The Gospel Coalition

(My forthcoming book, Unfashionable: Making a Difference in the World by Being Different, is almost finished. It will be released in April 2009 from Multnomah. Here is an excerpt from my final chapter.)

Both the Bible and history bear witness to the fact that it’s not so much big churches or big ministries that make the biggest impact in our world; it’s big Christians. By big Christian I’m not meaning the Christian whose physical stature resembles Hulk Hogan. I’m meaning the Christian whose spiritual stature resembles Polycarp, the bishop of Smyrna in the second century A.D.

Around A.D. 161, the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius ordered the persecution of all Christians. The story of how Polycarp handled his persecution is, for me, one of the greatest examples of big Christianity this world has ever known. John Foxe in his famous book Foxe’s Christian Martyrs of the World, tells the story best:

Hearing his captors had arrived one evening, Polycarp left his bed to welcome them, ordered a meal prepared for them, and then asked for an hour alone to pray. The soldiers were so impressed by Polycarp’s advanced age and composure that they began to wonder why they had been sent to take him, but as soon as he had finished his prayers, they put him on a donkey and brought him to the city. Brought before the tribunal and the crowd, Polycarp refused to deny Christ, although the proconsul begged him to ‘consider yourself and have pity on your great age. Reproach Christ and I will release you.’

Polycarp replied, ‘Eighty-six years I have served Him, and He has never once wronged me. How can I blaspheme my King, who saved me?’ Threatened with wild beasts and fire, Polycarp stood his ground. ‘What are you waiting for? Do whatever you please.’ The crowd demanded Polycarp’s death, gathering wood for the fire and preparing to tie him to the stake. ‘Leave me,’ he said. ‘He who will give me strength to sustain the fire will help me not to flinch from the pile.’ So they bound him but didn’t nail him to the stake.

As soon as Polycarp finished his prayer, the fire was lit, but it leaped up around him, leaving him unburned, until the people convinced a soldier to plunge a sword into him. When he did, so much blood gushed out that the fire was extinguished. The soldiers then placed his body into a fire and burned it to ashes, which some Christians later gathered up and buried properly.

Every time I read that account, I get shivers up my spine. Every time I read “Eighty-six years I have served Him, and He has never once wronged me. How can I blaspheme my King, who saved me?” I’m reminded of what a big Christian is—and how desperately the world needs more Polycarp’s today!

Because religious freedom in most parts of the world is protected, many of us will never face the physical danger that Polycarp faced because of his commitment to Jesus. Most of us don’t have to fear that we will be put to death or placed in prison for our faith in Jesus. But we face danger of another, more toxic sort. Jesus said, “Do not be afraid of that which can kill the body but be afraid of that which can kill the soul.” So while we must never forget the physical suffering of our Christian brothers and sisters in places like Southeast Asia, AIDS ravished Africa, and Communist China, we must keep in mind that the greatest threat to a thriving, God saturated, world transforming faith is not physical danger, but worldliness. 

Worldliness, as I described earlier, is a sleepiness of the soul in which the status, pleasures, comforts, and cares of the world appear solid, stunning, and affecting, while the truths of Scripture become abstractions — unable to grip the heart or guide our everyday activities. This means that the greatest challenge facing most Christians is not “persecution from the world, but seduction by the world.” “Becoming all things to all men” does not mean fitting in with the fallen patterns of this world so that there is no distinguishable difference between Christians and non-Christians. When the sin patterns of this world start to seem normal and the ways of God start to seem strange, we know we’ve been seduced. And when this happens, Christians become radically ineffective. The point I’ve made over and over in this book is that we transform this world by being distinct from it: living against the world for the world. We fail to make a difference in the world when we fail to be different from the world.

I have friends who are foreign missionaries and they tell me that one of the most difficult, hard to get used to, things about being a foreign missionary is the experience of culture shock. Culture shock, according to my friends, happens when a missionary arrives in a foreign field or returns home after being away for a long time. It’s caused when one set of cultural assumptions clashes with another set; when what seems normal to you in one cultural setting seems uncomfortably strange to you in another. After a couple of months, however, the culture shock goes away. Over time they gradually settle into the assumptions and patterns of behavior of the culture around them. As one of them told me once, “Shock eventually gives way to submission.”

The experience of culture shock has always been a helpful image to me as I try to understand the challenge of living in the world but not being of the world. Faithfully following Christ requires that Christians maintain a constant state of culture shock to the sinful patterns of the world. As followers of Jesus, we must maintain what psychologists call “cognitive dissonance” to the patterns of culture that undermine our loyalty to God and his unfashionable ways. For Christians to embody a vibrant, world-transforming presence in our culture, shock must never give way to submission; tension with the world must never give way to comfort in the world. My fear, however, is that for many of us professing Christians, it already has.  

How many of us, for example, under the intense pressure to give in and go along, possesses the spiritual backbone to face social scorn and contempt the way Polycarp did? How many of us quickly renounce allegiance to our King and the unfashionable way he has called us to think and live just so that we will “fit in” and be culturally accepted? Seriously. As I examine the spiritual stature of many professing Christians in our day, including me, I really wonder: Where are all the Polycarp’s today? I see plenty of big churches and big ministries, but where are all the big Christians? Are there many Christians left who are willing to die, physically or socially, for God’s unfashionable ways? Are there many Christian’s left who are willing, and desirous, to “leave it all on the field” for Christ’s sake? It’s important for us to remember that Jesus never went looking for crowds. He went looking for disciples. And to get disciples, he explained that any who wanted to follow Him would need to count the cost. Daily Christian living, according to Jesus, meant daily Christian dying: dying to our fascination with fitting in and joyfully becoming a “fool for Christ.”

My suspicion is that if all Christians were similar in spiritual stature to Polycarp, the Christian witness in this world would be much greater than it is. Remember, it only took twelve God-intoxicated men, full of the Holy Spirit, to literally turn the world upside down—or, more accurately, right side up! As E.M. Bounds said famously, “Men are God’s method. The church is looking for better methods; God is looking for better men.”