Missio Dei Suburbia

The End of Christian America

Jon Meacham in the April 13th issue of Newsweek:

To the surprise of liberals who fear the advent of an evangelical theocracy and to the dismay of religious conservatives who long to see their faith more fully expressed in public life, Christians are now making up a declining percentage of the American population.

Read the entire article here.

Driscoll on CNN

The Mark Driscoll national media tour continues - NYT Magazine, Nightline and now he's on CNN this weekend with comedian DL Hughley.

What I liked about this exchange is that Mark was able to take a dude who's going to approach a topic like sex flippantly and get his respect and open the door to a conversation about Jesus. If DL was living in Seattle, I'd lay money that he'd be sitting in one of the Mars Hill worship gatherings this weekend.

Doubting Your Doubts

'...it seemed good to me...to write an orderly account...that you may have certainty...' (Luke 1:3-4)

Everyone struggles with doubt. No one should want to stay there. Because of Christ, no one has to stay there.

May that hope make us compassionate and courageous in 2009.

Christians and Politics

This will show up sometime in The Oconee Leader. I'm channeling two semesters as a political science major, involvement in two presidential campaigns on a local level, pastoring in the Bible Belt and thoughts from Charlie Drew's book, A Public Faith.

Christians are lousy at politics.

Thirty years of organized evangelicalism as a political entity has failed to bring about the kingdom of God or better days for all or much else besides the centaurian cross-breeding of conservative social policy and the Republican party. Evangelicals have become a constituency to be pandered to and for the most part we have taken the bit. Walk into almost any church in Oconee County this Sunday (including mine) and political conversation will sound like talking points from Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly or any number of conservative pundits.

I believe that followers of Jesus Christ can and absolutely must walk down a new political road and become the kind of people who provide the resources for hope and change and unity that politicians of all stripes promise but simply cannot deliver. There are deep divisions in our country and in this county – to ignore them or to attempt to wish them away is both naïve and the height of tomfoolery. This is not a call to ignore our differences, only to put down the guns, knives, ninja stars and other rhetorical weaponry that so often accompanies political dialogue.

Living Outside the Bubble

Earlier this summer, I wrote an article about the opportunity that followers of Jesus have to live outside of the bubble that Christianity creates in places like Oconee County. Instead of living as though the church is a place of safety, refuge and protection from a dangerous, hostile and nasty world, the Scriptures teach us that the church is the people that God has gathered together in Jesus Christ to join Him in putting broken people and a broken world back together.

That shouldn’t negate what goes on in our worship gatherings, Sunday School classes and smaller groups that meet throughout the week around town – but it does mean that even those gatherings need to constantly have their gaze turned upward and outward. The church with the healthiest relationships among its members is the church that lives outside of the bubble. Churches implode because the energy that should be directed towards the kind of worship that spills into everyday life and the people around us gets expended on trivial internal matters.

Because Jesus left heaven to come to earth and further his mission to renew and restore all that was wrecked and ruined in the universe, those of us who follow him should be the kind of people whose lives add value to the community around us. That’s what it looks like to live outside of the bubble – to make Oconee County a better place so that all of us might know that there is a God who is true and good and all-satisfying.

To live outside the bubble, we need to breathe in the fresh air of the gospel. I’m not sure how it happens but Christians pick up this nasty addiction called religion – a carcinogen that pollutes our lives and the air around us by leading us to think that God won’t love us unless we’re good people. So we try hard to be better than other people and because God can’t see how good I am unless I’m better than you, I’m going to find intentional and inadvertent ways to make it obvious to God and everyone else that I grade out better than you and therefore deserve whatever good God has stored in his prize closet far more than you do.

Are we addicted to religion? We might be if we think the biggest problems in the community resides anywhere outside of our own heart. While we might get our kicks broadcasting the failures of others and launching verbal tirades against people who aren’t like us, the Scriptures teach that failure is universal and that we’ve all vandalized God’s perfect world. I know that owning up to our own junk isn’t all that popular – who wants to run around feeling bad about who we are and what we’ve done? Actually, that’s another symptom of religion addiction – thinking that our identity is determined by how well we’re living. Religion says that the Christian life is about what we do today but the gospel declares that the Christian life is always about what Jesus did for us on the cross.

Does that mean that it doesn’t matter how we live? Of course not – our life is a reflection on who God is and what he’s about in this world. But we don’t always look like Jesus. Only the gospel humbles us with that reality without crushing us, freeing us without allowing us to float off into a life of our own design. Because we are already loved, our failures don’t destroy us and our success isn’t some kind of badge we use to wield our moral authority in the community.

Only the gospel transforms us from mercenaries to missionaries. We’re don’t have to hunt for pagans or hide from the world – we’re free to love our neighbor and co-worker and classmates by listening well and learning each others’ stories and laughing at our own mistakes. The reformation that Oconee County desperately needs begins with a simple, radical love that flows from a bleeding Savior. Only when we see Jesus bleed out for us will we bleed out for others by inviting them into our home, giving the glory and taking the blame at work, carving out time for a cup of coffee and a conversation that connects their world to Jesus.

Sean Lucas on the Popularity of Joel Osteen

Sean Lucas, on why Osteen's Lakewood Church has over 15,000 people in attendance and is far more multi-ethnic than most churches in the United States.

'I think the driving reason that Osteen is hugely popular is that he sells hope. Books like Your Best Life Now and Become a Better You provide a message of hope that my life does not have to be the way it is right now; that God is powerful and able to change my life; that God is profoundly interested in my life and is near to me. And while that message of hope is packaged in the code language of the prosperity Gospel and positive psychology (like the phenomenally successful book by Tal Ben-Shahar, Happier), at the end of the day, people leave Lakewood feeling as though there is a greater meaning and purpose for their lives.

As I thought about all this, though, I couldn't help but think about John Piper's question from God is the Gospel (and other places): do you delight more in the fact that God makes much of you in the Gospel or that the Gospel frees you to make much of God? The fault in Osteen's message is that it overplays and wrongly prioritizes the fact that God makes much of us (and God does make much of us: as I read in my morning worship today, God cried out to a wayward Israel, "How can I give you up, O Ephraim?...My heart recoils within me; my compassion grows warm and tender" Hosea 11:8).

The biblical priority is that God in the Gospel rescues, delivers, frees and sustains us to make much of God. He is the great good in the Good News--and it truly is amazing: that God would save his wayward children for the fame of his name; would shape worshippers who will find their deepest satisfaction in making much of God; and would gather together a worldwide body of worshippers who hallow his name!

And that is the great hope: not that our material position would be better or our relationships grow stronger. Rather, our great hope is that the steadfast, committed love of our God is transforming us into worshippers who find our hearts satisfied in God himself.'

Tim Keller: Risky Evangelicals

Darryl Dash posts some notes from a series of talks that Tim Keller gave in the UK on the future of evangelicalism. Classic Keller. Here are some highlights:

• Evangelicalism used to occupy the middle ground between fundamentalism and liberalism. It was orthodox, pro-scholarship, and facing the world. Recently, evangelicalism has become more hostile and condemning of culture. A younger generation has given up on evangelicalism as a middle ground and are looking for a new consensus. This group goes by a number of names, such as post-evangelicals or the emerging church.


• A new gospel is being preached about the Kingdom of God and Jesus Christ overcoming the evil powers forces of injustice in the world. [Update: This version of the gospel rarely talks about personal sin and God's wrath.] The pendulum has swung the other way.


• To respond, evangelicals must understand and practice biblical repentance as a result of believing the gospel. This will allow evangelicals to admit their sins, even if they disagree with 80% of the criticisms from the post-evangelicals, and even if the remaining 20% is expressed poorly. To the degree that we understand the gospel, we will be able to freely admit our shortcomings as an evangelical movement.


• Don't ever think that we can respond to legitimate criticisms of our practice by defending our doctrine. In defending our doctrines, we have not responded to the criticisms of our practices. Orthopraxy is part of orthodoxy.


• It is necessary to draw boundaries. What really matters is how we treat the people on the other side of those boundaries. People are watching. We're going to win the younger leaders if we are the most gracious, kind, and the least self-righteous in controversy. The truth will ultimately lose if we hold the right doctrines, but do so with nasty attitudes and a lack of love.


• We need to approach the controversies with a repentant heart corporately and say, "Despite all the bad things that are being said here, there's a core of truth here and we need to deal with it."

When Rationalism Becomes Your God

We talk alot about postmodern people as spiritual - this clip reminds us that some of those around us really do believe that Jesus is no more real than Santa Claus.

The tendency among followers of Christ with rationalists like Maher has been to out-rationalize them and fire off a few rounds of apologetics. I think those might be helpful to show people that we're not kookier than Cocoa Puffs - however, I think what ultimately attracts people to Christ in our lives is not our commonalities between this group or that group but the radically different life created by the gospel. And by radically different, I don't mean cultural regression back to some golden age of society. It means primarily that we approach sex, money and power differently. Things like rational thought remain good things not ultimate things that we worship and center our lives around. It means we love people, even overexposed political comedians.

The Myth of the Church

I'm working on my next article for the Oconee Leader about the myth of the church as a spiritual haven in a secular world. Alan Hirsch posts about the false dichotomy between the secular and sacred here.

Couple More Thoughts from Hirsch

This post is sort of a response to the previous two posts below - if you haven't read them, start there.

• Hirsch points out that TV shows like Extreme Home Makeover are 'pagan' and create 'pagans' because they focus on those things that so easily enslave us. 'In these the banality of consumerism reaches a climax as we are sold the lie that the thing that will complete us is a new kitchen or a house extension, whereas in fact these only add more stress to our mortgages and our families. These shows are far more successful promoters of unbelief than even outright intellectual atheism, because they hit us at that place where we must render our trust and loyalty.' I knew there was a reason I didn't like that show...
• Trading in one church for another often masks an 'over-realized eschatology,' demanding heaven on earth now and becoming willing to divorce our spiritual family for another one because the grass appears greener on another hill.
• This one hurts - to the degree that we are not intentionally focusing on making disciples, we are inadvertently cultivating religious consumerism. 'If we don't disciple people, the culture surely will.' While I'm thankful that our leadership is constantly working to develop a culture of discipleship at Christ Church, this is surely a point of repentance for all of us. To the degree that we have made the church something other than the people we do life with in pursuit of conformity to and life with Jesus, we have missed God's purpose for us.