The Gospel Coalition

After listening to the lecture I pointed out yesterday from David Wells on preaching to postmodern people, I picked up my well-worn copy of his excellent book God in the Wasteland and read through some of my favorite sections. Reading God in the Wasteland while I was in college planted the seeds and laid the foundation for the thesis of Unfashionable. In the last chapter of Unfashionable, I write:

The seed for this book was planted in me fourteen years ago as I was sitting in an upstairs cubicle in my college library reading David Wells’s book God in the Wasteland. In it Wells meticulously shows that God rests too lightly, too inconsequentially, on the modern church: “His truth is too distant, his grace is too ordinary, his judgment is too benign, his Gospel is too easy, and his Christ is too common.” All the bells and whistles in the church have caused us to “forget” the God whose church it is. We’ve become entirely too comfortable with the ways and tastes of this world, and it has led to our increasing irrelevance—we’re failing to make a difference because we’re failing to be different.

I’ll never forget the morning I came to the end of God in the Wasteland and read the following paragraph. I don’t think it’s an overstatement for me to say that, outside the Bible, no paragraph ever written motivates me more or captures my hope better than this one from Wells. It has become my impassioned plea to young evangelicals:

I want the Evangelical church to be the church. I want it to embody a vibrant spirituality. I want the church to be an alternative to post-modern culture, not a mere echo of it. I want a church that is bold to be different and unafraid to be faithful . . . a church that reflects an integral and undiminished confidence in the power of God’s word, a church that can find in the midst of our present cultural breakdown the opportunity to be God’s people in a world that has abandoned God. To be the church in this way, it is also going to have to find in the coming generation, leaders who exemplify this hope for its future and who will devote themselves to seeing it realized. . . . They will have to decline to spend themselves in the building of their own private kingdoms and refuse to be intimidated into giving the church less and other than what it needs. . . . To succeed, they will have to be people of large vision, people of courage, people who have learned again what it means to live by the word of God, and, most importantly, what it means to live before the Holy God of that word.

To the degree that God becomes relevant once again in the life of the church, so that God’s truth and not social trends become the driving force behind everything we are and do, the church will become what the world needs it to be—a counter-culture for the common good.

And while that paragraph from God in the Wasteland still stands out as my favorite, I read another one yesterday that I had marked up many years ago which comes in a close second. Addressing the tendency of churches to provide band-aid solutions to cancerous problems, Wells writes:

It is one of the remarkable features of contemporary church life that so many are attempting to heal the church by tinkering with its structures, its services, its public face. This is clear evidence to me that modernity has successfully palmed off one of its great deceits on us, convincing us that God himself is secondary to organization and image, that the church’s health lies in its flow charts, its convenience, and its offerings rather than in its inner life, its spiritual authenticity, the toughness of its moral intentions, its understanding of what it means to have God’s Word in this world. Those who do not see this are out of touch with the deep realities of life, mistaking changes on the surface for changes in the deep waters that flow beneath. An inspired group of marketers might find a way of reviving a flagging business by modifying its image and offerings, but the maters of the heart, the matters of God, are not susceptible to such cosmetic alteration. The world’s business and God’s business are two different things.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to play around with my life. I want to “leave it all out on the field” for Christ’s sake. I don’t want to be a mile wide and an inch deep, spiritually. I want to possess the backbone to dig in and be unfashionable. I’m ashamed of those moments when I’m afraid to be a fool for Christ because the world might think I’m strange. I want to have a God-given, uncommon valor to follow God’s lead and do God’s will, regardless of how I might be perceived. I want to live my life, as the Puritans used to say, before “an audience of One.”

Christians who try to convince the world around them that they’re really no different at all, hoping they’ll be accepted on the world’s terms and on the world’s turf, should be embarrassed. It’s time for Christians to embrace the fact that we’re peculiar people. Because true followers of Jesus have been given a new heart and mind, we’re to operate according to a different standard, with different goals and motivations. Everything about us—our perspective on possessions, lifestyle, and relationships—will be foundationally different from the world around us: “We worship what we cannot see, love what we cannot hold, and live for what we cannot own.” To the world around us, this will seem out of place, uncool, and odd. My hope and dream is that 2009 will be a year in which followers of Jesus increasingly learn to embrace that fact.

May 2009 be the most unfashionable year of your life; the year of “the unfashionable church!”

Those who know me best know that theologian David Wells has had a huge impact on my thinking over the last 13 years when it comes to the church and our culture. He is, in my humble opinion, one of the most astute observers of present cultural trends in the church today. Not long ago, Dr. Wells (Professor of Theology at Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary) spoke at the Carl F. H. Henry Center for Theological Understanding on the topic of preaching to postmodern people. I watched his lecture online this morning and found it to be, not surprisingly, insightful and helpful.

Whether you are a preacher or not, it would be worth your while to take an hour and watch this video.

(The thoughts below contain themes that I develop at length in my forthcoming book Unfashionable, due out this April.) 

Many church leaders have been telling us for a long time that the church’s cultural significance ultimately depends on its ability to keep up either with changing structures and environments (innovative technology, for instance) or with the latest intellectual fad (such as postmodernism).

Recently I was flipping through a couple of well-known Christian magazines. I counted six full-page advertisements for upcoming conferences designed to help churches adapt in order to meet modern needs—“new ways for new days.” Some emphasized improved techniques, programs, methods, and advertising strategies. Others stressed our need to “emerge” from preoccupation with traditional truth claims and theology and to focus instead on what’s most important—relationships, caring for the poor, and social justice issues—forgetting that robust theological confession (belief) and Christlike practical compassion (behavior) are always meant to go hand in hand. To believe otherwise is like arguing that the wing on the right side of an airplane is more important than the wing on the left. Without both working together, the plane isn’t going anywhere.

But here’s what struck me: all this comes at precisely the time when our culture is growing weary of slick production and whatever’s new and is growing hungry for authentic presence and historical rootedness. Younger generations don’t want trendy engagement from the church; in fact, they’re suspicious of it. Instead they want truthful engagement with historical and theological solidity that enables meaningful interaction with transcendent reality. They want desperately to invest their life in something worth dying for, not some here-today-gone-tomorrow fad.

It’s both sad and ironic that this shift is now putting the church in the wrong place at the right time. Just when our culture is yearning for something different, many churches are developing creative ways to be the same. Just as many in our culture are beginning to search back in time, many churches are pronouncing the irrelevance of the past. Just as people are starting to seek after truth, many churches are turning away from it. As a result, these churches are losing their distinct identity as a people set apart to reach the world.

I have good news for all of us who are becoming weary of this pressure from church leaders to fit in with the world: we don’t have to. The relevance of the church doesn’t depend on its ability to identify the latest cultural trends and imitate them. “The ultimate factor in the church’s engagement with society,” Os Guinness says, “is the church’s engagement with God,” not the church’s engagement with the latest intellectual or corporate fashion. Contrary to what we’ve been hearing, our greatest need as twenty-first-century churches is not structural but spiritual. We need to remember that God has established his church as an alternative society, not to compete with or copy this world, but to offer a refreshing alternative to it.

When we forget this, we inadvertently communicate to our culture that we have nothing unique to offer, nothing deeply spiritual or profoundly transforming. Tragically, this leaves many in our world looking elsewhere for the difference they crave.

Ironically, the more we Christians pursue worldly relevance, the more we’ll render ourselves irrelevant to the world around us. There’s an irrelevance to pursuing relevance, just as there’s a relevance to practicing irrelevance. To be truly relevant, you have to say things that are unfashionably eternal, not trendy. It’s the timeless things that are most relevant to most people, and we dare not forget this fact in our pursuit of relevance.

In an article about younger generations returning to tradition, Lauren Winner notes that young people today “are not so much wary of institutions as they are wary of institutions that don’t do what they’re supposed to do.”10 What Christians are “supposed to do” is remind our culture that the things of this world aren’t all there is and that human beings aren’t left to the resources of this world to satisfy our otherworldly longings. Christians alone can provide our culture with that longed-for transcendent difference, because only the Christian gospel offers a true spirituality, an otherworldliness grounded in reality and history. Only the Christian story fuses past, present, and future with meaning from above and beyond. That’s what we have to offer and proclaim.

We Christians have been entrusted with an eternal, transcendent truth that can transform our weary culture and open others’ eyes to a world beyond their own: the story of a simple Jew who made a difference because he was different.

I was thinking this morning about how we tend to think of one another in terms of categories: he’s rich, she’s poor; she’s pretty, he’s ugly; she’s smart, he’s dumb; he’s black, she’s white. We typecast people. That’s how we know how to deal with them. We respond one way to someone if they’re rich and another way to someone if they’re poor. We approach different people according to the socio-economic, cultural, or racial category we’ve placed them in. Of course, this dehumanizes people as it fails to grasp that all of us are “fearfully and wonderfully made.”

This is why I love the story of Jesus calming the storm in Matthew 8:27. After this miraculous event, his amazed disciples say to one another, “What manner of man is this that even the wind and sea obey him?” They had no category for Jesus. He was beyond typecasting. He transcends every barrier that separates us from one another—and he intends for his body, the church, to follow suit.

Tim Keller’s short article in the most recent Christianity Today is the best piece on humility I’ve ever read and it’s finally online! He writes:   

Christian humility is not thinking less of yourself; it is thinking of yourself less, as C. S. Lewis so memorably said. It is to be no longer always noticing yourself and how you are doing and how you are being treated. It is “blessed self-forgetfulness.”

Please read the whole thing here.

Neil Jumonville, in his introduction to The New York Intellectuals Reader defines what a public intellectual is:

The term public intellectual describes one who is a generalist knowledgeable about cultural and political matters and whose ideas reach a substantial public. Their writings cross disciplines, and although they know much about the past and often address it directly, they train their analysis on contemporary debates. The intellectual role is different from that of scholars. Intellectuals usually write in periodicals for a general educated public while scholars write for their professional peers in books or refereed scholarly journals. Because they often address contemporary issues, intellectuals tend to write book reviews, columns and articles partly because the pace of cultural debate requires a rapid response not available through the long gestation period of books.

Maybe one of the reasons Christians are not having a greater impact in shaping our culture is because we need more public intellectuals. We have plenty of scholars (thank God for this), and even more subculture icons (I’m sure you know what I think about that). But where are our public intellectuals? 

John Seel understands how culture works better than anyone I know. His sane thinking never ceases to amaze me. This lecture entiteld It’s the Culture Stupid: Reflections on the Challenge of Cultural Influence was first given at the Boston L’Abri and subsequently republished in Think, a publication of Cardus (formerly the Work Research Foundation), a Canadian think tank that seeks to foster a Christian view on work and public life, and later published in Provocations, the online journal of The Trinity Forum. As I’ve mentioned before, John is a cultural renewal entrepreneur, educational reformer, and writer. He and his wife, Kathryn, live in Cohasset, Massachusetts.

What I found particularly helpful in this lecture was John’s excellent explanation of the cultural mandate. He said:

The creation mandate has three aspects summarized by the three words: fruitful, fill, and subdue. “Be fruitful and increase in number, fill the earth, and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea, and the birds of the air, and over every living creature that moves on the ground.” This mission statement answers the what, where, and how of the human enterprise. It describes what it means to be human.

The substance of the task is captured in the words “be fruitful.” Its “what” is the twin obligation of procreativity and cultural creativity. We have a responsibility to create life and to generate a life-affirming, life-sustaining culture in its widest variety – from making babies to making music, from family life to civic life.

The scope of the task is expressed in the words, “fill the earth.” Its “where” is all creation. Ours is a global responsibility – “You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” This witness encompasses an ecological responsibility: over every living creature in the sea, in the air, and on land. This witness is both extensive (geographically, all nations) as well as intensive (sociologically all of culture). Our task is both wide and deep – every nation, all of culture.

Finally, our stewardship of creation is expressed in the words “subdue” and “rule.” Its “how” is one of authority and leadership. Neither abdication nor domination is an expression of faithfulness. The force of the imperative is not control over, but care for. We are responsible to cultivate, prune, and husband nature, thereby enabling its full potential to glorify its Creator. Our aim is not merely environmental “sustainability,” a hands-off policy of an unkept wilderness, but rather creational “vitality,” a thoughtful active investment of ourselves in nature’s rich inherent potential – a weeded garden in full bloom, a landscaped city filled with music and art.

Have you ever read a better explanation of the cultural mandate? Read his whole lecture here.

Universal Pictures has given a gift to our families this Christmas. The Tale of Despereaux (G) will be released in theaters this Friday, December 19th. You can view the trailer and website here.

My friend John Seel (a cultural analyst par excellence) sent me this note the other day:

I’m really high on the upcoming film, “The Tale of Despereaux.” When Hollywood does something right, we really need to applaud! May be some day they’ll really start listening to their audience.

So I asked John if he’d be willing to write a guest post here exlpaining the story and why he thinks it’s important. Thankfully, he agreed. Take it away John…  

Life isn’t fair. Life is hard. This is not a lesson we often teach our children. We tend to protect them from the hard edges. But a sense of entitlement leads to an attitude of victimhood. It’s far better to forgive and overcome.

The Tale of Despereaux is a compelling morality tale where themes of acceptance, sacrifice, forgiveness, beauty, light, and love find their narrative voice and compelling action. It is a disservice to the young to think that these adult themes or heroic choices are limited to the grown-up world. In fact, reality knows no age limit to nobility of purpose, no size limit to the expanse of the heart. It’s best to learn these lessons when one is young – to work them out on the playground, in the classroom, around the kitchen table, or in this case, through a beautifully told adventure about a tiny mouse with big ears…and an even bigger heart.

If brokenness is a reality, so too is forgiveness. Forgiveness always has a cost. Someone always bears its price. “Forgiveness breaks the chain of causality because he who ‘forgives’ you — out of love — takes upon himself the consequences of what you have done. Forgiveness, therefore, always entails a sacrifice,” writes former U.N. Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold.

Imagination always precedes knowledge. It’s better to illustrate this lesson in a story, than teach it as a rule. For when the heart is engaged, the feet follow.

The Tale of Despereaux is tale of redemption. In the end, soup returns and the Kingdom of Dor is restored because the cycle of bitterness and revenge is broken. Forgiveness is the most heroic of all actions.

Few movies depict forgiveness as central to a virtuous heroic life. This is the message of the film, The Tale of Despereaux, the cinematic adaptation of Kate DeCamillo’s Newbery award-winning book.

[John has also co-written the discussion questions below for personal, family, and church use.]

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS: THE TALE OF DESPEREAUX

Despereaux
1. What quality or qualities make Despereaux different than those around him?
2. How are Despereaux’s unusual physical qualities related to his moral qualities?
3. How do Despereaux’s unusual qualities serve him in his quest?

Good and Evil
1. What was the greatest good done in The Tale of Despereaux, and what was the greatest evil?
2. How is good brought out of evil in this story?
3. What causes the rain to fall again, the sun to shine, and the king to leave his dark room?
4. What plunges the Kingdom of Dor into darkness and how is the light restored?
5. How are the wrongs done in the story rectified? What single quality most changes the various unhappy situations for the better?
6. Who (or Which character) in The Tale of Despereaux is responsible for the restoration of the Kingdom of Dor?

Motivation
1. Despereaux ignores the rules of his people. Why? Does he live by any rules? (Remember that a rule is a measure of action.)
2. What most motivates Despereaux in all his actions?
3. Do other characters share the vision Despereaux has, either from the beginning or intermittently?
4. The movie says that when we are hurt, sometimes we look for someone or something to blame. Was the king wise to blame soup and rats for his grief? What should he have done instead?
5. Several characters in the movie pursue their dreams. Is it always good to have a dream, or are some dreams distractions from our real callings and temptations to envy others?
6. After the queen died, it seemed all the king did was sit around, play sad tunes, look at her picture, and cry. Is this how a king should behave?

Quest
1. Does Despereaux fulfill his quest to tell the Princess the end of the story?
2. Does the story that Despereaux reads have an end?

Other Characters
1. What quality in the Princess prevents her from ever being truly imprisoned? Do others in the story have that same quality?
2. What does it mean to be a princess? Princess Pea is a princess. Is Mig a princess?
3. Why couldn’t the king, sitting in his dark room and playing his music, hear Despereaux?
4. Why and how did the king shut out the light from his kingdom?
5. Why does Roscuro abandon his quest and how does he find it again?
6. What is the role of Boldo in The Tale of Despereaux? Does he help achieve the quest?
 

From Sarah Pulliam at Christianity Today:

Rick Warren, senior pastor at Saddleback Church, will give the invocation at Barack Obama’s inaugural swearing-in ceremony on January 20.

The benediction will be given by Rev. Dr. Joseph E. Lowery, dean of the civil rights movement and co-founder with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

Obama will be the first president since Harry Truman not to have a close relationship with evangelist Billy Graham. Franklin Graham told CT last month that although his father is praying for and would like to meet Obama, his role as counselor is ending. Could Rick Warren fill that role?

While working on my forthcoming book Unfashionable: Making a Difference in the World by being Different, I had a conversation about fundamentalism with a woman in her sixties. With tears in her eyes, she told me about her strict, cold Christian upbringing, which taught her that being different meant girls couldn’t wear pants, makeup, or jewelry, and guys had to have short hair and be clean-shaven. Guys and girls couldn’t swim together in the same pool; movies were strictly off-limits; alcohol was forbidden; and any music other than classical music and hymns was clearly “of the devil.” And associating with anyone who broke those rules was a violation of Christian purity.

This woman grew up being told that the church was a tribe, not a mission, and its chief objective was self-preservation from the world, not self-sacrifice for the world. When I explained that this wasn’t the kind of “difference” I was calling for in my book, she was understandably relieved.

The kind of self-righteous and radical withdrawal by Christians this woman described to me isn’t nearly as prevalent today as it was in past decades. That’s a good thing. But a less obvious form of cultural withdrawal and retreat is gaining momentum.

As I travel to churches around this country, I’ve noticed a growing trend: traditional places of worship are turning into sprawling campuses—cities within cities. Many churches now have their own restaurants, nightclubs, gymnasiums, bookstores, food courts, cafés, fitness centers, game rooms, and baseball fields. They provide their own sports leagues, exercise programs, and yellow pages. I understand the benefit of some of these things, but when churches provide a substitute activity site for everything under the sun—effectively setting up a parallel universe—we run the risk of abandoning contact with the very world God has commanded us and equipped us to change.

As Andy Crouch points out in his book Culture Making, “When we copy culture within our own private enclaves, the culture at large remains unchanged.” Christians who retreat into a comfortable subculture are bad missionaries—it’s that simple.

Remember, making contact is a key to salt’s and light’s effectiveness. That’s why Jesus’ command in Matthew 28:19 is that we “go.”

His command reflects the impact of the new covenant on the mission of God’s people. Under the old covenant, Israel was a nation blessed by God in order to be a blessing to other nations (Psalm 67), but Israel’s function as a community of blessing was primarily (though not exclusively) centripetal; instead of Israel going to the nations to give blessing, the nations came to Israel to receive it. Think of the Gentile women Rahab and Ruth, both of whom received the blessing of God by coming into his covenant community.

Under the new covenant, while it’s true that blessings await those who enter into the visible church, the church’s function as a community of blessing is primarily (though not exclusively) centrifugal; the church goes out into the world to bring God’s blessing of redemption and renewal to the whole earth.

My friend Trevin often makes the distinction between “sink Christians” and “faucet Christians.” Sink Christians, he says, view salvation as something to soak up. It fills the sink and they soak in the benefits (heaven, peace, Jesus, etc.). Faucet Christians see salvation as something that comes to them in order to flow out through them to the rest of the world as a blessing to others, as a pipe carries water from its source to a parched land. I like that.

We’re called to be “fishers of men” (Matthew 4:19), and we’re to be Christ’s witnesses “in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth” (Acts 1:8). We go out in order to give.

When we operate according to the idea “If we build it, they will come,” we fail to take into account this distinct nature of new covenant ministry and mission. Instead we’re called to operate with this mindset: “God is building; therefore we should go.”