It is common practice in the conservative Christian community to surround ourselves with people who think like us, both spiritually, politically,  and socially. Some of that happens naturally because of people are most comfortable around people that they are more similar to. This is a variant of the Law of Attraction of Homogeneous Species. Some of this also occurs as a direct result of choices and beliefs we hold as humans (this is where the implications of LAHS deviate). If we don’t approve of a denomination’s interpretation on a given topic, we will exclude ourselves from them. Actually, if we don’t approve of another church within our same denomination, we exclude ourselves from them. We only hang out with people that are ‘good enough’ people. We only go places that are ‘appropriate’ for Christians. We even draw lines that intermingle political preferences and spiritual beliefs: good Christians are Republicans and shouldn’t interact with people that hold beliefs of the Democratic party.

The problem with this is that when we shield ourselves from people based on whether we agree with them or not or whether we approve of them or not, we are doing the same thing described in this TED talk. This talk is concerned with the idea that being shielded from ideas we differ with is bad for us as individuals and is therefore bad for us globally. For Christians and churches the concern should go the other direction. If we build a bubble of agreement around ourselves, we not only keep people with whom we disagree out but we remove our ability to engage them and influence them with our ideas and beliefs. Since this is the core purpose of the Church, we completely undermine our ability to fulfill any of the Great Commission.

Click here to view the embedded video.

After successfully assisting Child2 in solving his problem, I got to thinking about how I was even able to help in that scenario. Those thoughts led to this chart that I’ve created about how dads are so awesome. Enjoy!

1. Assume the best in others. Give others the benefit of the doubt.
2. Communicate openly and with integrity.
3. Function as a plurality of leaders.
4. Be free to be members and ministry leaders yourselves.
5. Practice humility and feel free to say “I’m wrong” when necessary.
6. Lead with character that produces the fruit of the Spirit.
7. Be quick to forgive.
8. Jesus is the head of this leadership team. We should function from an awareness of self and team in relation to Christ.

There are three sections to this piece. The top, left section is four colored bands that merge together. This symbolizes the trinitarian statement from verse 17 and demonstrates how we, the flesh toned section, derive from God. The middle section, which resembles a flow of water, symbolizes the power of God that was exerted both in us and in the raising of Christ. The bottom right section symbolizes the earth. The core is dark and black, but as we, the church, function in the world through the power of God we shine his light on the earth, eventually over coming the darkness.

Enjoy!

As many of you know, I have a company that I co-operate with fellow minister Randy Wray that we call BranchWeaver. We generate resources to help churches use technology in ministry. The idea behind the name comes from the idea that Christ is the vine and we are the branches, and we want to help weave the branches together so they work better.

I was recently introduced to a man with considerable artistic talents. He was raised unchurched and had recently started attending our congregation with family members whom he was currently living with. In a effort to reach out to him, I asked about designing a logo for our company. He thought it would be a good project, so I described to him how our company got its name. With an enlightened look on his face, he said, “I know exactly what I’ll do!”

Fast forward a few weeks. One of his family members came to me with a humorous story. When the family member came home one day she found her youngest son helping the artistic relative with a web search. They were looking for images of dogwood trees. The artist explained what he was working on for me, and this task demanded visual research on dogwoods. The family member asked “Why dogwoods?” The artist replied with a sincere but clearly unchurched response, “Because anyone who knows anything about Christianity knows that the cross was made of dogwood!”

I’m a big fan of the dogwood tree. It is, after all, the state flower of my home state of Arkansas. But how on earth could the cross be made from dogwood? This statement actually stirred in my memory banks a legend I had heard a long, long time ago. According to said legend, the dogwood was once a tall, strong, thick trunked tree that was popular for making crosses for crucifixions. After the dogwood was used for the cross of Christ, God cursed the dogwood so it could never be used for a cross again. In fact, there’s a nifty little poem out there about it:

In Jesus’ time, the dogwood grew
To a stately size and a lovely hue.
‘Twas strong and firm it’s branches interwoven
For the cross of Christ its timbers were chosen.
Seeing the distress at this use of their wood
Christ made a promise which still holds good:
“Never again shall the dogwood grow
Large enough to be used so.
Slender and twisted, it shall be
With blossoms like the cross for all to see.
As blood stains the petals marked in brown
The blossom’s center wears a thorny crown.
All who see it will remember Me
Crucified on a cross from the dogwood tree.
Cherished and protected, this tree shall be
A reminder to all of my agony.”
-author unknown

So… what’s the point?

The point of this series, and of the title in particular, is to draw attention to the fact that the distance between us and unchurched/non-Christians around us is significantly greater than we really imagine. The typical approach to discipling new converts is to receive from them some kind of commitment of faith (baptism, placing membership, etc.) and then to point them to where the adults participate in church. Who cares what the adult classes are studying? Could be Christian parenting, could be Song of Solomon. Doesn’t matter. What matters is that this person is a Christian now and so they do what Christians do… go to Bible class and worship.

Like the man from my story above, people outside of our churches learn a lot of things about God, Jesus, church, and the Bible. Unfortunately, almost none of it comes from the Bible itself. Tradition, Christmas specials, movies like The Nativity or The Passion of the Christ, The History Channel, Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, their 2nd cousin Bob who dropped out of seminary, and old wives tales like the one about the dogwood tree are the most common sources of information for non-Christians/unchurched about God/Jesus/Church, etc. This is very, very scary.

Awareness of this leads to a couple of realities that demonstrate our need as churches to focus on a systematic way of helping people assimilate into church culture through the acquisition of basic Bible knowledge and skills on how to handle the Bible.

First, no one likes to feel stupid. Imagine how the artistic gentleman above would feel if he had shared his belief about the dogwood with a Bible class? Hopefully he would have been handled gently, but I know some settings where he wouldn’t have been. This would be catastrophic for the assimilation of this gentleman into the church body.

Second, in general church adult education programs are a poor source of education. The most popular version of class for both teachers and students is currently discussion based classes. I’m a big fan of the discussion based class, but when not properly managed it becomes more of an opportunity for people to get together and share what they ‘think’ about a passage or what they ‘feel’ about a situation. Perhaps even worse is how often a discussion based class can devolve into a pooling of ignorance that is guised behind dialog. This is not beneficial for anyone, least of all new Christians that need teaching.

Sounds fairly dreary. People don’t know scripture and we’re not teaching it to them. What must be done? I don’t claim to have all the answers, but a recent two year study on church history has revealed a significant pattern. The Christian movements that were most effective at being reformative and revolutionary were the ones that took advantage of ‘catechism’. Catechism is a scary word for some because it sounds so catholic. Catechism is simply a formal curricula that covers the information that a group feels is essential. New converts went through a catechism before they were ‘full members’.

But creating catechism would require identifying the basics and most important things about the Christian faith. What are those things, and how would we identify them? More on that later, but for now, use the comments section below to share your thoughts on the dogwood series thus far.

When I think about churches and their evangelism programs, I often find myself asking ‘what are we evangelizing them to?’. Many of the churches I’ve been a part of do not have a solid answer for that question. When they talk about evangelism, they speak of technique, programs, and methodology. They spend very little time, however, on discussing what an evangelized person will look like that is different than what they are now.

In his book Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Steven Covey states that habit #2 is ‘begin with the end in mind’. If you don’t know what the end is going to look like, how will you ever be effective in pursuing it. This applies for evangelism as much as anything else. Without knowing what the finished product looks like, how can we ever hope to achieve it.

I believe this lack of focus on the finished product has created some problems for us. First, I think it has facilitated the hyper focus that Churches of Christ have on baptism. Baptism is very important, but it is only one of many important things in the conversion process. Since it is tangible… the only tangible part of evangelism as we usually frame it, we focus on that as the goal of our efforts. When we get a new convert into the water, most churches treat it as the end of the road for evangelism. They are then expected to get in the flow of things as a member of the church and pick stuff up as they go.

The second challenge the lack of a vision of an evangelized person has caused us is that we’ve turned discipleship into something weak and easy. When reading through scripture, I am overcome with the power of the concepts of ‘lordship’ and ‘surrender’. As a disciple, I’m supposed to live every minute of every day trying to fulfill God’s will on earth. How many of us really do that? How many of us can say we’ve grown spiritually in the last year? Two years? More?

From the time I was a child, I remember every church I was a part of having one of those grumpy, old people in it. They were mean, they wanted their way, and they were willing to do just about anything within their power (including manipulate others) to get what they wanted. A couple weeks ago I was at Rochester College for their Streaming Conference. During the conference, we participated in a shared reading of scripture of James 2:14-26 where we paired up after having the scripture read aloud and shared what stood out to us about the passage. The thing that stood out to me was that faith and discipleship would have external, visible qualities to it. It’s not acceptable to be the old, grumpy person in a faith community.

The thing that allows these two problems to occur is not having a standard by which we can measure people. Sometimes we will say ‘Jesus’, but psychologically we know that there is no way we can achieve equality with Christ so our efforts wane.

So, what is the standard that we are striving for in our evangelism efforts? Remember from earlier posts, external behavior control is not the desire, but internal change and Christlikeness. So, what can we use for a list of expectations that doesn’t judge externally and that emphasizes the expectation of growth? Let us know what you think in the comments below.

We’re going to turn the direction of this series a little and start looking at the environment that non-Christians/new converts/visitors experience when they enter into a church building. Much of what we’ll discuss has to do with culture.

Culture is something that many of us are completely unaware of yet it is all around us, in us, and protrudes from us. At the same time it is very difficult to define. In 1952, Alfred L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn published a book called Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions that was simply 200 pages devoted to the different definitions of the term. To help us understand culture in this discussion, I will provide the bullet pointed definitions used by Myron W. Lustig and Jolene Koester in their book Intercultural Competence: Interpersonal Communication Across Cultures:

Culture:

• Is Learned
• Is A Set of Shared Interpretations
• Involves Beliefs, Values, Norms, and Social Practices
• Affects Behavior

The biggest challenges regarding culture in churches is 1) being aware that there is a culture that exists within the walls of our churches that is probably different from the culture of the non-Christian/new Christians we encounter around us 2) being aware that much of our culture is not from scripture and is therefore not mandated 3) being aware that other cultures exist and are of equal value with our culture and 4) being sensitive enough to these facts to help individuals new to our church culture transition effectively.

In case the above doesn’t quite make sense to you, here’s a clip from the Adam Sandler movie Waterboy to give you a demonstration of what culture clashes look like. For those of you that haven’t seen the movie, the student doing most of the speaking was raised by his ‘momma’ in a swamp and was home schooled by her in all the important thing in life. He is attending college because he wants to play football.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Aggression in the video aside, entering into the culture of church is a very strange thing for those outside the church. Several years ago while living in the D.C. area I received a phone call from an inquisitive young lady about our church. She was raised religion neutral, meaning she was brought up neither for or against any particular religion. Her first question demonstrates the confusion involved in approaching another culture. She asked “Are your services open to anyone or only to particular people?” Little did she know how badly we wanted people.

After her first visit, my wife and I invited her over for dinner and to discuss her experiences at worship. She brought a bottle of wine as a gift for the hosts, which is a very customary thing to do in D.C. Of course, those of you who know the culture of conservative Christianity, we have a thing against drinking alcohol… despite the Biblical mandate for consuming it.

As we discussed the whole Christ and Christianity thing, we got to the part about baptism. I described the process of entering the water, confessing faith and obedience to Christ, and being immersed. She thought I was kidding. “Are you serious? I get in water? I go all the way under? In front of everyone?” Think about that for a second… for someone outside of Christianity, how weird does the idea of baptism seem? Could you imagine another organization using this practice as their method of extending belonging? For the uninitiated, we might as well be asking them to put on a chicken costume and run around the auditorium clucking. Would be about the same level of intimidation for some.

So, what kinds of things do we need to watch out for in the cultural transition for new converts? Or how about even before that? What do we need to be aware of culturally for first time visitors to our facilities. Not everyone knows to stand up when we get to the second part of “Holy Ground” after all.

Thanks again for dropping by! The feedback on this series has been great. I know you’re not all commenting, but please feel free to jump into the discussion by leaving comments below. I won’t bite, I promise.

Last post we talked about the issue of authenticity when it comes to a behavior modification approach to Christianity. At the end of the blog I noted that there is a significant spiritual implication for using Christianity to modify behavior. The implication is that using Christianity to modify behavior is exactly opposite of how the gospel works. Renewal and redemption of the Spirit is an inside out process, but the behavior modification approach adheres to the fallacy that if you control the exterior then the interior is also in line.

In the fifth of seven ‘Woes to teachers and pharisees’ (Matthew 23:25-26), Jesus clearly addresses the practice of cleaning up the outside and calling things ‘good’ while the inside is filthy. Much of the sermon on the mount from Matthew 5-7 addresses the difference between the inside and outside. Give to the needy in secret, pray in private, hide the fact that you’re fasting. All of these reinforce the idea that it is what is on the inside that matters. By implication, you can discern that no matter how much you clean, dress, and control the external, you’ll never affect the spiritual.

So why all the focus on the external? Why the presupposition that the cleanliness of the outside is indicative of the spirit on the inside? Why measure our success in evangelism by whether someone quits wearing their Marlboro t-shirt or not?

I’ll go a step further and say that not only is focusing on the outside bad authenticity from the spiritual standpoint, it is also one of the greatest inhibitors to spiritual growth. The reason is because we are allowed to dress ourselves up and pass ourselves off as something we’re not. When we define a ‘good Christian’ by whether they attend church each week, we’ve fallen for the ‘external matters’ trick. We frequently joke around about families that fight all the way to church and then get out of the car and pretend that everything is fine… and that’s just the preacher’s family.

A few weeks back I overheard someone say that they loved it when men wore dress shirts and ties when the get up during worship. It made them look like they were ‘ready to serve the Lord’. I have to admit, I’m from a different generation. Not only did we make Levi’s cool, we made Levi’s with gaping holes in them cool. So when someone says to me that what you wear is indicative of your preparedness to serve the Lord, I balk. Not only I, but non-Christians/new converts have a similar reaction.

I shared this encounter with one of my peers who had been wearing a beautiful, new suit to worship for the last several weeks. I had noticed the suit, and since he was similar to me in many ways demographically I wanted his opinion on the matter. He recounted of when he bought the suit several weeks before, of how he wore it to service, and of how people just ooohhed and aaaahhed over him in his nice new suit.

“That must have felt nice.” I said, thinking I could pass his interest in ‘dressing up’ off as a interest in vain recognition. His response: “Not really.”

He proceeded to tell me the story of why he bought the suit. He had been struggling with depression for some time and had decided it was time to end his own life. He researched the different ways to kill himself and decided on hanging. He had visited several stores to find just the right rope he needed to get the job done. He selected a spot where his kids wouldn’t be the ones to find his body. Then, as a last step, he went out and bought a nice, new suit to wear when he killed himself.

Then he wore the suit to church. While I can’t speak to his emotional response to people commenting on how good he looked, when some expressed to him that they wished more men would be more like him he definitely caught the inconsistency. “Here I was, rotting on the inside and all these people cared about was how I looked on the outside.”

The inconsistency is glaring. The lack of authenticity is offensive. When we elevate the importance of external things over that of spiritual things, we either 1) turn people off, or 2) win them to a system of external regulations and not to a system of transformation by the Spirit.

Next post in this series we’re going to turn the topic a little in a different direction. Until then, what are your thoughts on where we’ve been so far? Please leave your comments below.

Authenticity is a culmination of many important characteristics, both of individuals and of organizations. It is a combination of honesty, truthfulness, reliability, integrity, and more. It even covers big picture leadership ideas like mission and vision, whether we’re focusing on significant issues or not, and legitimate awareness of ourselves and our community. Scot McKnight, in his book “The Blue Parakeet”, recounts an encounter with a young man whose youth minister constantly asked if he still believed in the authority of scripture. The young man was extremely frustrated about this constant questioning because the youth minister didn’t know any poor people, didn’t mention the homeless, and was unaware of the severe suffering in Darfur. In summary… the youth minister had an authenticity problem. He was concerned about the respect of scripture, but not to the point that it affected the way he interacted with his world.

When we fall into the trap of the behavior modification approach to Christianity, we too are suffering from an authenticity problem. On one hand we talk about forgiveness, grace, and ‘speaking where the Bible speaks’, but on the other we create all kinds of rules and social expectations for behavior that have minimal sanctioning from the Bible. It is no different than the hedge building that Jesus accused the pharisees of. At it’s core it is salvation by works theology. We’d deny it if you accused us directly of it, but it’s true.

The inconsistency and lack of integrity that comes from the failure in authenticity drives non-Christians/new converts CRAZY. In general, people are smart. They are also not accustomed to doing things just because someone in authority tells them to, religious or otherwise. When you say to them “mixed bathing is wrong unless everyone is wearing a t-shirt”, they see the lack of authenticity and somewhere in their mind their subconscious is saying “you really think there is a direct link between boys and girls swimming together and teen pregnancy or proliferation of sexually transmitted diseases?” Well… do we?

There is a greater spiritual implication for trying to legislate behavior as a part of our evangelism, outreach, and assimilation. I’ll talk about that more in the next post. Until then, what are your thoughts on integrity and authenticity in evangelism? Are we doing a good job in this department? What stories have you witnessed where there was a lack of authenticity in church?

One of the phrases that has entered American culture that can be found anywhere from Veggie Tales to Relient K lyrics is the saying “We don’t smoke, we don’t chew, and we don’t go with those that do”. This phrase embodies much of the behavior control theory of church. Answer this open ended question: Good Christians don’t _____________.

I’ve asked that question in many places. Most of the responses are making fun of the past efforts we’ve made at regulating behavior. The responses include dance, smoke, drink, play cards, go to prom, give two armed hugs, etc. Once in a worship assembly someone responded with ‘go clubbing’. I had to tell them that was one I happened to agree with.

The behavior modification approach to church is very deeply engrained in church culture. In fact, the ‘Sunday school’ movement started as a behavior modification tool. Dating back to the industrial revolution in England, Sunday school was started to train children how to behave. There were no child labor laws at the time, and public education was neither mandated or available. This led to children working six days a week in factories and mines, feeding the machine that was the industrial revolution. On the seventh day… they ran crazy through the streets. Robert Raikes, editor of the Gloucester Journal, started the first Sunday school to address the problem of behavior in children.

The problem with the behavior modification approach to Christianity is that it adds an additional obstacle to assimilation into a local church body. A vast majority of the world outside of ‘the church’ doesn’t see any problem with smoking, drinking a beer, buying a lottery ticket, or watching rated ‘R’ movies. They enjoy dancing, both at parties and at dance clubs. They sleep in on Saturday and Sunday, unless they’re going to play golf or their kids are in a little league.

Despite the fact that ‘we’ do none of these things, we manage to encounter them and convince them that Jesus loves them. The Spirit moves within them and they give their lives to Christ. We tell them it means they have to give up sleeping in on Sunday mornings, then we hit them with the sucker punch… now they have to give up all of those other things that Christians consider culturally inappropriate.

There is a glaring deficiency (just one?) with this thinking that really irritates non-Christians/new converts to their very core. I know what I think it is, and I’ll share that with you in the next post. Until then, what do YOU think the deficiency is? Do you even think there is one?