Evangelical leaders continue to produce theology which
ratifies the cultural status quo. From divorce and psychology, to work,
finances, lawsuits, politics and how we order our time, the Evangelical
leadership does not disappoint in this regard. If there's a way to baptise the
cultural norms, you can count on them. Motivated primarily by a fear of losing
numbers, money and ultimately cultural influence they seem to spend an
inordinate amount of time teaching about the culture... but in reality they
endlessly explore ways to push the church to the edge of the cultural cliff and
then hope that they won't fall off.
Little do they know, they fell off decades ago and are simply
waiting to hit the bottom.
Subject to fads and an ever changing orthodoxy, the movement
has openly embraced the style, tactics and mindset of Madison Avenue in order
to keep their numbers up. They've built a broad movement but repeatedly when
tested it's exposed as being perilously shallow.
It's clear, even in my own present church experience that
most modern Christians put work and money above all else, certainly above
Church life and attendance. And so rather than leaders calling the Church to repentance,
calling them to re-think priorities, perhaps even re-think the Church's overall
approach to money and time... we are instead presented with the latest
cutting-edge solution to the problem of dwindling attendance. Let us (the
Church) bend to the culture even further and let it define our time, how we
order our lives, even how and when we worship.
Why not, in so many areas the Evangelical movement has
already done this. From the embrace of youth culture and pop music, to their
appropriation of educational ideas regarding age segregation, to their accommodation
of communication forms in this age of digital media, to their willingness to
bend and be shaped by the political moment, the Evangelical movement doesn't seem
to stand for much of anything.
They pay lip service to the ideas of the Reformation and the
concept of Sola Scriptura (Scripture Alone) but in reality their views are not
much better than Rome's. Scripture also plays a part in Rome's doctrinal
equations but it's subordinated and for the past 75 years the modern
Evangelical movement has engaged in the same sort of doctrinal sophistries. The
Scriptures are affirmed but the Sufficiency of Scripture (for doctrine and
life) is (despite their claims) denied. Like Rome, the Scriptures are at best a
starting point, an element within a larger equation of philosophical inference,
speculation and cultural compromise.
And while the Evangelical apologists do all they can to
counter the narratives of church decline, the truth is they're also playing a
dishonest game when it comes to their own numbers. Membership numbers often do
not reflect reality and this is certainly the case in the Evangelical world
where discipline and accountability are largely absent or non-existent.
Large numbers of people who are on the books, don't show up.
And large numbers of people who assemble with a given congregation show up
irregularly at best. In the congregation we attend, some weeks there are eighty
people, others there are thirty-five or forty. Where is everyone? For some it's
work. For others it's just a lack of commitment, a distraction, a lack of
prioritisation. I know many who say they want to go to church but by Sunday
morning they're tired. Our maddened culture is exhausting especially for those
caught up in the mainstream lifestyle and its expectations. Long hours leave
little time for life. Saturday's are either taken up by wage-salary work or are
consumed with 'catching up' on errands and chores... all the more when the
modern middle class expectations of yard maintenance, the size of yards and
homes for that matter, the number of bathrooms etc... means that taking care of
a house (to the expected standard) is almost a full time job. I guess the ideal
is to make enough money to hire out the yard and housekeeping (which often
requires more hours of work to generate the income) and so the maddening
hamster-wheel trap churns away.
By Sunday morning people are exhausted and it's pretty easy
to hit the 'snooze' button and lay about in pajamas watching television,
followed by a buffet or a little shopping in the afternoon. On one level such
exhaustion is understandable and those who are attempting to be 'serious' in
terms of Christian lifestyle even while playing the world's games (according to
the world's rules) are to be pitied.
These people need to be challenged in a way they have never
been challenged before. They need to re-think their lives, their goals and
their definitions of success.
But that's not what's going to happen in Evangelical circles.
One need not be a Sabbatarian to argue for Sunday worship.
It's the clear pattern in the New Testament and the Early Church. We can
disagree over the theological basis for the day and whether or not it's rooted
in some kind of abiding continuity (and yet modification) of the Decalogue.
But this is what the Church has done and in our culture it's
the day Christians meet. I've argued at other times that in a Muslim context
given that Friday is the equivalent of Sunday, it might be acceptable for
Christians to meet on that day. Others might disagree and I certainly respect
that and yet the point I'm making is that there would still be an agreed upon
day in which everyone in the Christian community says... life stops because
this is the day we meet. This, the day and time of meeting is a priority above
all others.
In our culture the day is clearly Sunday. Now the Church can
meet on other days too and ideally it should do so. If we had real Christian
communities we could (like the Early Church) meet on an almost daily basis but
that would require a deliberate effort and serious re-calibration of life and
priorities. The Amish and groups like them are able to experience this kind of
daily fellowship and interaction and of course they pay a price for it in how
they've chosen to live. I'm speaking of their proximity, the fact that they
live in clusters, near one another, connected to each other in their daily
lives. Their technological stance certainly affords this but is not an absolute
necessity. I'm not saying they're right or that their way is the only way. Of
course not. I'm typing this on a computer so clearly I'm not in agreement with
the Amish but there's something to it, something we can learn from... at least
in principle.
Some churches are offering Saturday and Sunday services. This
is fine except for the fact that the move seems rooted in a form of compromise
that I hate to see. It would be better if Christians stuck together and refused
to work on Sundays. If the nation really had as many Christians as some claim
this alone would have the power to change culture. But of course the truth is
quite different. The additional problems raised by the article are superficial,
trivialities and pseudo-dilemmas born of bad extra-scriptural ecclesiology.
Problems associated with musicians and child-care do not
concern those who would pattern the Church after the New Testament. Leader
burnout is a combination of sloth, distraction, a flawed 'pastor'-based polity,
and the production-expectation of modern sermonising. Leaders balk at teaching
multiple times a week because in many cases they are unfamiliar with the
Scriptures or so tethered to manuscript production (and thus reading or
memorising a sermon) and a kind of scholastic methodology that they spend tens
of hours putting together what should be a fairly simple 30-45 minute lesson.
In other cases time is wasted in the pursuit of illustrations, stories and
other such 'sermoncraft'... which smack more of production, showmanship and
rhetorical trickery than substantive teaching.
I always remember an old (now deceased) Reformed pastor I
knew who was helping out at a church plant I attended. He would get up on
Sunday morning and drive quite a distance just to preach. When he showed up he
was surprised that there was no Sunday School planned. He volunteered on the
spot. He didn't need a curriculum or time to plan. He was one of those older
guys that had lived and breathed the Scriptures all his life and the thought of
jumping up and leading a little study through a passage was hardly daunting. He
was able to do it ad lib and did just fine. Given the low state of knowledge in
today's churches this should be easier than ever. Our teenage kids have been
attending a Bible study as of late and I've been left somewhat aghast at the
shallowness of the content but even more so by their reports of where the other
attendees are at in terms of knowledge. And mind you this is at an ostensibly
Calvinistic church where one might expect the level of knowledge to be a couple
of notches higher than what one finds at the run of the mill Evangelical
gathering.
I have little patience for the 'sports' argument and it's
clear the author of the cited piece is perhaps a little embarrassed by it too.
Once again if there were really so many Christians out there and they all
refused to participate in Sunday sports, then the leagues would change their
days or collapse, right?
And what's a greater testimony, to craft a phony Christian
sports ethic and witness (something I encountered at Christian school back in
the 1980's) or to say 'no' and then tell people why. It will really strike them
that you make a stand for something, give up something and refuse on the basis
of principle. They may shrug their shoulders but they'll remember it far more
than some kind of professed ethical sportsmanship... which really creates
dilemmas in that if you're part of team dedicated to winning, an attitude of
'it doesn't matter if you win or lose but how you play the game' often strikes
others as less than loyal, less than fully committed, less than expressing the
proper devotion to the team and its goals.
I remember the dominionist Chuck Colson criticising American skier
Bode Miller in reference to his comments at the 2006 Torino games in which
Miller (if I might read through the lines) suggested that the experience was
more important to him than his medals and tally of victories. This was
excoriated by media commentators and even Evangelicals like Colson who believed
that Miller wasn't acting ethically. He wasn't fully committed to his team and
of course (if I might read between the lines once more) to the glory of America
and the 'honour' of representing it.
Though Miller was a bit of punk (he was just some half-crazed
skiing dude, what did they expect?) I actually found his attitude somewhat
refreshing, especially in light of the often self-destructive fanaticism that
surrounds competitive sports, an attitude I believe to be deeply un-Christian.
Perhaps it even struck an ethical note in the right direction. I remember being
very put off by the commentators who attacked him but most of all by Colson, a
person whose Christian profession and mission were by my estimation under a
dark cloud to be sure.
I remember as an unregenerate teenager playing on the football
team at my Christian High School being rather unimpressed by the 'ethical' or 'Christian'
approach to the sport. In the case of American football unless I hated the guy
across the line and wanted to hurt him, I found that I was ineffective. It all rubbed
me wrong and a few years later when I was converted and actually started
studying the Scriptures I was vindicated and over time and upon reflection I grew
rather disgusted with the Evangelical high school I had attended... not just
with its sport programmes but almost every aspect of its curriculum, culture
and general approach.
But I digress.
The last point regarding entrepreneurs struck me as
particularly bogus. If you're self-employed, then you have complete control of
your schedule. I know of a Christian guy who owns a lumber-hardware store. He's
closed on Sundays and given that our area is flooded on the weekends by
'campers' and other people from the cities who have second homes and weekend
retreats, a Sunday closure means that he's losing what would otherwise be his
top sales day, or at least his second best day.
It's all about priorities. In his case, he's made the right
choice.
Likewise as my work is often connected to these weekend
visitors I have lost a lot of work by refusing to work on Sundays and meet with
people on Sundays. Sunday morning is the number one time most of these people
want to meet me for a consultation. It's their 'laid back' time as they prepare
to head home to the Pittsburgh or Cleveland metropolitan areas on Sunday
afternoon. Some understand my refusal and others are left baffled and
frustrated. The idea that you would put church over making money is to them...
(ironically to be sure) unethical.
But it makes a point. They know what I'm about and some even
failing to understand it will nevertheless respect my position and in a few
cases it's actually scored me some points in the realm of integrity.
Rainer, the article's author tries (but mostly fails) to make
hay out of the agrarian angle and indeed there are some strange agrarian
time-ordering holdovers, especially in rural areas. For example around here
most restaurants close by 7pm. It's frustrating especially for people who get
off work at 5, rush home and by the time they get cleaned up they barely have
time to get to the restaurant before it closes. Remember in rural areas,
there's lots of driving involved. The schedules hark back to farm days.
But Rainer is using the argument in a disingenuous way, a
type of reductio ad absurdum that in
the end totally misses several larger points. It will tickle the ears of some
to be sure, but it does nothing to help the Church discern its place and
understand the principles which (ought) to undergird and guide it.
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