Cooking Up Excuses

30 July 2024

In order to join the church I grew up in, you had to sign off on the statement of faith in its entirety. That statement of faith was pages and pages long, very detailed. It got down to the level of things like the pre-trib rapture. I recall one family who faithfully attended the church–in fact, the wife ran our nursery for two decades or so–but could never officially become members, on account of holding a different view of prophecy. Too often, doctrinally conservative churches wear such nit-picky particularity like a badge of honor, touting how we “care about truth” and “take doctrine seriously.”

That’s a lie. (I say that advisedly, and I mean it.) Allow me to demonstrate: if we cared deeply about the truth, then what about the truth that “by one Spirit we were all baptized into one Body”? How do we present that truth to a watching world? When we allow such nit-picky details to define the boundaries of our membership, cooperation, or fellowship, we are–to borrow Paul’s words from Galatians–“not straightforward about the truth of the gospel.”

What does that mean? In the immediate context, Peter and Barnabas and the rest of the Jews in the Galatian church had been freely mixing with Gentiles until certain folks came down from Jerusalem who wouldn’t approve. Then they all withdrew, and wouldn’t eat with the Gentiles at the church potluck anymore. Paul calls it hypocrisy, and with good reason: if the Gentiles belong to Christ, and Christ has cleansed them, then they are as clean as it gets! There’s no reason to divide the body into slighly-more-clean and slightly-less-clean factions, which is what Peter and Barnabas were doing.

And that’s exactly what we are doing, when we make that degree of doctrinal specification the boundaries of our membership, fellowship, or cooperation. We are dividing the Body into the people who really get it, over here with us, and those people over there. We admit that those people really belong to Jesus, and we know we’ll be sharing heaven with them…but that’s soon enough, eh? Let’s not over-realize our eschatology.

If you can’t smell the reek of brimstone coming off that line of thought, get your sniffer checked.

You should care about the truth, right down into the details. In a teaching ministry (church or otherwise), there’s nothing wrong with clarifying what you’re going to teach. It’s nice to have a label on the package that tells everybody what’s in it, you know? But requiring that level of agreement for membership, fellowship, or cooperation is asinine. You do that, you’re just cooking up excuses to break the unity the Spirit made. Don’t do that.

In the ministries I’m part of, the doctrinal boundaries of our fellowship and cooperation are ordinarily defined by the ancient creeds (Apostles’ Creed, the 325/381 Nicene Creed, the Definition of Chalcedon) and a broadly Protestant grasp of salvation by grace through faith, not of works. That’s about it; we work out everything else as we go.

That makes people panicky. “What if [fill in whatever imagined disaster here]?” Well, first of all, as Mark Twain said, “I’m an old man and have known a great many troubles, most of which never happened.” In four years of church services with an open floor for reflection on the week’s Scripture readings, we’ve only ever had two people bring up a doctrinal error that called for specific correction. It’s not the case that we just never have to solve a problem, but it’s pretty rare. Is it worth foregoing four years of fellowship with our brothers and sisters in order to avoid difficult conversations with two people? Don’t be silly.

So we approach the situation differently: we look at how much we need to have in common for what we’re actually doing. Do we have enough in common to pray, say, the Lord’s Prayer together? Cool–let’s do that. Do we have enough in common to feed the hungry? Cool–let’s do that together. The mayor and the city council are struggling with a difficult situation; do we have enough in common to pray for God’s wisdom for our civil authorities? Cool–let’s do that together. I’m sure there are a dozen solid reasons why the timing of the Rapture is theologically important, but let’s not be using it as an excuse to stop us from what we can and should be doing together.

So many theological conservatives think unity is based on doctrine. If that were true, then certain key misbeliefs follow from it: the more doctrinal uniformity, the greater the unity; doctrinal disagreement means we can’t really be united; cooperating despite doctrinal disagreement means we really don’t care about truth; etc. But none of that is true.

Unity is not based on doctrine. “By one Spirit we were all baptized into one Body.” Our unity is a spiritual reality gifted to us by the Holy Spirit. Through the Spirit, we are all united to Christ and therefore to each other. We should live like it.

3 Comments | Ecclesiology, New Fundamentals, Unity and Community of Christ's Body | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Ruined in the Kitchen

16 July 2024

I saw a meme the other day:

Once upon a time, there was a chef named Burk. Burk absolutely refused to cook with anything less than the very finest ingredients. Thing is, Burk sucked at cooking. He would buy perfectly ripe, beautiful, crisp peas and boil them into tasteless grey mash. His chicken cutlets were raw on the inside, and his pies were burned black. Obviously, the feedback Burk got was less than stellar.

So Burk did the obvious thing: he took to the internet to complain. “Chefs who use the best ingredients will be rated poorly only by people who are seeking something besides the best ingredients,” his meme read. Lots of other chefs liked Burk’s meme, and Burk never got any better at cooking.

Is there a subset of the Christian public that the meme accurately describes? Sure, and it’s not a small group, either. But that “only” in the meme transforms what could have been a penetrating observation about the Christian public into a steaming pile of pastoral cope. They will only call you boring if they’re not interested in faithful preaching? Really? It’s just not possible that you’re, well, actually boring?

Don’t be ridiculous. Nothing you can buy at the farmer’s market is so good you can’t ruin it in the kitchen. In the same way, the Word is living and powerful and profitable, but YOU can still ruin it with bad presentation. You might get called boring because you’re hard to follow and never get to the point. You might get called boring because you make your point in the first five minutes, and then repeat that same five minutes relentlessly for an hour before mercifully closing in prayer. You might get called boring because your voice is a flat monotone and it puts people to sleep no matter how good your content is. Or for any one of a hundred other reasons. Preaching isn’t entertainment, but it is public speaking, and it’s a skill, and it’s entirely possible to be terrible at it. If you’re patting yourself on the back purely because people call you boring, you’re an idiot.

There’s a subset of conservative pastors who are absolutely terrible teachers, and genuinely proud of it. They preach long, impenetrable sermons, use Greek and Hebrew grammatical terms that are meaningless to the congregation they’re preaching to, adorn their preaching with unnecessary theological neologisms, wander off on rabbit trails that are at best diagonally related to the point they’re making. Their congregants tend to be proud of it too, to the point of dismissing other skilled teachers as “not serious enough” if they don’t also do these same things.

Among these folks, there’s a group that maintains, in all seriousness, that if you’re walking with the Holy Spirit, the Spirit will teach you through your pastor’s sermons, no matter how bad they are. Therefore, they reason, if you didn’t get anything from your pastor’s sermon this week, it must be that you had some unconfessed sin gumming up your relationship with the Spirit, and were unable to grasp what the Spirit was teaching you. (I am not making this up — I’ve heard this taught from the pulpit, and I’ve heard it invoked self-condemningly from people who were struggling to understand a poorly constructed sermon.) That’s all rot. Pastors are not inerrant; sometimes we just preach a bad sermon.

Do not be like the hypocrites. There’s no excuse for sucking at your craft, and slagging the audience instead of finding ways to improve yourself is a really lame approach to ministry. Don’t do that.

Comments Off on Ruined in the Kitchen | Ecclesiology, Preaching, Real Ministry Training | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

“Shouldn’t we at least have…?”

2 July 2024

When it comes to programs and services in the church, the answer to all questions that begin with the phrase, “Well, shouldn’t we at least have…?” is a hearty “Heck, no!”

Of course it seems unreasonable to answer the question without knowing what specific “improvement” is in view, but stick with me for a minute. I concede that a good case can generally be made for any single improvement of this kind. Considered in the abstract, the proposed improvement is a good thing, and would perhaps take relatively little effort. It’s hard to see what harm could come of it, and so it’s very hard to make a case against it—but this is a failure to see the big picture. The problem is threefold. 

First, humans have notoriously low sales resistance to anything that involves other people’s work. It’s very easy to sell the idea that we “ought to have” something, but it’s quite another matter to assemble the wherewithal to actually do it—and it’s usually substantially more work than it sounds like, because everything is. In a church with a professional staff governed by a board, a few zealous congregants can often persuade the board to their way of thinking, thereby foisting the necessary work onto the staff. In our church, there’s additional resistance because no one is making a living tending to the needs of the church. All of us have jobs that support our families, and aren’t looking for ways to make our ministry more labor-intensive, especially not for secondary things that “would be nice.” If it’s not primary to our mission, we’re not touching it.

Second, this sort of task tends to travel in packs. First there will be one, which is harmless enough, but then there’s another, then a third, and before you know it, there’s a mountain of such obligations, all of which have to be maintained. Proponents will argue that we can always stop doing a given task, if it becomes onerous, but in reality they always oppose efforts to prune back whatever is presently being done (by other people—see #1!) The net result of these two tendencies is a ratcheting effect: it’s easy enough to start a church bulletin, or newsletter, or phone tree, or nursery, or whatever, but it takes an extraordinary effort of leadership to stop doing those things once you start them. It’s much easier and faster to kill it before it starts.

Finally, this burden of (theoretically low-level) tasks has a way of compromising church leadership. The tasks themselves can usually be handled by some sort of administrative assistant, even a volunteer one. However, once ensconced in the position, the administrative assistant often ends up being a de facto elder simply by virtue of being willing to do a bunch of tasks that, while nonessential to start with, nobody can now imagine living without (see #2)—which is to say that this person has accrued power out of all proportion to his/her qualifications. In the church, directional leadership is reserved to a select group of men meeting specific biblical qualifications. The elders may not abdicate their core functions to a third party who doesn’t meet the qualifications God assigned for those functions, and therefore it’s best not to create perverse incentives that encourage such abdication.

The bottom line is simple. We have work enough and to spare just doing what Jesus gave us to do: make disciples. Things that “would be nice” are a distraction we simply can’t afford, and tend over time to choke out the work Jesus told us to focus on. If you need a demonstration of this fact, you need look no further than the five churches nearest you. I promise you, if you look around, you’ll swiftly find a church that does a dozen such “nice” tasks with real excellence, and hasn’t a clue how to make disciples.

Comments Off on “Shouldn’t we at least have…?” | Ecclesiology, Mentoring/Disciple-Making, Real Ministry Training | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Ruin it for Them

25 June 2024

Last week, we looked at matters of politics, class, and Pentecostalism discussed in Dr. Miles Smith’s summary of exvangelical memoirs. In addition, Dr. Smith also spoke of a type of clericalism, in which “the leaders of those churches could speak with near ex cathedra authority on any issue they deemed important.” In some of the churches Smith has in mind, this is because the church is effectively a cult of personality; the pastor’s opinion is effectively law on everything from the Trinity to parenting philosophy to the merits of the Chicago Bears.

While there’s undoubtedly a problem there, Dr. Smith represents an unhelpful form of backlash: an implicit contention that pastors exceed their mandate when they speak to this-worldly concerns. So it is that Smith opines one of his exvangelical writers “can be forgiven for retroactively wincing at the graphic depictions of copulation in a book written by Tim Lahaye and his wife Beverly.” He goes on to say that pastoral advice on sex is clear “evidence of a clericalist culture run amok.” The book in question would have to be The Act of Marriage; I read it years ago, along with a whole generation of evangelicals older than me. For what my opinion is worth, I don’t recall it leaving any scars.

Whatever the shortcomings of a particular book, one has to ask: as opposed to what? Should we have no books on sex written by pastors? If an accurate depiction of copulation offends Smith’s sensibilities, one wonders what he thinks of the act itself — or of the God who designed it! Would Smith have pastors remain silent about sex, or speak in tasteful generalities that offer no actionable advice? For two suburban virgins on their wedding night, a few “graphic depictions of copulation” are helpful. Where would Smith suggest that ordinary Christian people get practical advice on the details of sex? Pornhub?

Which raises a point: I can tell you that while some exvangelicals “checked all the boxes” while they were in the church, others very much did not. Some exvangelicals I know hated the discussions of sex at church because they were already daily porn users, even if they weren’t actually sleeping around themselves. They didn’t need to hear a “graphic depiction of copulation” from a pastor because they were watching it for entertainment already, and they didn’t want to hear about chastity, because they were already in high rebellion. They still recall those conversations with guilt and loathing, and nobody should be concerned about that.

Meanwhile, a number of the exvanglicals of my acquaintance complain of the opposite problem: their churches seemed preoccupied with the details of internecine doctrinal squabbles, and unable to offer substantive help for important matters of everyday life like dating, sex, and child-rearing. When we’re damned for speaking to sex, and damned for refusing to, one begins to suspect that talking about sex is not really the problem. “We played the harp for you, and you did not dance; we played the flute for you, and you did not mourn.”

But returning to the matter of pastoral advice: there’s a “great gulf fixed” between the earthy preachers who get into the details on one hand, and upscale ministry professionals who keep things at the level of luncheon conversation on the other. This cultural divide has been a feature of Western ecclesiastical life for centuries. The internet hasn’t really changed that, but it has made the divide easier to see, since anybody with access to Youtube can see plenty of both types, and the wide gulf between them. (See the last 10 or so paragraphs of Nathanael Devlin’s excellent essay on the Moscow Mood for a discussion of one such divide within the Reformed community.) What are we to do?

Obviously, not every pastor is well-equipped to offer advice on every subject, nor is the pool of people with helpful counsel about sexuality (or anything else) confined to pastors alone. The relevant command from Christ is to make disciples, and it applies to all of us! Where we’re able to offer a disciple-making influence to our brothers and sisters, we should, and we it makes little sense to confine ourselves to unhelpful generalities. In a culture where The Experts (all rise!) are wildly unlikely to honor God’s design for anything at all, God’s people dare not leave one another at the mercy of the secular wolves. On anything.

We are not gnostics; we proclaim Christ in all places and for all things, right down into the earthy details that don’t make for polite country-club conversation. Of course, not everyone will agree on everything, and we should relish the opportunity to foster robust discussion and debate on everything from sleep-training your kids to making fluffy biscuits to sexually satisfying your spouse. Nobody should be embarrassed to get into the details as required to offer one another meaningful help; loving your neighbor requires it. God made us of dust and breath, after all. There’s no shame in being material, nor in talking like you are.

Pastors above all have this responsibility; it’s our job to equip the saints for the work of the ministry. Ministers who stand aloof from such “peripheral” matters are betraying their office, no matter how “gospel-centered” it makes them feel. “The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed” — a very old problem, but no less pressing for its distinguished pedigree. Many ministers want to hold back, and many of the sheep want their ministers to hold back. They have acquired a taste for the sweetmeats of the secular wolves, and they’re not overly interested in having a pastor intrude “outside his area of expertise” and ruin it for them.

Let’s go ruin it for them! Jesus did; how can we do any less?

Comments Off on Ruin it for Them | Ecclesiology, Mentoring/Disciple-Making | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

People Like You

18 June 2024

Miles Smith of Mere Orthodoxy was kind enough to read a stack of exvangelical memoirs for us. For those of you who are blessedly unfamiliar with the trend, this is now a whole subgenre of personal memoir. You, too, can be applauded as courageously speaking truth to power, if only you will very publicly break up with the church, preferably on Instagram. You might even get a book deal out of it. Mr. Smith has done us all a service, plowing through a number of such books in order to discuss some of the common elements. He writes:

“Fundamentally, exvangelicals seemed to have been told that a specific type of church was the true church, that true faith probably didn’t exist outside of it, and that the leaders of those churches could speak with near ex cathedra authority on any issue they deemed important.  The specifics may change from church to church–some tended to be vaguely charismatic, others strict dispensationalists, and still others a kind of independent folk Calvinist. But all shared a certain exclusivity and clericalism that defined their existence. These churches and this culture were governed ostensibly by the Bible, but ultimately it was a faith defined primarily by individual pastors….Enough of these churches led by enough of this clericalist type of minister popped up between 1970 and 2000 to build an entire subculture.”

Just a Subculture?

Speaking from my experience ministering to people who’ve abandoned their faith, I agree that a number of them fit Smith’s profile, which is to say that (in rough generalities) they come from churches that mix generic doctrinal orthodoxy with cult-of-personality sociology. I’ve been at war with that defective ecclesiology my entire adult life. I cut my teeth in ministry doing counter-cult work with the victims of exactly that sort of ministry. Upon hearing their stories, I’ve surprised quite a number of exvangelicals from such churches by responding, “Well, you can’t go back to that!” (And they shouldn’t, either. There are plenty of faithful-if-flawed churches to fellowship with; no need to get tangled up in a cult.) But look, while we all agree that cults of personality are a bad idea, that’s hardly the whole story with exvangelicals.

Plenty of these folks don’t fit that profile, and Smith himself mentions one of them when he wonders aloud why so many people listened to Bill Gothard and Joshua Harris. It’s a good question (which I’ve discussed elsewhere), but the point for the moment is that he’s aware of Joshua Harris, himself now an exvangelical. Harris didn’t grow up the downtrodden follower of some clericalist mini-pope out in the swamps, thinking his church was The Only True Church. He grew up speaking all over the country in churches and at conferences, and attended seminary at Regent College in Vancouver before abandoning his faith. The exvangelical phenomenon is not confined to the isolated backwaters.

Politics and Pentecostals…

Smith’s article focuses quite a bit on both recent politics and the charismatic movement with regard to his exvangelical interlocutors. Bethel Church gets a mention, as does Greg Locke’s Global Vision Church, and the word “Trumpist” also comes up a surprising number of times for a short article. The overall effect is to give the impression that you’re seeing a wave of these “I used to be a Christian, but…” books because independent churches with no historical roots got themselves tangled up with Trump and Pentecostalism, and people understandably fled. (If only we’d all remained mainline, cessationist, and respectably centrist, how faithful we would be!) In keeping with that, there’s a definite class-oriented vibe in Smith’s piece. Trump’s appeal is populist, Pentecostalism is famously working-class, particularly in the South, and there’s a certain looking-down-the-nose, “Isn’t this a bit regrettable” tone in the article, especially in its conclusion: “We sometimes accuse exvangelicals of leaving ‘Protestant churches.’ I’m not so sure they did.” I began to wonder about Smith’s background: I made a bet with myself that he was a southern Episcopalian.

Upon a little research, I discovered that Dr. Miles Smith IV (Ph.D. in history, 2013) is Anglican (ACNA), “a native Carolinian,” and a Citadel M.A. graduate who, in addition to his serious work, “sometimes writes for popular outlets like Mere Orthodoxy, The Gospel Coalition, Public Discourse, The Federalist, and The University Bookman.” Call me crazy, but my Appalachian fundie-trained nose could smell the clubby, upper-crusty Southern Anglican aspirations coming off Smith’s article. As you might have guessed by now, Gentle Reader, I do not find this an endearing trait, but that’s fine; Jesus transcends all our tribal affinities. Miles Smith and I both belong to Christ, and therefore to one another, and anything that stands in the way of our unity is future ash in the Kingdom of God. For today, the point is that you should not be lulled by Dr. Smith’s complacent sense that exvangelicals don’t come from the same places that we real Protestants do.

…and you

I do appreciate Dr. Smith’s sacrificial act, slogging through a stack of self-justifying exvangelical accounts so the rest of us don’t have to. Speaking as a pastor who actively works with such people on a regular basis, I think Smith’s treatment tells some truths, but falls woefully short of really capturing the exvangelical phenomenon. The whole truth is a good bit less comfortable: while some of the folks who abandon the faith come from insular, low-caste swamps on the working-class side of the tracks, rather a lot of them are more like Joshua Harris: well-resourced, experienced, and connected to multiple institutions. (And not all of them admit to having abandoned the faith, but that’s a subject for another time.)

It would be comforting to believe that people like us (“real” Protestants, or whatever) know too much to fall for the temptation to abandon the faith, but it’s just not true. We’re not just losing people from the margins; we’re losing people like you–and your kids. Cool-shaming can work on anybody, and seems to work particularly well on people who aspire to respectability–or as C. S. Lewis put it, a place in the Inner Ring. The antidote is as simple as it is painful:

“Therefore Jesus also, that He might sanctify the people with His own blood, suffered outside the gate. Therefore let us go forth to Him, outside the camp, bearing His reproach, for here we have no continuing city, but we seek the one to come. Therefore by Him let us continually offer the sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of our lips, giving thanks to His name; but do not forget to do good and to share, for with such sacrifices God is well pleased.” (Heb. 13:12-16)

UPDATE: Dr. Smith recently discussed his article with Aaron Renn.

Comments Off on People Like You | Ecclesiology, Reviews | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Shadow Sins

11 June 2024

Some sins are fully conscious. You’re doing someone wrong, taking advantage of their weakness or their goodness or their inattention, or you’re cynically manipulating them to your advantage, and you are fully conscious of what you’re doing.

Some sins are fully unconscious—just as wrong, but you have no idea you’re doing it. Even when someone calls an unconscious sin to your attention, it can be extraordinarily hard to see, not because the act is particularly subtle, but because you’re genuinely unaware of what you’re doing. You are responsible for your unconscious sins—it’s not as if someone else should be apologizing for the things you do—but you can’t do anything about them until you become aware.

There’s also a third category: semiconscious sins. This is where a lot of the trouble happens. These are often patterns of behavior that have worked for you in the past, and like all people you habitually resort to things that have worked before. (This is called “learning,” and it’s how we become able to ride a bike or throw a ball or anything else we do: repeat what worked, and don’t repeat what didn’t. But learning is not a fully conscious process, and not all the behaviors we learn are good.) These semiconscious sins involve patterns of behavior that sin against the people around you, and they often involve violations of your self-concept.

For example, if you think of yourself as a generous person, you would probably not allow yourself to be stingy on purpose—say, by always being the last one to buy a round of drinks. If you were fully conscious of the implications of the act, you wouldn’t let yourself do it. But if you somehow acquired the habit back in your poorer days, and it’s worked for you, you will probably will continue the habit even though you don’t actually need to spend less money now. You will simply allow the program to run in the background, as it were, without examining it closely.

How do we know this semi-conscious category even exists? First of all, because the Bible talks about it in terms of self-deception. If someone else is deceiving you, then you can be fully unconscious of a thing, but if you are deceiving yourself, then some part of you knows. Apologist Greg Bahnsen likens self-deception to holding a beach ball underwater: it’s a demanding task, and there’s no way to be successful without being at least somewhat aware of what you’re doing.

Secondly, you know this category exists because you’ve experienced it for yourself. We’ve all had the experience of someone challenging a pattern of our behavior: “Hey, have you ever noticed that whenever you’re in this situation, you do X?” a well-meaning friend will say. X — as your friend is describing it — is clearly sinful, or at least a rotten thing to do to a friend. You’re offended, and you begin to object: “I do not! I would neve….” and then you can’t even finish, because all the times you’ve done exactly that come flooding into your mind, and you experience the stomach-dropping sudden cessation of ignorance: “He’s right! I totally do that!”

Now, if you were fully unconscious of what you were doing, that realization wouldn’t come so easily. And if you were fully conscious, you wouldn’t have been able to start the instinctive defense, only to stop when you suddenly realize your friend is right. That experience only happens because you were semiconscious of the pattern to start with. Someone had to connect the dots to make it fully visible, but the dots were all visible over in the corner of your eye, not quite out of view, just waiting for someone to connect them.

These three different categories call for somewhat different responses. Of course, you should repent of all your sin, but if you’re fully unconscious of a sin, you can’t very well repent of it. Rest assured, there are items in this category for you, and thank Jesus that He cleanses you of all sin. That’s pretty much all you can do, until God makes the sin conscious. Trust me, it’s on His to-do list.

If you’re fully conscious of the sin, and you were conscious the whole time, there’s nothing to do but repent, fully and immediately, and take your lumps.

The third kind is a little trickier, but the brief is ultimately pretty simple: “rebuke a wise man, and he will love you,” and your job here is to be the wise man. Learn to love the people who will grab that thing that was over in the corner of your peripheral vision and drag it into full view. Don’t punish your friends for bringing things to your attention; encourage them!

One of the best things you can do is cultivate a ruthless honesty. Repent of exactly what you’ve done, and don’t repent of things you haven’t done. Depending on your personality, you’ll be tempted in one of two directions. Some people will be tempted to repent of nothing in the past. “I wasn’t aware of it,” they’ll tell themselves, “and I can’t possibly be responsible for something I’m not aware of. Of course I won’t do it in the future.” This won’t do, for the simple reason that you did what you did, and you need to own it. Your heart is a dark, deceitful place, more than capable of hurting your friends for your advantage and lying to you about it. You let it run around without a leash, and that’s on you. So confess it and forsake it.

Another sort of person will be tempted to over-confess, to not only own his actions but apologize as if he’d been cynically conscious of it the whole time. To this person, “I didn’t see it” will seem like a lame excuse he wouldn’t dare to make. But it is a sin to lie to your friends, in either direction. You may not under-confess, and you may not over-confess. Tell the truth: “I never quite thought about it like that, but now that you’ve described my behavior in those terms, I see that you’re right. I was wrong, and I’m so sorry I put you through that.”

And then go and sin no more.

Comments Off on Shadow Sins | Discernment, Real Ministry Training | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Three Great Church Fights

23 April 2024

“When you’re picking a spouse,” I tell my young disciples, “make sure you can play well together, work well together, and fight well together.” They always think that’s a little funny, but I’m dead serious; the closer you are to someone, the more you’re gonna fight; best you be able to do it well together. We need these same qualities in the church, and the need didn’t take long to manifest.

The first serious recorded disagreement in the church was over ethnicity. The presenting issue was about the church’s charitable care for widows who didn’t have anyone to provide for them, but it wasn’t all the widows who were being neglected. It was the Greek-speaking (Hellenistic) Jewish widows who were being treated as second-class citizens. That sort of second-class treatment to Hellenistic Jews would have been common enough in the general culture of Jerusalem, but it had no rightful place in the church.

Acts 6 records the story: the apostles declined to leave their posts in order to handle the charitable matters themselves, and instead called on the congregation to nominate some men who were above reproach to administer these charitable matters. The apostles commissioned these men–Philip and Stephen famously among them–to handle the distribution. Worth noting: all seven of the chosen men have Greek names, and presumably could be trusted to treat their Greek-speaking brethren fairly. The matter doesn’t come up again; this solution seems to have put it to bed.

The next big fight is recorded in Acts 15, and this one is very different. The presenting issue this time is more doctrinal. Everyone understands that Gentiles can come to Jesus without becoming Jews first; the conversion of Cornelius and his family in Acts 10-11 made that plain. The question is, once you’ve brought the Gentiles into the church, then what? Up in Antioch, they were having a lot of success winning Gentiles to Christ, so the question became pressing. Some — Paul and Barnabas among them — thought that the Gentiles could follow Jesus as Gentiles. Others argued that it’s fine for a Gentile to believe in Jesus, and they clearly receive the Holy Spirit as Gentiles, just like Cornelius did, but if they’re serious about following Jesus, then they need to keep the Law. WWJD, right? Jesus kept the Law; if you say you’re following Jesus, put down the shrimp!

That’s not actually an easy argument to answer, and the details of the argument are beyond the scope of our time together today, but you can find the early church’s answer in Acts 15. In brief, the Gentiles are children of Noah, and therefore accountable to keep the commands God gave Noah, but they’re not Jews, and they don’t have to keep Jewish Law.

The next major church fight in Acts is different again. This time it’s a personal squabble between two people: Paul and Barnabas. Some distance into their first missionary journey (after Cyprus but before most of Asia Minor) John Mark left them and returned to Jerusalem. The text doesn’t say why. In any case, when it’s time go out again and encourage all the churches they’d started, Paul doesn’t want to take Mark. Barnabas does. There’s not much room for compromise — take him or don’t, right? In the end, the disagreement gets so sharp that they split the team and the job. Barnabas takes Mark and goes to Cyprus. Paul takes Silas and goes to Asia Minor.

Note that this disagreement doesn’t rise to the level of the previous one. It’s largely a question of personal philosophy of ministry: do we give the kid another shot? Barnabas is all for second chances. Paul wants traveling companions he can count on. Who’s right? The text leaves us to work it out for ourselves.

I say they both are. Barnabas — remember that his name means ‘Son of Encouragement’ — is living into the role that God has given him in the church. He’s the one, you may remember, who brought Paul (the freshly-converted former terrorist) into the Jerusalem church when nobody would associate with him. Barnabas was caring for Mark, as he should have been. Paul’s first priority was the work, and he chose traveling companions he could count on to keep up with him.

This third fight doesn’t ever come before the apostles or a church council. It doesn’t appear to even end up before the leaders of the local church (which would have been Antioch, in this case.) It doesn’t rise to that level because each man is within his liberty. Nobody is proposing to do anything wrong, and there’s no doctrinal issue at stake. Paul is not required to take a traveling companion he can’t rely on; Barnabas is free to give Mark a second chance if he cares to. At the same time, clearly they fought about it. The contention grew so sharp, Luke tells us, that they parted company. The first-ever Gentile Mission dream team, and it breaks up over an interpersonal squabble about whether to take along a particular junior team member. Wow.

(In God’s providence, the result of breaking up the team is two teams both going back out to the mission field. Don’t miss God’s ability to turn a profit on absolutely anything.)

The point is that not every conflict is the same, or calls for the same kind of solution. The first conflict was practical; the applicable doctrine was “Love your neighbor as yourself,” and everybody agreed on that. The question was just how to make sure that it got implemented well. Choosing people that everyone could trust to implement it well solved the problem.

The second conflict was fundamentally doctrinal; there was nothing to do but get everybody together and have it out. They needed time and space to do that, but they persisted at it until they came to agreement on the right answer.

The third conflict didn’t have one right answer. As conflict of personal and ministry philosophy where each man was within his Christian liberty, there wasn’t a clear wrong party. Because there wasn’t really a right or wrong answer, there also wasn’t an authority they could appeal to for a final resolution. Nobody had competent jurisdiction to curtail either man’s liberty in Christ, and the leaders rightly left it up to Paul and Barnabas to figure out what they were going to do.

You’ll face all three types of conflict in ministry. The vital thing is to discern which kind of conflict you’re facing, and act accordingly.

2 Comments | Ecclesiology | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Terrifyingly, Discouragingly Competent

16 April 2024

It is common in more conservative circles to think of the American church as ineffectual, diffuse, bumbling, incompetent. I have come to believe this is a comforting lie, and that the truth is far less flattering: the American church is terrifyingly competent at getting nearly anything it really wants. I know that sounds preposterous, but hear me out. 

Maintaining a typical American church is no picnic; starting one even less so. Even well-established churches die, and many, if not most, church plants fail within 3 years. But show me any major city in this country that doesn’t have a handful of hip, urban churches with that industrial coffee shop vibe. Show me any major suburb that’s not home to a few suburban megachurches that look like a mall or an airport concourse. The American church wants those things, and we make sure that we have them. 

Within most churches, the weekly worship service is a major priority. Go visit; sit through a service, then pull aside a church staffer. “That was amazing!” you say. “Would you mind telling me how you do it?” Ask the right person, and they can tell you, down to the literal nuts and bolts. After all, the Sunday service isn’t happenstance; they make the same thing happen every single week. 

  • They know exactly what tasks need to be done, by when, in order to pull it all off. 
  • They know what skill sets are needed to accomplish each task. 
  • They have identified people who have those skills, hired them (or installed them in volunteer positions), and empowered them to carry out their tasks. 
  • They make sure to provide those people with what they need to get the job done. 

We all know what this looks like. If a microphone cord goes bad, or a speaker goes out, they’ll replace it. The office manager orders the right kind of paper to print the bulletins. The PowerPoint (Keynote, if you’re really cool) slides will be carefully crafted and ready by Saturday so they can be loaded into Pro Presenter. The sound techs have an established rotation so there’s always someone on duty, and a backup in case of illness. The musicians will have the set list and be ready. The ushers who take up the offering will know who they are. The greeters will have been reminded to arrive 20 minutes early. And on and on….

I’m not knocking any of this. It’s a prodigious, brilliantly-coordinated effort, and a metric ton of work. Bringing it all off smoothly every single week is one of the great unappreciated labors of the modern church, and it’s not even considered some sort of extraordinary accomplishment. It’s just our baseline expectation — after all, it’s literally what we pay our church staff for, right?

…and that’s exactly my point. You want to know what it looks like when we really want something to happen? That’s what it looks like. We are absolutely competent at getting what we really want. 

Hold that thought.

Now go back to that same church staff, and ask them if they care that their kids grow up continuing to know and love Jesus. “Of course!” they will say. So then ask them “How do you make sure your kids don’t walk away from the Christian faith?” Inquire as to the plan. Ask the same set of questions that you asked about the service: 

  • What tasks need to be done, and by when, in order to accomplish the goal?
  • What skill sets are required to execute each task? 
  • Who has those skills? Who is empowering those people to use their skills?
  • What do those people need to get it done? Who makes sure they have what they need? 

You know as well as I do what’s going to happen. You’re going to get a deer-in-the-headlights look, a stammering recitation of some platitudes, and a quick exit from the conversation. And then we wonder why it’s getting sort of hard to find a 22-year-old who’s still Christian.

Someone will complain, of course, that discipling our kids is a multifaceted and organic process much harder to map than simply putting on the Sunday production, and so it is. But it’s also our primary job. All the more reason to have a plan, yes? Jesus never told us to make a Sunday morning stage production; He commissioned us to make disciples. So why is it we’re so competent at the one, and so helpless at the other?

Comments Off on Terrifyingly, Discouragingly Competent | Ecclesiology, Mentoring/Disciple-Making | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Egalitarianism as Luxury Belief

26 March 2024

If you’re not familiar with Rob Henderson’s work on luxury beliefs, it would benefit you to get acquainted. The essay above will develop the idea in more depth, but here’s the quick-and-dirty version: “Luxury beliefs are ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes.” A common example would be the “defund the police” concept. People who live in gated communities with private security can afford to hold such a belief; people who live in a rough neighborhood where they need to call 911 a few times a month can ill afford to hamstring the police.

As luxury goods of all types (or credible knock-offs of same) become more attainable for anybody with a credit card and an Ebay account, it’s become increasingly difficult to tell who’s a member of the upper- (or upper-middle) class club by someone’s dress or accessories. Henderson suggests that fashionable ideas—luxury beliefs—are taking up that slack.

Both in general society and in certain quarters of the church, egalitarianism functions as a luxury belief. In general society, very few framing carpenters or concrete guys are women, and this is not because of some sort of systemic sexism. In jobs where physical strength and durability really matter, the workers are overwhelmingly male. Dangerous jobs are overwhelmingly male, as are workplace fatalities. More prosaically — and speaking from several years’ experience as the only male employee of a particular retail establishment — when the big, heavy box needs to go on the high shelf, the women look around for the guy to do it.

By contrast, people with laptop-class careers are much less likely to encounter circumstances on the job where they are forced to reckon with the biological differences between men and women. Anybody can sit at a desk and push buttons on a keyboard. These folks can afford a correspondingly higher level of fantasy about how much biology matters, because they don’t have to live with the consequences of that counterfactual belief. The head of a network administration department can entertain the notion that men and women are largely interchangeable; the foreman of a concrete crew had better not.

In other words, the key differentiator here is whether you face any plausible danger of having to eat your own cooking.

There’s a church near me that exemplifies this trend. On gender issues, good number of members profess to be strongly egalitarian as a matter of basic justice. However, the polity of the church they attend is such that they cannot have a female lead pastor, and they do in fact have a very strong, masculine man leading the church. One of the worst upheavals the church ever had happened because egalitarian staffers, most of them female, tried to steer the organization in a more progressive direction, and badly overplayed their hand. The strongly complementarian direction of the church was confirmed; many of the egalitarian congregants nonetheless stayed. Today, those egalitarian congregants–mostly middle- to upper-middle class, mostly driving 10-15 minutes or more to attend–drive past multiple churches with far more egalitarian convictions, some of them with female pastors, in order to attend this particular church. How many of these people would actually be happy with the results, were their fashionably avowed convictions actually put into practice? We’ll never know — and that’s exactly the point of a luxury belief.

Comments Off on Egalitarianism as Luxury Belief | Ecclesiology, Equality and Difference of Man and Woman, New Fundamentals | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Lent-Challenged?

19 March 2024

Lent is always an interesting time for me. I’m a conscientious objector to the annual 40-day fasting-and-flagellation routine. When God crafted a religious calendar, He devoted exactly one day a year to that (Yom Kippur) — and all the other high holy days are big, mandatory parties. It can’t be that after the great victory on Golgotha, we now should be less interested in joy and forty times more devoted to self-affliction. One day is good — Good Friday seems a reasonable choice for those of us who don’t still celebrate Yom Kippur — but forty? No.

Also, frankly, the relationship between traditional Lenten practice and anything Jesus actually said or did is at best very diagonal. Two particular points here; first, Jesus did the 40-day fast once, when He was 30, and He didn’t just give up chocolate and swearing, either. Wanna be like Jesus? Celebrate your 30th with a 40-day fast. If you live to 60, maybe you can do it again. Second, Ash Wednesday directly and solemnly violates Jesus’ instructions on fasting in Matthew 6:16-18. So directly, in fact, that it’s kind of funny.

On the other hand, at a particular time in my life, God called me into a community that observed Lent. There’s no real value in being difficult and cross-grained about it, so I didn’t. Instead, I just skipped the Ash Wednesday service and took on a couple of positive projects (a stack of reading and a fairly sizable apologetics writing project). The projects were big enough that there was no way I’d get through them without giving up something. The goal was to find out in hindsight what I had given up, and then make a determination during Eastertide about whether to resume whatever it was.

That practice did three things for me: it got those projects done, it gave me an opportunity to reassess some of my less useful pastimes, and it gave me something to talk about when people asked — as they often did — “What are you giving up for Lent?” In other words, it allowed me to participate in my community and not be a grief and a trouble over something that wasn’t going to change in any case. The result was a number of great conversations about Lenten practice — mine and theirs — and how it was affecting our daily walk with God.

The communities I’m now part of align more closely with my convictions, and the question doesn’t arise as frequently. But for those of you who find yourself in similar situations, this is a practice I commend to you.

Comments Off on Lent-Challenged? | Ecclesiology, liturgy | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »