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The words "tough" and "book" don't belong in the same sentence. It's like putting Shirley Temple into a film about Jack the Ripper. As I read through Mike's posts, I realize that part of my anxiety about getting published comes from this tension. How do we marry the creative and practical sides of writing and selling books?
I might ask the question this way. Are books really about this:
Or are they really about this:
Of course the answer is that they're about both. You can't keep making books unless you make a profit. Yet nobody who chooses a career in publishing chooses it purely for the money—other industries will make you wealthier quicker. As Mike says, "It is partly about the money. Otherwise, we won't stay in business. But that is certainly not what gets us up in the morning."
So we don't want to say that the "good" side of publishing is the creative/intellectual side while the "bad" side of publishing is the practical/financial side. The two sides have to stick together. Divorce is not an option. You can't have one without the other.
Yet, from an emotional standpoint, when I imagine being a published author, it's not the money that gets me excited. It's the readers. It's the bookstores. It's the physical presence of the book itself.
Yesterday morning I spent 45 seconds sniffing C. H. Dodd's The Epistle of Paul to the Romans, which was published in 1932. The yellow pages are browning at the edges like an old daguerreotype. Dodd's commentary is fierce, but it smells sweet—literally, like a summer meadow.
My dad published a few books when I was a kid. I remember him bringing the galleys home—oversize pages with fine, typeset lettering—a sort of prototype for the book. Looking at them was like sneaking a glimpse into a secret world. They would be marked up in blue by a copy editor, who even noted things like indentions and headings and the location of page numbers—things no ordinary reader would ever know someone had fussed over. I hear publishers don't use galleys anymore. They've been cut adrift and left to bob in the wake of digital technology. Pity.
I love books, and I love reading—not just doing it, but imagining it done—the long, united centuries of paper and print and the people who have loved them. When I write a paragraph, I don't think about its market value. I think about its meaning, its function, its structure, its beauty or lack thereof.
But I know that to get published I must sometimes take off my wire-rim spectacles and don safety goggles, or even a helmet, and charge once more into the fray, and let slip the dogs of market analysis and pitch meetings and niggling contract terms. I have to make the beautiful sell.
It's tough straddling the worlds of books and business—one foot on land, the other on sea. You have no choice but to serve both logos and mammon.
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The passage is Jonah 1:1–5, which we're studying in my second-semester Hebrew course at Dallas Theological Seminary. Part of what makes the translation such a pleasure is the story itself. Jonah has an amazing, vexing personality. His adventure is engrossing, profound, helpful, and hilarious, all at the same time.
Translating from the Hebrew brings color to each word. I discover that the word we translate "to sleep deeply" (1:5) can simply mean "to snore." I begin to see connections I hadn't noticed before. Jonah is an underachiever. Both God and the ship captain have to tell him to "get up!" People keep throwing things: God throws a wind upon the sea, prompting the sailors to throw their stuff overboard. Later, they'll cast lots, and then of course they'll chuck Jonah.
The star of the show is kind of a lovable nut. What is more comical—and yet disturbingly believable—than a prophet who thinks he can escape from God? What kind of weird mix of faith and rebellion would enable someone to sleep through the perfect storm?
But Jonah is more than a slapstick crank, and much more than a children's book character. The tension that drives him is one that drives me. On the one hand, he wants to serve people and bring them closer to God. On the other hand, he thinks God is too good for those people—and by implication, so is he. It's easy to hold contempt for those you're sent to serve. So when God speaks to Jonah, I try to keep my ears open.
After nine months of studying Hebrew, memorizing 400+ vocab words, learning Qal verbs and Piels and Hiphils and Hophals and myriad Weak verbs, it's a relief to finally apply that knowledge. I feel like a man who has been studying a map so long he can barely focus his eyes, until one day he is dropped off in a foreign city and discovers that he already knows how to get around.
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It was a cedar, in fact, and it stood in a forest of all kinds: oaks, walnuts, pears, hackberries, maples, willows, and pecans. Now cedars, as you know, never lose their leaves. They stay green all year round. But this particular cedar loved nothing better than to see the colors of fall. All through the scorching heat of summer she dreamed of a day when the north wind would bring frosty air down from the Rockies. Then the sun would shine bright from a clear, blue sky onto a festival of yellows and ambers, oranges and auburns, vermilions and russets and reds. She would shake out the dust from her limbs and breathe in the sweet air and feast her eyes on the colors all around her.
This particular autumn began as they all do, with a sudden sweep of cool air followed by three days of storms. The little cedar felt refreshed and happy. She rubbed her leaves in anticipation. But after a week or two, she began to notice that the other trees were only turning brown.
She went to the oaks and said, "Great oaks, autumn has come, yet you haven't turned beautiful colors. Why are you only turning brown?"
"Ah, little cedar," the oaks answered, "we haven't had enough rain. We need water to turn lovely colors, but our roots are dry and our mouths are parched and all we can do is turn brown."
The little cedar felt very sad for the oaks. Then she went to the pecans and said, "Mighty pecans, autumn has come, yet you haven't turned beautiful colors. Why are you only turning brown?"
"My goodness, little cedar," the pecans answered, "it's hardly worth it, is it? I mean, we do all that work to make a little splash of color, then all our leaves fall off as soon as a puff of wind comes along. Why go to all the trouble?"
The little cedar felt rather angry at the pecans. Then she went to the maples and said, "Beautiful maples, autumn has come, yet you haven't turned beautiful colors. Why are you only turning brown?"
"Well, little cedar," the maples answered, and they smiled condescendingly, "it's not exactly fashionable anymore, I dare say. Bright colors are well out this year—haven't you heard? Browns are so much more understated, don't you think—so much more sophisticated. We wouldn't be caught dead in the bright oranges and reds we wore last year." And they droned on like this for some time.
The little cedar felt bewildered by the maples. As the sun set, she sensed a frosty bite in the air that told her winter would soon arrive. Then all the trees would lose their leaves, and she would have to wait a whole year for the chance to see them turn again. The little cedar looked up to the budding stars and said, "Please, please let me see lovely autumn leaves before winter comes." And she fell asleep with tears dripping down her branches.
She awoke the next morning to the sounds of gasps and whispers. She looked around. The sky was blue, the air was crisp, and the forest buzzed with excitement. Yet everywhere she looked, the little cedar saw only brown, dry trees, and she wondered what had captured everyone's attention. Then she realized that what they were all looking at…was her.
She looked down at her limbs and saw that her own leaves had changed from dark green to all the colors of autumn: yellows and ambers, oranges and auburns, vermilions and russets and reds.
She shook with joy. She was very beautiful, and she reveled in the breeze and the sunlight. The whole forest admired her—even the maples—and she gloried in her colors for the rest of the autumn.
Labels: faith
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John Reed hesitated as he stared into the mirror—somehow, he had forgotten how to shave. He dressed, then wandered into the living room. His daughter Beth phoned, but he couldn't put a sentence together. Sensing something was wrong, Beth raced home and took him to the emergency room. Then a seizure gripped him—Reed, 80 years of age, was in real danger. "I was on the edge. It had to be a matter of hours," he recalls. The surgeons operated on his brain, finding and repairing a ruptured vessel that had pressurized his brain cavity with blood.Two weeks later, he greets me at the door of the house he has shared for thirty years with his wife Erris. He shakes my hand and leads me to a chair. I watch, surprised, as he lifts a nearby table and lamp and shifts them out of the way, then sits in the chair opposite. It's hard to believe this man came near to death so recently. His recovery seems miraculous.
Hundreds of friends around the world—many of them pastors—prayed for him in the days following his seizure. You may never have heard of John Reed, but you've heard of some of the pastors he trained: Joe Stowell, Timothy Warren, Ramesh Richard, Tony Evans, David Jeremiah—the list goes on. "No one knows the name 'John Reed,'" says former student Greg Jenks, "but when his daughter Becky died a few years ago, attending the funeral was a Who's Who of evangelical ministry."
Reed worked as a professor in the Pastoral Ministries department at Dallas Theological Seminary from 1970 to 1993, spending much of that time as chairman. Now he leads the Doctor of Ministry program, continuing to train both new and experienced ministers.
Dr. Tony Evans, who now pastors the 7,500-member Oak Cliff Bible Fellowship, says Reed had a profound influence during his years in seminary. "Dr. Reed was the first person to welcome us when we came to DTS in 1972," he says. The seminary had only admitted three African American students up to that point, and Reed gave Evans a much-needed sense of belonging. "He was a great encouragement," says Evans. "He added heart to a lot of the truth I was learning."
Jenks describes Reed as a pastors' pastor. "John is known for his insight as a mentor and encourager. He has the uncanny ability to know what's going on in your life without having to ask. He knows how to bring you along without being too direct."
Derrick Jeter, whom Reed mentored in the early '90s and who now works at Insight for Living, agrees. "He was the proverbial iron fist in a velvet glove—he gave tough and pointed criticism but in a way that made you want to accept his critique," he says. "I always think when I talk with Dr. Reed, this must have been what it was like speak with Jesus."
Reed's success as a pastor of pastors has made him one of the most influential and beloved figures in evangelical ministry. Perhaps his speedy recovery is due, in part, to the many Christian leaders who, in the weeks following his seizure, let God know they can't afford to lose him.
Confronting Limitations
I ask Reed how he got started in ministry. His answer: "When I was young, I was very shy. People made me uncomfortable. But when I was 18, I experienced a call to ministry. It came about one winter, sawing lumber. My dad was a very quiet person. We would go to the woods in the morning and he would say, 'Good morning,' and at the end of the day he'd say, 'Let's go to the barn.' We didn't talk. It left me with a lot of time to think. And as I thought, I felt a compulsion to ministry."But Reed faced a serious barrier: stage fright. Whenever he got in front of an audience, his knees shook and his whole body trembled. He decided to face up to this limitation and conquer it, so he looked for opportunities to get in front of audiences. At Cedarville College he got a job introducing and closing a TV program called Chalk Talk. "We never did any retakes. And after two years, I was totally relaxed and free in front of a camera. I'll look in the big blue eye anytime."
He also worked to develop his preaching skills. In churches where he spoke, he asked individuals from the congregation for feedback. One of the things they told him was that he needed to smile more. "I had to learn to express joy through my preaching," he says. He became a student in rhetoric, eventually earning his doctorate in communication.
This once-shy boy shepherded churches in Indiana, Ohio, and Texas for 37 years, ending up as senior pastor of Sherman Bible Church, which flourished under his leadership. Then he shifted into the role of seminary professor, helping to train new generations of pastors and preachers.
His love for the pastoral office is infectious. "I could listen to sermons day after day and week after week. I love working with people, bringing them on, encouraging them. I've been professor and I've been pastor, so I know them both. But the power is in the pastor of the Lord's church. That's where the influence is."
Overcoming Inferiority
Reed's battle with stage fright was only the first in his campaign to overcome his limitations. Despite his easy, confident exterior, a sense of inferiority has haunted much of his life. When he came to Dallas Seminary in 1970, Reed found himself alone, isolated, and intimidated by fellow professors who had graduated from the seminary and knew the original languages intimately. "I'd see S. Lewis Johnson and Bruce Waltke come into chapel with their Greek and Hebrew Bibles bound together, then get up and preach straight out of the original languages! I felt unworthy."In his early years at Dallas he slipped into depression. "One Saturday night, I was driving home, picking out a bridge abutment to drive my station wagon into, and I realized I was suicidal. I told Erris, and it scared her. There weren't any counselors then—no chaplain—and I had nobody to talk to because I didn't know who I could trust." He realized he had to analyze his situation and find a way out of the darkness.
Then it hit him. The seminary had hired him to train pastors, not to expound the ancient languages. He was good at what he loved to do, just as other professors were good at what they loved to do. Their expertise complemented rather than overshadowed his.
Though the crisis passed, he continued to feel inferior. "The faculty would meet every Thursday afternoon for one or two hours. I was so frightened of those people, and I'd just sit there. If I ever said anything in that meeting, I would have prayed about it, thought about it, written it down—and I got a reputation for being wise." Reed laughs. "I've never told them that I was intimidated, not wise."
Have these feelings of inferiority ever disappeared? "It never goes away. It never, never goes away. It's usually my first impulse—all I know now is how to check it. I am inferior, I just don't want anybody to know it."
Close to the Edge
I ask him about the seizure, his brush with death. "I had to lie on my back for three and a half days and let the rest of the blood drain out. It was a horrible experience. There was no pain—just the restraint: I can't sit up, I have to lie just like this." He stiffens to show the discomfort.When did he realize he had come close to dying? "When my doctor said, 'You were pretty close to the edge, John.' I was shocked. I thought, 'Boy I sure have left things a mess.'"
Is he afraid of dying? "I'm ready to go. I don't have any problem with it. My daughter died in 2002 of brain tumors. I thought about her when I was lying on my back. No, I don't fear death at all, but it was premature for me.
"I'm okay. I'm not depressed. I'm a happy person. I enjoy life. My father lived to ninety-nine and a half, so I'm targeting one hundred and ten."
A Pastors' Pastor
Reed looks forward to writing Civil War novels after retiring from seminary. But I have a hard time believing he will ever fully abandon his passion for cultivating Christian pastors. As Derrick Jeter says, "He is one of the few men I would consider a great soul—loving his Lord and his students more than himself, committed to training excellent preachers of the gospel for the glory of God." Since hearing God's call in the stillness of a winter forest, he has fought through his limitations to become the finest of pastors' pastors. Training fellow shepherds is deep in his soul.Now he leans forward and fixes me with his eye. "What's God calling you to?" he asks, then leans back in his chair. Before I can answer, he sets the hook: "Or does God still talk to people? Do they get quiet long enough to hear Him?"
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Let's make a game. Let's you and I sit down together and invent our very own video game. Then we'll show it to our friends, put it up on a website, and people all over the world will play it.
What sort of game should we make? Should we design a strategy game, a puzzle game, a role-playing game, a massively multiplayer game—yeah, how about a massively multiplayer game? Let's make something that will bring people together and help them connect.
What should we put in our game? What features can we think up that promote relationships between players?
First we need a way for people to talk. We'll add a chat window so players can type messages to each other. But relationships take more than words. Let's allow players to choose their faces and expressions. That way they can express their personalities and emotions: solitary or sociable, grumpy or jolly.
Now players can communicate, but they need more to do than stare at each other and talk. They need activities. Let's make it so they can build things: statues, houses, machines—anything. Each player will start with a few parts that they can stick together—bricks, wheels, motors, axles, windows, gears. They can combine their parts with other players' to build bigger and better things than a player working alone could ever make. A single player could build a unicycle, but a couple of players could build a bike, and a team of players could build a bus. This sounds good—our design begins to take shape.
Will Wright, the brilliant designer of Sim City, The Sims, and Spore, defines a game as "a series of interesting decisions." Our design already meets his definition. By giving players building blocks and letting them put them together in a variety of combinations, we've envisioned a world that rewards ingenuity. Some players will team up to build artwork—replica of the Statue of Liberty, anyone?—others to build functional things like shopping carts and bulldozers, others to build instruments of destruction like battering rams and catapults, and others to run markets for rare parts or handy devices. I imagine a noisy, exciting, talkative world full of players making, using, and trading things. We have ourselves the core of a good game.You and I have just done what I do for a living. I develop video games. I helped make Ultima Online, Brothers in Arms, Halo PC, and Phit. If you haven't played one of my games, ask your nephew—he probably has.
Christians often ask me why I—a Christian—would work in a godless, immoral, child-corrupting industry like game development. Not wishing to disappoint, I give them the usual excuses: to shine light in the darkness, to fight the corruption from within, to bring the gospel to geeks and artists. The real answer is more complicated. For me, making games is an exercise in experimental theology.
We Create Worlds
When I started my career twelve years ago I worked for Origin Systems, developer of Ultima Online. Origin's slogan boldly asserted, "We Create Worlds." We loved that slogan; it captures the power and allure of making games. In a very real way, game makers fashion worlds like little gods would.The word "game"—with its offhand, childish overtones—fails to capture what games really are: virtual worlds. Game designers create vivid, living places. You can visit them, explore them, even live in them. Not long after we released Ultima Online in 1997, we discovered that many players spent upwards of 12 hours a day, every day, inside the game world. We heard of divorces caused by players' gaming addictions. We had created a world that appealed to many players more than the real world did.
The Good Game
As I design games, I keep rediscovering how God's world resembles a well-designed game. Sound ridiculous? J. R. R. Tolkien, that greatest of modern mythologists, once described God as the ultimate Myth-Maker. God, he said, authored the True Myth. Like any myth, the True Myth has plot, events, characters, heroes, and villains. Yet it lives and breathes: you and I dwell in its pages. In much the same way, the real world resembles a game. It is the Good Game, designed and programmed by the ultimate Designer.How does the real world resemble a game? A game poses challenges, leading players into interesting decisions. Likewise, the real world confronts us with choices and responds to our decisions. Video games have instruction manuals and strategy guides to help players excel. Likewise, God has provided us with the Scriptures to teach us the objectives, rules, and hints (and even some of the cheat codes) to help us excel in the Good Game. The mastermind behind Ultima Online, Richard Garriott, entered his own game as a player named "Lord British." Similarly, the mastermind behind the Good Game entered as a player named Jesus Christ.
A Series of Interesting Decisions
As Game Designer, God has total control over every element of his Game. If he says the sun will shine, it shines. If he says players should blink every few seconds, they blink. If he wants to teleport a player named Philip, Philip goes zipping through space. But in a game—unlike a book or movie—players should have some control. Their choices matter. Much of the skill of game design lies in crafting rules that limit what players can do while granting them freedom. The Nintendo character Mario can jump high, but only so high. He has power within limitations. We see the same principle in God's Game. He grants us, his players, control within the boundaries he defines.
Because players have freedom to do what they want, game designers influence players in indirect ways. A good designer suggests what players should do, rather than forcing them. For instance, many games flash the health bar when your health gets low. This warns you of danger but leaves you free to ignore it: you can carry on picking up bonus points if you choose to take the risk. In God's Game, hunger has a similar effect. By requiring us to eat, God wakes us up and gets us focused on the world around us. We choose when and what to eat, but God's Challenge of Hunger puts the choice in front of us. Without hunger, we would spend our lives yawning and daydreaming—why bother getting out of bed? Hunger lets us know from the opening moments of the Game—from our first seconds of life—that we have something at stake, that we have to play to win.We all know the rule that nobody lives forever. Death horrifies us, yet serves a good purpose: it tells us we cannot win God's Game through material gain. With one, simple rule, God makes clear that health and wealth fall short as the currency of success—even the healthiest and wealthiest players die and decay. Incredibly, many players ignore this basic, undeniable truth. Jesus' parable of the rich fool who toils for wealth only to lose it with his life illustrates what happens when we forget the Challenge of Death (Luke 12:16–21).
The Challenge of Sex
More than any other game element, the Challenge of Sex advances God's desire to teach players how to love. Yet our distorted views of sex blind us to the genius of its design.Game designers will tell you that if you want players to work together, you have to entice them. Players prefer to work alone unless cooperation pays off. To promote cooperation, designers give players complementary abilities. In a role-playing game, for instance, archers excel in long-range fighting but succumb to close-range attacks, whereas swordsmen excel in close-range fighting but succumb to long-range attacks. To survive in the widest variety of fights, archers and swordsmen wisely team up. By designing each type of player with strengths and weaknesses, designers encourage players to join forces.
God's strategy for cultivating relationship follows a similar principle. He begins by making half his players male and the other half female—two complementary types. He rewards physical contact between these types with orgasm—the greatest immediate pleasure his creation has to offer. This gives an immediate incentive for every player to connect with a player of the opposite sex. On its own, the thrill of orgasm fails to ensure relationship, but it does get players focused on each other—a move in the right direction.
Next, God attaches the process of childbearing to the sex act. Producing children offers another of the greatest rewards in the Game, and both males and females naturally want children. God designs children to need protection and training, a difficult challenge for parents. This challenge brings players into real connection with their mates: players who want the best for their children must commit to work together with their mate, communicate about their children's needs, and agree on difficult choices for nearly twenty years. A couple pursuing these challenges moves toward true relationship.
Yet men and women differ so greatly, not only physically, but in appetites, outlook, and psychology. God designed this challenge too—not to frustrate our relationships, but to perfect them. The tension between men and women rests on a key imbalance. While both a man and a woman can enjoy the sex act, the woman carries the baby.
Pregnancy—the very thought of it—gives the woman a different perspective from the man. For her, a single moment of closeness can transform her body and change her life. She needs help raising a baby and wants a man who will stick with her. This need for commitment leaves her yearning for deep personal connection before, during, and after sex. The man, with less at stake, takes a more immediate approach. Instinctively he knows he can enjoy a woman, then leave her, so he needs less emotional connection. Yet he benefits just as she does from raising healthy children. Both the man and the woman enjoy the benefits of children and consistent sex only if they commit to a life-long partner. They have similar goals but dissimilar outlooks. Through the design of our bodies, God has posed a challenge that guides us toward marriage and deep relationship.
We often respond to this design with resentment rather than joy. Men complain about reticent wives, women complain about overeager husbands, and the "battle of the sexes" rages on. But God never poses a puzzle we can't solve (1 Corinthians 10:13). He has created us to win at the game of love (Genesis 2:18–24). When we trust him, we see that God gives us these challenges to teach us intimacy. Because men and women look at sex differently, we fully enjoy the benefits only when we commit, communicate, compromise, and—ultimately—love one another. Like the best game designers, God keeps us engaged with wonderful rewards that help us press through the hardest lessons. We choose whether to keep on striving for success or to give up hope. But we must remember that God's Game Manual gives two key instructions: "Love the Lord your God" and "Love your neighbor." If we truly want to win God's Game, marriage provides the best training.
The Grand Design
The great Calvinist creed known as the Westminster Confession states the ultimate objective for players of God's Game: "To glorify God and enjoy him forever." God draws us, his players, toward that objective through hunger, which reminds us we have something at stake; death, which reminds us that victory lies apart from material gain; and sex, which challenges us to work out the puzzle of true love. They represent just three of the many features he designed to grow us and help us succeed. When we look at his world as a Game, we discover a beautiful design full of subtlety and wisdom, crafted for our growth and enjoyment.
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In the churches I've been involved with over the last twenty years, I've seen a kind of mass deflation. It's not the churches that have gotten smaller, it's the people. Churchgoers attend less regularly. They give money less consistently. A smaller and smaller core serve a larger and larger clientèle of punters. When I meet people on Sunday mornings, many seem furtive and desperate. They avoid eye contact. They talk in generalities and stick to safe topics—"Awful hot out there," "Rangers seem to be picking up this year." They love Jesus, apparently, but won't talk about him. Sometimes I feel like I've landed in a spiritual horror movie where it's the good guys who have become the zombies, The Night of the Dead Living.I see Christians struggling to explain what puts the "Good" in Good News. We each remember some poignant moment when we "accepted Jesus," "got saved," and our lives began to turn around. But for many of us, somewhere along the way, our lives stopped turning around. We stopped drinking but not smoking. We stopped sleeping around but not looking at porn. We stopped cussing around the office but not around the kids. We gave up greed but can't get out of debt. We learned how to love, but still got divorced. Where, we ask, is the abundant life that Jesus promised?
So now we drift in and out of our churches, hoping against hope that someone will have some answers. We sing worship songs we've long since stop feeling. We rub shoulders with brothers and sisters but the love of most has grown cold. Pastor's got lots of nice things to say, but they don't amount to the crowbar we need to pry our lives back into shape.
In the last ten years, a string of writers has diagnosed the church's problems and offered solutions for how to fix it. George Barna produces a wealth of data exposing the heart rate and blood pressure of a sickly North American Christendom and advances his own prescription for how to heal it. Brian McLaren and others have founded the emergent movement trying to get the church back in step with a rapidly changing culture. I've just been reading Reggie McNeal's The Present Future: Six Tough Questions for the Church, which exposes the moral and practical failure of the megachurch movement and pushes a "missional" approach. Some friends of ours are starting a family-based church that upholds the nuclear family as the center of God's work on earth. Christian pundits have advanced 101 suggestions for what is wrong with the church and how to fix it. My heart is drawn to these writers and ideas because I'm aching—really aching—about the condition of the church and yearn to see it revived.But I don't believe that anyone has uncovered God's official new way for doing church—not Barna, not McLaren, not McNeal, not nobody. And I don't think we'll uncover what God has in store until we give ourselves the time to become truly empty.
Emptiness. That's my contribution to the discussion. Emptiness.
Solutionism
It's amazing how few people even realize something is wrong with the church. Those who do realize it often don't understand their own thoughts and feelings—"Why am I so unhappy on Sunday mornings?" "Why don't my Christian relationships seem as open as they used to?" "Why doesn't anyone else see what I'm seeing?" And when we tell others what we're feeling, we're often rebuffed.A few years ago I pointed out to my then-pastor that our local church had become a revolving door where visitors left as quickly as they arrived. I suggested what we needed was not more churchgoers, but deeper churchgoers. His goal was to pastor a megachurch, and he wanted to crank up the appeal of Sunday morning music and sermons in order to draw in the masses. So he didn't appreciate it when I pointed out that finer showmanship on Sunday morning would only promote a thinner, shallower, less committed congregation, not a deeper one. Evidently something about this suggestion tweaked him because he reacted aggressively, accusing me of arrogance (a tactic he used many times against the many people who questioned him over the years that followed). His hostility shocked me, but since then I've seen it again and again. The last people to accept that the church is in trouble are the people who have the most to gain—or think they do—by carrying on with business as usual.
The result of this hostility is that we who question the health of the church quickly find ourselves alone and misunderstood. Our isolation opens us to many temptations: defensiveness, divisiveness, insensitivity, and—indeed—arrogance. I'm not saying Brian McLaren is arrogant and self-absorbed, but have you seen his book, A Generous Orthodoxy: Why I Am a Missional, Evangelical, Post/Protestant, Liberal/Conservative, Mystical/Poetic, Biblical, Charismatic/Contemplative, Fundamentalist/Calvinist, Anabaptist/Anglican, Methodist, Catholic, Green, Incarnational, Depressed-yet-Hopeful, Emergent, Unfinished CHRISTIAN? You don't get that way—the way I'm not saying he is—without fighting for change alone and unsupported for a lot of years. When people do begin to agree with you, you feel vindicated and relieved—jubilant, even. You feel ready to find a solution and fix the problem—stat.Loving a wounded church hurts. It hurts to see the church hurting. The hurt can draw us into desperation. So when we see a chance to help the church, our temptation is to jump at the solution without too much discernment. "Corporate model? Emergent? Missional? Family-based? Pick whatever buzzword you got and give it to me," we say. "Anything would be better than this."
But of course: no. Many things would be worse than this. And when we uphold solution X as God's New Way of Doing Church, we subscribe to something much worse: we love the solution rather than God or the church.
This is the catch with the umpteen new models for How Church Should Be. They are all about The Problem and The Solution. But there is no one problem and there is no one solution—there is only Jesus and his Bride struggling to love one another. When we forget that, we fall into solutionism and worship the fix rather than the Lord who gives it.
Say I'm a disenchanted middle-aged pastor. I've been reading church health books and going to conferences for years, struggling to grow my church and see it shine with spiritual vibrancy. Sometimes I see growth, yet our vibrancy continues to dim. Or a growth spurt occurs, but then diminishes as our members siphon off into the megachurch down the road. Finally, starving to see real ministry happen, I crack, declaring, "This is not how church was meant to be!"
I wander lost and alone, but finally come across a writer who says what I've been thinking all along. I'm not alone! I discover that just the sort of decay I've seen has happened in churches around North America. My writer-guru and I agree: the church is sick and needs healing. But what do we do about it?
It's at this point we make our mistake. We immediately search for The Fix—the New Way of Doing Church—and in our desperation quickly find it. When we do this, we skip a step, the all-important step of Emptiness.
Emptiness
When God takes someone from one place to another, he often brings them through a time of emptiness. This happened with my wife and I when our marriage was on the rocks. Our old way of relating to each other—the childish, selfish way we had practiced since dating—collapsed into resentment and bile. We desperately needed to learn how to love each other as God intended. Yet he let us wallow for a while in brokenness. After we had despaired of each other and turned our tearful eyes upon him, he didn't immediately give us bright feelings of delight and service for each other. He let us wallow, not out of cruelty, but in order to let our old ways fully drain from us. Only when we had become truly empty did he begin to build up the new ways.Emptiness is part of transition. We see it in Christ's forty days in the desert, his time of preparation for ministry. We see it after the Exodus in the desert wanderings as the sands of Egypt fell away and God prepared Israel for the Promised Land. We see it in Job's despair, in Paul's years in Arabia, in John's isolation on Patmos.
God does not like to put his treasures into cluttered vessels. He likes to clean out his vessels—slowly, thoroughly—before depositing his treasures into them. It makes good sense for him to do this—the vessels would not gain by being stuffed with jumbled oddities, and his treasures deserve a fitting home. Yet it's very painful for us. When we give up our old ways—old habits, old ambitions, old securities—we're filled with longing for the new ways. Yet it's at that moment that God "deprives" us (so we think), and we begin our wait—the long dark night of the soul.
Jesus didn't burst from the tomb the moment he was placed into it. Between the crucifixion and the resurrection is the long silence of Jesus' death. What incredible terror and doubt the disciples must have gone through! But their emptiness no doubt had a purpose: to prepare them for the changes to come. Likewise, the Holy Spirit didn't come at the moment Jesus ascended. There is emptiness between the Ascension and Pentecost.
So it is with the church now in its dark and stumbling days. We're praying for rescue, for revival, for God to show us where he wants the Bride of Christ to go. But this transition is too big for an easy answer or one-size-fits-all solution. No doubt God is calling his church to be culturally relevant, missional, and family-oriented. But why stop there? Mightn't God call us to rediscover worship, or prayer, or spiritual gifts? Perhaps his "new direction" for the church will involve rampant persecution or widespread poverty in a collapsing global economy. I don't believe we'll experience God's revival until we empty ourselves of all expectation, of all solutionism.
Witnesses
It's funny, because the one model of church that everyone admires—the first church as illustrated in Acts 2—is the one model nobody is quite willing to follow. We all want to break bread in our homes and eat together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. But who wants to go to church every day? Who wants to form a commune in which we all sell our SUVs and pool our incomes? How do we really feel about our apostles freaking us out with miraculous signs on a weekly basis?We admire the Acts 2 church, yet fail to emulate it, because it represents a reality we're too afraid to embrace: the reality of people who have truly been changed by Jesus. Christ calls us to be witnesses to who he is and what he has done. Being a witness is easy: you see something, you say you saw it. The problem many Christians have is that we haven't really witnessed Christ doing much. We've read about him but haven't experienced him. So we don't have much to say, and our Good News comes across to non-Christians (and ourselves) as neither new nor especially good.
We can talk about revival, but until we can talk about what Christ has done for us, what business do we have fixing his church? We don't need a new model for church. When we let Christ change our lives so deeply that we can't stop talking about it, we'll be living the new model. Then revival will come, and we won't be able to stop it.
Labels: faith
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"Anchored in Deep Waters" is the article I co-authored with Eva Bleeker on the ongoing Katrina recovery effort, published in Kindred Spirit.
The seminary student newspaper Jot & Tittle published my profile on DTS professor John Reed a few weeks ago. On the back cover of the same issue is my cartoon, "A Seminarian's Guide to How to Hold Your Face on Campus." The Jot & Tittle is available only in print, but I'll post these items here when I can.
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One day as the boy's mind emerged from a delicious daydream, he heard one of the flock bleat wildly for a moment, then go silent. He looked for the source of the outburst but saw nothing. Later, when he counted the flock, the number came up short. He decided he must have miscounted—his abacus was missing a bead.
The next evening when the boy numbered the sheep, he realized that two were missing. He looked all over but found only a tangle of blood and wool where the flock had last been grazing. He felt alarmed at first, but when he brought the flock into the village, he told no one about what had happened.
The next afternoon he saw a black shape racing among the sheep and heard terrified cries pass through them. He dismissed the shape as a bird or badger, but later when he counted the sheep, another five were gone.
That night the man who tended the barn asked the boy about the flock. "It looks one or two short," the man said. "Are you sure they're all there?" The boy gave a toothy, uncertain nod before going into the house.
The next evening, as the boy played his flute to the sunset, he noticed an odd silence coming from the flock behind him. When he had finished his song, he looked back hesitantly, then quickly turned away, not wanting to believe his eyes. After a few shuddering moments he looked again at the flock.
Half of the sheep were missing. Half of those that remained lie groveling on the ground or stumbling aimlessly from place to place. As for the rest—at first the boy couldn't understand what was wrong with them. They seemed to be standing up and lying down at the same time. Their wool had turned black and white. They sat eerily still, and breathed either not at all or with rapid heaving gasps. Occasionally one of them shook violently, then became still again. They seemed to have two sets of eyes.
It was then that the boy grasped what he was seeing. The black-and-white sheep were not sheep alone, but wolves and sheep clutched together in a cruel embrace. Each sheep had the jaws of a wolf clamped onto its neck. More than a dozen wolves were scattered among the flock, their eyes shifting furtively, their lips peeled back in a guilty grin, each quietly crushing the life from its victim.
The boy snapped to his feet with his voice clenched in his throat and his flute dangling from his fingers. He hesitated, unable to take his eyes from the horror in front of him. He knew he had to get help, but fear stayed him: fear of what the villagers would do when they found out; fear that the wolves might let go of the lambs and turn their hungry eyes upon him.
I wish I could tell you what happens next, but I can't because it hasn't happened yet. As of July 21, 2007, that was the last we had heard of the Boy Who Wouldn't Cry Wolf.
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Three parties are involved—Spring Harvest, Keswick Ministries, and the Universities and Colleges Christian Fellowship (UCCF). The Spring Harvest conference—the gathering they put on each year—brings together 55,000 Christians including a great many youth. Now its future is uncertain.
What makes this a particularly sad split is its cause: the doctrine of atonement. Atonement is the question of how Jesus' death and resurrection brings about salvation. It is a terrible subject to pick a fight over, for more reasons than one.
The question at the heart of the doctrine of atonement intrigues Christians of all stripes. We all believe that Jesus saves us, but how exactly does he do it? Some people think about it this way. Although God was angry at us for our sins, Jesus drew that anger upon himself and satisfied it when he died. We are saved from punishment because Jesus has experienced the punishment we had earned. We call this idea the "penal substitution" theory of atonement. God had good reasons for feeling angry with us, and that anger had to go somewhere—so Jesus took it into himself.
The Lamb of God
The penal substitution theory has its upsides and downsides. On the upside, the Bible says that something like this took place. Jesus is described as a sacrificial lamb that takes away the sin of the world, and if we look at the idea of sacrificial lambs in the Old Testament, we see that they were thought of us substitutes right back to Abraham and the Passover—dying in place of human beings to take away their sins. Paul says, in a profound and beautiful statement, "God made the one who did not know sin to be sin for us, so that in him we would become the righteousness of God." (2 Corinthians 5:21, NET)But the penal substitution theory has problems too. First, it explains nothing about how we opt into or out of Jesus' sacrifice. If Jesus absorbed God's anger, why would God still send some people to hell? It's as if Jesus absorbed God's anger conditionally, so that each of us has the chance to "sign up" for forgiveness or not. Well, most Christians believe that, but it doesn't really explain much. There's nothing quite like it in normal human law. How can God's anger be satisfied—but only on a per-person basis?
Christus Victor
The other theory of atonement at the heart of the Spring Harvest split is Christus Victor, otherwise known as the ransom theory. According to the ransom theory, Satan "bought" humanity when we sinned. Atonement means that Jesus bought us back with his blood. We had sold ourselves to Satan, but Jesus ransomed us.Jesus himself said that he came "to give his life as a ransom for many" (Matthew 20:28), so the ransom theory rings true. But like the penal substitution theory, it gives an incomplete picture. Did Satan really enter into a bargain with Jesus, trading souls for blood? The Bible doesn't tell this story, and we're left to speculate. And again, how is it that Jesus paid for some people but not for others?
It's tempting to hammer out all the upsides and downsides to both theories, to debate their strengths and weaknesses, and to dredge the Scriptures for supporting evidence until one theory defeats the other in hand-to-hand combat and strides forth as the victor. The trouble is that life isn't that simple—God isn't that simple—what Jesus did on the cross isn't that simple.
Christianity's Dark Secret
I'm about to utter the dark secret of Christianity, the Fact that Dare Not Speak Its Name, the truth we are embarrassed to admit. Here it is. Christians believe that Jesus died for our sins, but we haven't the foggiest how it actually works. The gospel we package up and sell each week is something we only dimly grasp ourselves. We have a few theories—images really, mere metaphors—but we haven't got a clue how Jesus' blood dealt with sin. We know that in some cosmic way, Jesus' death plus our belief makes us pure in God's eyes. But as for the mechanics of that transformation—the technicalities of divine jurisprudence—we are out in the cold. We have only the dimmest glimmer of insight.It's sad that Christian organizations would split over this question. How can you split over something you don't understand? Why part ways over a mystery?
The Mystery of Salvation
In the Christianity Today article, J. I. Packer is paraphrased as saying, "Penal substitution, Christus Victor, and other Scriptural views of atonement work together to present a fully orbed picture of Christ's work." In other words, picking a theory of atonement is not an either-or thing. Christ did something profound when he died for our sins. His death worked on many planes, in many ways—some of which we can begin to understand, others of which we cannot. Anyone who has read or seen The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe has glimpsed the richness of atonement. Did Aslan die as a substitution for Edmund's sin? Yes. Did he negotiate a ransom payment to buy Edmund back from the witch? Yes. Did he fulfill the cosmic law concerning traitors? Yes. Did he transcend the cosmic law to fulfill the divine, creative law? Yes. C. S. Lewis understood that atonement is multifaceted. It cannot be boiled down to a party political statement, a theological soundbite.Fundamentally, whatever other consequences it may have had, Christ's death was an interaction between Father and Son. In some mysterious way, the Father and the Son conspired together—and yet strangely in opposition with each other—to make sinful people utterly sinless. How can we understand what words they exchanged, what commodities changed hands, what legal precedences were invoked? Their negotiations, whether by whispers or shouts, are out of our earshot. We cannot comprehend the magnitude or method of what they did. So why would we argue about the mechanics of grace?
Who or What?
It's this word "faith" again. In recent years, Christians have got it into their heads that saving faith has to do with what you believe. It never did. It has to do with who you believe. Who do you think is trustworthy? Who will you bank on? Who will you invest in, spend your time with, imitate? "...That whoever believes in him will not perish..." Believes in his existence? No. Believes in the correct nature of his atonement? No. Believes in him—trusts him. Reckons he can get the job done. Dallas Willard suggests the word "confidence" instead of "faith": Do we have confidence in Jesus?That's not to say confidence doesn't involve doctrine. Jesus can't get the job done unless he is fully man and fully God, and that's a doctrinal statement. But in the Bible, faith is not fundamentally about logical propositions—it's about who we decide to follow.
Salvation, then, is not about the technicalities of atonement, but about the Person who gives it to us. There is no point in arguing about the mechanics of grace; the only thing to do is to receive it. This is one gift horse whose mouth is best left unexamined.
So when I come before the throne of God and he asks me why he should let me into his kingdom, I don't plan to give him a treatise on Christus Victor or the penal substitution of atonement. I'm planning to say, "I don't know how it all works, but I trust Jesus to have made my way." It's like they say in business: It's not about what you know—it's about who you know.
Labels: faith
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Two of the door handles on our 2002 Toyota Sienna had broken. It's cause our kids have superpowers and don't know how to control them yet—a common problem amongst larval superheroes. I couldn't repair the sliding door myself, but I found a site outlining how to fix the rear door handle better than new. I'm not mechanically inclined, but I reckoned I could do what the site described. And it would save me the $130 the repair man would charge.
First I removed the inner part of the rear door and removed the broken latch. The latch was plastic—no wonder it had broken. Now all I had to do was drill a hole down through the latch into the lever that had broken off it, then screw the two back together. This would make the latch even stronger than it originally was: metal is stronger than plastic, you know.
Drilling through the parts went well until I realized I couldn't get the drill bit back out of the part. The bit was stuck so tight that the drill couldn't keep a hold on it. I tried prising it out in several ways; I even drilled a second hole right alongside the first, but the bit still would not budge.
I decided that what I needed was a tighter grip on the drill bit. So I clamped it with a pair of pliers and clamped the pliers in a vise. Then I rocked the part back and forth, trying to twist it off the bit.
With the inclusion of the pliers and vise I had involved quite a bit of force into this endeavor and realized the chance of something slipping, flipping, or cracking was non-zero. I said a little prayer that the handle wouldn't crack—I really hated to have to pay the repair man to replace it. Then I remembered my friend Chris, who had his eye nearly blown away a few months back in a freak accident, and I heard a little voice saying the same sort of thing could happen to me. "But of course it won't," I replied. "Nothing like that has ever happened to me. I'm the least accident-prone person I know." Still, I felt uneasy, and pushed my glasses closer up toward my face. I've worn glasses since I was a kid and they've saved me from many a flying chip, splinter, and pebble. But as I touched them I noticed they don't give the coverage my early-'80s serving platters did.
Even worse, they weren't even in a position to block whatever shrapnel might emerge from my twisting contraption. I'm needing bifocals, frankly, and what that means—for you young folk—is that I can't focus on something if it's between six and twelve inches from my face. I can look under my glasses at something if it's closer than six inches; I can look through my glasses at something if it's farther than twelve inches; but in the middle distance neither my eye nor my lenses give me focus.
I suddenly realized I was looking at this twisting contraption under my glasses, about six inches from my eye. So I moved it away to arms length. But I needed to see whether the drill bit was turning, so before I knew it I had moved in close again.
Now this is the moment when the drill bit should have wrenched free from the handle effortlessly, and I should have grinned at it triumphantly and carried on with my work. Instead, there was a sharp "ping" sound, and suddenly I was staggering back from the work table, the vision in my right eye was blurry and—holy cow—pink, and I've just shot out my eye.
It didn't hurt. It felt like a little dust had got in there. But when I pulled my hand back down and saw my fingers were covered in blood, I knew I had bigger problems than dust.
This is just going to keep getting worse, so stop reading now if you've had enough forensics.
I felt quite calm as I went into the house. My first thought was that the kids not see me. My second thought was that I could now joke with Chris about going to new lengths to identify with his troubles. My third thought was that I should get someone to take me to the emergency room. The order of those thoughts will tell you a great deal about my character.
I moved through the house to the bathroom and surveyed the damage. The good news: my left eye was perfectly fine. The bad news: my right eye looked like the horror section at the video store. I was literally crying blood. Some of the more enterprising droplets had stolen into my tear ducts and now emerged furtively from my right nostril. The white of my eye was flowing pink like a decorative waterfall at a Japanese garden. A thin sheet of tissue about the size of a fingernail emerged like an anemone and wavered every time I blinked.
I leaned under the faucet and rinsed. When I got up, there was a little tab of tissue left in the sink. I thought: "I've got a pretty good chance of losing this eye." I prayed that I wouldn't—that I'd come out of this unscathed.
Not wishing to cause alarm, I called to my wife in the most nonchalant, "Honey we're out of toilet paper," voice I could muster, and pondered what to do next. Usually I have a hard time planning a trip to the bathroom, but it took me no time to decide how to get to the hospital. Driving myself was out of the question. I couldn't ask my wife because someone had to stay with the kids. My parents were entertaining company. So I called up my nephew James. My wife came in as I reached him, and I told him to be on standby. Then I showed her what had happened. She gasped, looked more closely, gasped again, then went to the bed to wrestle with the temptation to faint while I asked James to drive me.
We were at the hospital for three hours—not bad at all for an emergency room visit. I spent most of the time resting on the bed, reading a good book and enjoying myself. I felt completely calm—no anxiety at all. The nurse found my heart rate and blood pressure to be normal. This will sound trite to some, but I knew from long experience that God would do right by me. I could live without one eye—there are worse things to lose. And I figured he would answer my prayer with a "yes." He usually does. Usually.
The doctor put weird drops in my eye and looked into it with a blue light. Then he gave me the diagnosis: subconjunctival hematoma.
The eye, it turns out, is a complicated thing. The white of the eye is a mass of tissue kept at a constant pressure by an elaborate pumping mechanism or something. Then you have the cornea, which is the clear "dome" over the iris—the colored part of the eye. What I didn't know was that the eye is enclosed in a kind of clear skin called the conjunctiva. What happened with me is that a little piece of the drill bit bounced off my cheek, making a small mark, and ricocheted across the surface of my eye making a long, but not terribly deep, scratch. It tore the conjunctiva and cut a little way into the white, then came out again. If it had stayed embedded, I would have been in agony—not to mention the unpleasantness of removing it. If it had struck a few millimeters to the right, I would now be blind, or facing endless surgeries, or both.
It merely broke a couple of vessels in the white of my eye, and this flooded the space between the white and the conjunctiva with blood. Thus the diagnosis: subconjunctival hematoma.The injury did not damage my cornea. It did not affect my vision. It didn't mess with the sensitive pressure in my eye. All told, I got off easy. I needed a tetanus shot, antibiotic eye drops, and some saline solution. If I say, "Praise God," will you see what I mean? When God had warned me about my eye, I hadn't listened. But when I asked him to make it work out all right, he did listen.
I paid $100 for the privilege of using the emergency room, plus $35 for a check-up three days later. So much for saving money. The next day I braved working on the handle again, and found it was still unbroken. The drill bit had snapped off right where it exited the handle. I decided to leave it in there—more steel reinforcement. Then I finished fixing the van, and the rear door works better than ever.
My eye was dry and uncomfortable for a couple of days. Now it's fine. The only long-term effect is that I look like a demon-possessed thug. Even this downside has its advantages. I win a lot more arguments, for instance.
I learned three things from my experience.
- Wear safety goggles.
- There's a reason repair men charge the big bucks to fix things. Let them.
- If a little voice inside your head says, "Maybe this isn't such a good idea," believe it.
Labels: faith
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