaining a good family: striving to be a good wife or husband, striving to keep bad influences out of the home, striving to raise good children — and failing. These believers have been taught moralism. Week after week in church, they have heard five steps to good communication, seven steps to good time management, and a wearying list of other “practical” suggestions for getting their act together. Christ’s role in their spiritual life is to forgive their accumulating sins. And that’s his only role.
Still others describe the Christian life as activism. Many older evangelicals strive to recapture America’s political system and restore the culture they once knew. Younger evangelicals, reacting against their elders, often strive for progressive causes. But political striving fails too. These believers have been taught different forms of ye olde throne-and-altar religion, that Christ builds his kingdom through governments. Christ role for them is to get the right people in office.
These forms of striving — existential, moral, and political — have three things in common. Each replaces Christ with an idol, a totem of sanctified obsessions. Each fails to supply Christ’s power, leaving the soul dessicated. And each consigns Christ’s resurrection to legend: an inspirational diversion from the cares of life, but not ultimately relevant to our pressing work.
For evangelicals now, the most important thing about Christianity seems to be our responsibility to solve our own problems. Some dress that message up in therapeutic lingo. Others now supplement it with a grab-bag of medieval mystic practices. But it’s the same old bad news: “God helps those who help themselves.”
Churches must restore the emphasis on genuine power. Christ is risen. In him we also have been made alive.
I notice that discouraged believers still distinguish between the follies of churches and the power of God. In discouragement, they persistently hope in Christ, knowing that his subterranean heat remains fierce even if the ground looks cold.
They should take comfort. Easter is not empty.
Gingrich and Social Conservatives
January 22nd, 2012 § 8 Comments
by Matthew Raley
The victory of Newt Gingrich in South Carolina puts evangelicals and other social conservatives at a crossroads. Gingrich by any measure is morally equal to Bill Clinton, upon whom social conservatives released so much rhetorical lava in the 1990s. Yet one of the GOP’s most traditionalist states has just told its delegates to vote for Gingrich at the convention.
The message is hard to misunderstand. South Carolina Republicans could have voted for three family men whose private morality is unquestioned. Ron Paul is one. Mitt Romney lives the way social conservatives say public men should live. His pro-life credentials are weak, but no weaker than George H. W. Bush’s were. Rick Santorum also walks the family walk, and has the additional advantage of being publicly acclaimed by evangelical leaders at a summit in Texas.
No deal. It’s Gingrich.
According to exit polls, Gingrich won almost every voter category, including independents. Women favored him 38% to Romney’s 29%. Married people favored him over Romney 41% to 28%. Gingrich won both “somewhat” and “very” conservative voters by large margins. He swept evangelicals with 44%. Romney and Santorum each took 21% of evangelicals, meaning that even their combined vote wouldn’t have beaten Gingrich.
The conclusion is inescapable: the people who wanted President Clinton removed, and who only recently heaved Mark Sanford (R) from the governor’s office for his notorious adultery, just said that adultery doesn’t matter in Gingrich’s case.
The hypocrisy cannot be healed by excuses such as:
1. Christianity is really about forgiveness.
Rick Perry used the line when he endorsed Gingrich. And, to be sure, there’s something in this forgiveness thing. But some evangelicals in the 90s, notably Tony Campolo, tried to alert evangelicals to the gospel’s potential for President Clinton, and got the smack-down. Is forgiveness only for Republicans?
2. There is a vast left-wing conspiracy that uses the politics of personal destruction.
Yes, the ABC interview with Gingrich’s ex-wife was transparently an attempt to sway the South Carolina primary. It was too exquisitely timed. But, when the words were “vast right-wing conspiracy,” social conservatives scoffed.
3. The accusations against President Clinton were never about sex, but about his perjury.
Yes, the impeachment process was about perjury. But what really bothered social conservatives at the time was Bill Clinton’s cultural significance. He was not merely a 1960s liberal, but a 1960s libertine. He represented the triumph of moral relativism and the mainstreaming of sexual immorality. Or so they said. Why not Gingrich? Why doesn’t his behavior equally symbolize the decline of sexual ethics? Symbolize it more?
Bottom line: social conservatives in Bob Jones country voted for Gingrich because they think he can win. And that’s always the bottom line in politics, left and right.
I do not believe Clinton’s or Gingrich’s transgressions tell us much about American culture, in the 1990s or today. In fact, public presidential immorality has been worse in the past. Grover Cleveland assumed responsibility for an illegitimate child in 1884, going on to serve two terms as president. The public shame of such politicians is just the continuing story of power. For the story of American culture, we have to examine what ordinary people do.
I’m one of many pastors have been arguing for years that the evangelical political machine is wrong both about the gospel and politics. Those who believe we can take back our culture through political means, and who have been selling us politicians for the last 25 years, have yet to show one cultural transformation. They keep stumbling over their spin. They have failed to understand that the political process rarely shapes culture, but is culture’s slave.
The only hope for transforming our nation is for evangelicals to bring the gospel of Jesus Christ to people’s hearts. When we get our message clear again, we will see God change lives, and our culture will change as a result. Pastors are doing this with leaders of both parties, choosing to see them as men and women who need counsel, healing, and repentance rather than as enemies who should be crushed. Leaders like Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich. If followers of Christ never said another word about pro-family policies and spoke only of the restoring power of Christ through his death and resurrection, we would be amazed at the results.
The power-game will always be with us. It’s past time for us to choose Christ instead.
God’s Redemptive Justice
April 26th, 2011 § 5 Comments
by Matthew Raley
Ross Douthat made a trenchant observation in his New York Times column on Easter Sunday. “The doctrine of hell . . . assumes that our choices are real, and, indeed, that we are the choices that we make. The miser can become his greed, the murder can lose himself inside his violence, and their freedom to turn and be forgiven is inseparable from their freedom not to do so.”
The idea of divine justice, that God renders a verdict on our choices and that a guilty verdict demands punishment, is being revised.
Many evangelicals are now saying that we must discard such old notions. They argue that God’s every action is redemptive. Because the doctrine of eternal, conscious punishment in hell assumes a punitive wrath in God that has no redemptive motivation, the doctrine is inconsistent with God’s nature.
Gregory Boyd (discussing annihilationism) says, “Consider that in the traditional view, the wicked are not being punished to learn something. There’s nothing remedial about their torment. Rather, God keeps them in existence for the sole purpose of having them experience pain.”
Modernists made similar arguments more than a century ago. Old notions of justice as payback are barbaric, and Western civilization has outgrown such primitive ideas. Hell thus belongs to the lower rungs of humanity’s evolution.
Is it the case that redemptive mercy is central to God’s character, and does this characteristic invalidate the idea of hell?
Let’s probe the word redemption. The Greek word is lutron, which refers to the ransom price for slaves or captives. There will be no release until the price is paid. Jesus, speaking about the key to his Lordship, says that he came to serve by giving his life as the redemption price for many (Mark 10.35-45).
Another word that expresses a similar idea is propitiation. Paul teaches that God made Christ’s blood to be the “propitiation,” the appeasement of God’s justice, that sinners receive by faith (Romans 3.21-26). Paul also states the reason God made this appeasement in blood: “It was to show his righteousness at the present time, so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.” That is, God’s justice is demonstrated by his paying the price incurred by sin.
Redemptive mercy is indeed central to God’s nature. But to call God’s nature redemptive without reference to the purchase price is to talk nonsense. God does not do “remedial” sentences as a way to satisfy his justice. When he shows mercy to a sinner, he purchases the individual out of death into life.
In other words, Christ’s death on the cross was redemptive because the death was entirely punitive. In God’s plan the cross was not a sympathy-generating symbol or an attention-getting drama. It was the final propitiation of God’s wrath. It paid the ransom.
No payment, no mercy. Full payment, full pardon.
The argument from God’s mercy that many evangelicals are now using against the traditional doctrine of hell can also be used — indeed, has been used — to attack Christ’s atonement for sin. Modernist theological liberals have long preached that the cross couldn’t have been about something so primitive as payment. The cross is tragic blood-poetry to them.
I have never been impressed with modernism’s treasured fantasy of cultural progress. Today’s notion of remedial justice is founded on the lie that sin is not truly destructive of human life. Believing lies like this is not a sign of evolutionary refinement, but of degradation. Sin is destructive, and its deadly consequences cry out for recompense. The fact that we are all under sentence only makes the urgency of the cross more intense.
Douthat cites a contemporary story of sin, the fictional life of Tony Soprano, who rejects one opportunity after another to turn from his life of violence. “‘The Sopranos’ never suggested that Tony was beyond forgiveness. But, by the end, it suggested that he was beyond ever genuinely asking for it.”
Rob Bell’s notorious question about whether Gandhi is in hell is fair enough, says Douthat. “But there’s a question that should be asked in turn: Is Tony Soprano really in heaven?”
The Pantheon’s Embrace
April 19th, 2011 § 5 Comments
by Matthew Raley
The Romans achieved cultural durability not through military force, but through the embrace of every god in their empire. They appropriated Greek culture wholesale, and affirmed the other traditions they conquered. While their broad piety was generous toward foreign gods, the generosity was motivated by shrewdness. If a conquered city could keep its gods, and if Rome could endow those gods with cosmopolitan nobility, then the city would be less resistant to control.
As a tool of empire, the pantheon works really well. Better than armies.
Time, the American century’s literary temple, gave its blessing to Rob Bell last week in the form of a cover story. Author Jon Meacham is both a journalistic eminence (the former editor of Newsweek) and a serious observer of our religious life. To whatever spiritual trend he devotes his keyboard, there is a higher order of national attention. The controversy over Bell’s teachings about hell might have remained a matter of small interest to non-evangelicals, but not anymore.
I’ll write another post about Bell’s book, Love Wins. I don’t want to examine his doctrine based on the blast of writing for and against him. Also, I won’t draw any conclusions about Bell’s teachings based on Meacham’s piece. The analysis belongs to Meacham, not Bell.
My interest here is in the Time artifact itself: how Time presents Bell, how Meacham frames the theological issues, and what sort of embrace is being offered to evangelicals by the American pantheon.
How does Time present Bell?
He is a rock star. The photo of him is edgy. Meacham describes him as “a charismatic, popular and savvy pastor with a following.” The message in this package seems to be, “Don’t mess with Bell. He’s way beyond other evangelicals in style. We embrace him.”
How does Meacham frame the theological issues?
Meacham treats heaven and hell seriously, being careful to say that Bell only claims to question theological rigidity, but also pointing out the implications of Bell’s ideas. Of Bell’s suggestion that everyone may end up in heaven, Meacham asks, “If heaven, however defined, is everyone’s ultimate destination in any event, then what’s the incentive to confess Jesus as Lord in this life?” Meacham accurately says that Bell is “more at home” within the “expansive liberal tradition” of Harry Emerson Fosdick.
R. Albert Mohler notes, “This may mark the first time any major media outlet has underlined the substantial theological issues at stake.”
So, hat-tip to Meacham.
What sort of embrace is being offered to evangelicals?
The American pantheon is opening the front door wide and proclaiming, “All ye who are weary of theological rigidity, come unto me and I will give you rest.”
The invitation is pointed. Meacham’s theological literacy has the effect of posing a clear choice to followers of Christ: keep your father’s Christianity (with no blessing from Time), or drop that traditionalism and be sprinkled with the holy water of sophistication. Bell’s Christianity is “less judgmental, more fluid, open to questioning the most ancient assumptions.” Adopting Bell’s attitude will get evangelicals the “seat at the table” they have coveted.
Further, the invitation is backed by power — the power of perceived cultural inevitability. Meacham asks, “Is Bell’s Christianity … on an inexorable rise?” Then he quotes Bell himself: “I have long wondered if there is a massive shift coming in what it means to be a Christian. Something new is in the air.” Whatever that quote means, it at least signals that Bell is using March-of-Progress inertia to advance his ideas.
The heavily implied victory of the New stands behind Time‘s invitation to evangelicals. You know you can’t hold out forever. Bell is a plausible enough theologian for you and for us. Let us embrace you and be done with it.
The reason Jesus never entered the Roman pantheon, of course, was that his exclusive claims invalidated all rival gods and goddesses, and threatened the durability of Rome’s culture. The Jesus of the New Testament was never amenable to broad, cosmopolitan pieties. If he were turned into a statue, an abstracted symbol of Goodness, then he would have fit nicely. But 1st century Christians understood that accepting the pantheon’s blessing was a surrender to imperial control, and that the real Jesus did not need the emperor’s permission to rule.
This is Bell’s moment. He mounts a rostrum of significant cultural authority, and what he does with this moment tells what he believes most deeply. Is Christ alone the Savior? From what exactly does He save us? The American pantheon has always been willing to embrace Jesus, so long as Jesus’ followers do not deny the other gods their place.
What is Rob Bell’s creed?
Book Review: Colors of God
October 13th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
by Matthew Raley
Congregational life among evangelicals is changing across the United States and Canada. For several decades, innovators have been challenging the way churches worship, preach, and structure themselves. The new book, Colors of God: Conversations About Being the Church, is another perspective that seeks to be innovative.
The list of problems in churches is familiar.
For starters, preaching has become ineffective. What pastors talk about either seems of little consequence, or seems rooted in small-minded bombast. And that’s when the preaching is comprehensible at all.
Also, community has deteriorated. Churches become busy without producing deep change in people’s lives. Believers complain about the shallowness of church relationships, or about constant bickering. Most worrisome, there is a sense of unreality about interactions at church, a sense that we can’t deal honestly with our failings and that church isn’t safe.
Deeper, Christians are paralyzed by guilt. The weight of secret sins, the anxiety of paying lip-service to “values” without really knowing what those values entail, the general sense that God is displeased and angry, have all conspired to produce the opposite of what the Gospel promises — joy and thankfulness.
Colors of God is written by three men who started a church called neXus in Abbotsford, BC. Randall Mark Peters, Dave Phillips, and Quentin Steen have been influenced by the Emerging church movement in the areas of how to preach, how build community, and how to deal with the moralism of today’s evangelicals.
The book’s strong point is honesty. The authors are transparent about their struggles, both emotionally and intellectually, and gracious in describing how they believe churches are broken. I found many points to admire in their prescriptions. Their emphasis on God’s grace, and their clear doctrinal understanding of it, are indeed the antidote for evangelicals’ guilty consciences.
But I found the book unreadable.
I think the authors’ decision to print, in effect, a transcript of a round-table discussion emptied the book of drive. Their representation of aspects of church life with four different colors, far from clarifying their points, required too much explanation. It seems to me that a book needs both analytical and narrative logic to propel the reader to the end. And this reader did not make it. The organization of the book seemed both fussy and murky.
And to some extent, this toying with presentational niceties as a way of expressing values is emblematic of the evangelical malaise. Pastors are forever worrying about what’s wrong with “preaching.” The fact that most preachers couldn’t give a clear, compelling public address on any subject should figure into the analysis somewhere.
If evangelicals are going to strengthen their churches, at some point they will have to regain enduring competencies. Colors of God has some contributions to make on that score, contributions that would be brighter in a book not burdened with the pretense of being a transcript.
Are We About To See an “Awakening?” [Yawn]
October 6th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
by Matthew Raley
The term awakening is important to American evangelicals — and ought to become more important. It refers to periods of spiritual renewal, of which churches are in desperate need.
So I was not surprised to find the word associated with Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” rally, and the formation of his Black Robe Regiment. One of the regiment’s websites announces that it is “awakening the Christian community.” Another is more specific: “The time has come that we must now arise and awaken to the danger of this hyper-progressive agenda that so permeates every aspect of our political, legal, and educational systems.”
The term moves in mysterious ways, its wonders to perform. “Awakening” gets picked up by various Beck enthusiasts as a focus of their hopes.
Here is one pastor about the “evening of prayer and spiritual renewal” Beck hosted at the Kennedy Center on August 27th, the eve of the big rally: “I’m telling you tonight was like the beginning of a Revival for our country with Asians, Latinos, African-Americans and people from all walks of life singing praise songs and calling upon God to restore our Nation . . . .” The pastor concludes, “Tomorrow, I pray will begin the next great awakening in America.”
The next great awakening. There seems to be some confusion.
“Great awakening” is a phrase applied to two periods in American history. The First Great Awakening occurred in the 1740s, the Second from 1800 to roughly 1830.
Here’s the problem: Beck’s regiment is modeling its awakening not on those periods, but on the Revolutionary War period (1775-83). That is a generation after the First and about a generation before the Second Great Awakenings. No one classifies the Revolution as a period of spiritual revival. Quite the reverse.
Iain H. Murray, in his study Revival and Revivalism (Banner of Truth Trust, 1994), summarizes (p 74), “With the possible exception of Western Pennsylvania, there seem to have been no areas where there was general revival during the years of the War of Independence . . . . In most of the country there was evident spiritual decline as political and military events dominated public attention.”
Murray quotes an observation from Robert Semple, who was fourteen when the war was won in 1783. Semple said that with liberty came “leanness of soul” (p 76).
This chill to their religious affections might have subsided with the war, or perhaps sooner, if there had not been subsequent occurrences which tended to keep them down. The opening a free trade by peace served as a powerful bait to entrap professors who were in any great degree inclined to the pursuit of wealth. Nothing is more common than for the increase of riches to produce a decrease of piety. Speculators seldom make warm Christians. With some exceptions the declension was general throughout the State [of Virginia]. The love of many waxed cold. Some of the watchmen fell, others stumbled, and many slumbered at their posts.
Note that last sentence describing Virginian pastors. That would be the original Black Robe Regiment — falling, stumbling, slumbering.
The spiritual drought lasted so long, according to Semple (Murray, p 78), that it “induced many to fear that the times of refreshing would never come.”
At this moment in our nation’s life, pastors need to know their jobs. The surest way to freeze congregations in self-righteousness is to go soldiering in the populist militias. Churches are populated with sinners who have trampled the holiness of God, and whose only hope is that the Jesus Christ whose name they have claimed will recognize them on the last day.
I fear we are not on the edge of an awakening, but inhaling the fumes of stupefication.
Glenn Beck’s Rally For Religion
September 1st, 2010 § 3 Comments
by Matthew Raley
Last Saturday’s headline at the New York Times pretty much said it all: “At Lincoln Memorial, a Call for Religious Rebirth.”
Glenn Beck aims to unite evangelicals and Mormons spiritually using generalized pietistic language to make America more religious. According to the Times: “’Something that is beyond man is happening,” Mr. Beck told the crowd, in what was part religious revival and part history lecture. ‘America today begins to turn back to God.’”
Several features of that statement strike me.
For starters, Beck does not say what is happening that is “beyond man.” Indeed, his second statement undermines that portentous claim: The nation’s repentance begins “today,” with Beck’s “Restoring Honor” rally, powered by high celebrity wattage and stimulated by plenty of free media. The event, whatever it was, came entirely “from man,” and was not in any sense “beyond man.”
Further, Beck’s use of the idea of repentance is safely generalized. “America,” Beck says, the nation corporately, turns back to God. The populist implications are clear: we who already follow “God” have gathered, and those other people who do not follow “God” would do well to pay attention.
Even further, the repentance is vague because the “God” to whom “America” is turning is a squishy sort of being. Beck appeals to us to pray to this God on our knees in front of our children. This God drops giant sandbags on Beck’s head, apparently. But does this God forgive sinners? Did he give his Son in an atoning death to save them? Is it this God’s sole purpose to build an eternal kingdom for His Son that is categorically greater than America? Is this, in other words, the God who revealed himself to all in the Bible?
Or is this the God who invites us to be initiated into one secret teaching after another under the strict guidance of a prophet in Utah, whose revelations continue to add to the good but insufficient work of Jesus Christ? Is he the God of the gnostics?
Those devoted to mere religiosity won’t care. But those devoted to the Gospel should.
Ross Douthat in the Times nailed what went on at the rally with his usual perceptiveness.
Now more than ever, Americans love leaders who seem to validate their way of life. This spirit of self-affirmation was at work in evangelicals’ enduring support for Bush, in the enthusiasm for the Dean campaign among the young, secular and tech-savvy, and now in the devotion that Palin inspires among socially conservative women. The Obama campaign raised it to an art form, convincing voters that by merely supporting his candidacy, they were proving themselves cosmopolitan and young-at-heart, multicultural and hip.
Beck’s Mormonism blends in well with the lifestyle of religiosity that the rally sought to affirm, and the evangelicals he woos always seem to be desperate for someone to affirm them. The courtship has been ongoing and shrewd.
David Gibson at Politics Daily reported earlier in the summer on Beck’s commencement speech at Liberty University.
“I want you to know that the invitation to speak today is not meant as an endorsement of my faith,” he said, absolving Falwell — son of the late Jerry Falwell Sr., icon of the religious right and founder of Liberty, which he envisioned as a Baptist Notre Dame. “But I also want you to understand that my agreeing to speak here today is an endorsement of your faith.”
Big applause, understandably, and then a good follow-up, as Beck told his listeners that this was no time for division on the right over things like doctrine and dogma. “We may have differences, but we need to find those things that unite us.”
It’s possible, even likely, that the courtship is a two-way street. I can readily understand some evangelical leaders making the most of an opportunity to influence Beck toward a true understanding of the Gospel.
But why are they promoting his bid for national spiritual leadership? Having a man who has not professed faith in Christ alone be a commencement speaker to Christian graduates, to say the least, is a novel form of outreach. And forming a “black-robe regiment” of evangelical pastors to amplify populist pieties under Mormon generalship is not going to advance the Bible’s Gospel. Such efforts will blur it.
That does indeed sound like something “beyond man,” but not from the direction of heaven.
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.
