Thirty-Five Theological Notes

26 June 2015

(for old friends and new, who are trying to figure out where I’m coming from) 

Prolegomena

1.  I am an exegete, storyteller, and shepherd. My personal ministry focuses on helping people to pray, know God personally and directly, learn and live the biblical Story, retake lost territory the Church has ceded to the pagans, and use high-concept folk culture as a vehicle for reformation. Mostly in Englewood, Colorado.

2.  I have tried to listen well to the Scriptures and be as faithful as I can be to what they say. Theologians tend to gather in herds like anybody else, and my particular set of emphases has not led me into one of the standard herds.

3.  The spirit of the day being what it is — postmodern ectoplasm that evaporates in a strong light — I am expected to reject herding and its attendant labels, and demand recognition as an absolutely unique snowflake. But no. Gathering in community and giving apt names to things are expressions of the image of God. Hence this explanation, which I hope will help.

4.  Much mischief comes of affirming something we ought to affirm, and then on that basis denying something we ought not to deny. We ought to have learnt this from the doctrine of the Trinity: if we believe in inerrancy, then sometimes we must submit to mystery.

5.  Mood is often more important–and harder to capture–than the standard talking points. For example, I have worked productively with postmil brethren with no problem, and had trouble working with some of my fellow premil folk. The practical difference is mood: when the kings of the earth conspire against Him, Yahweh laughs at them. Do we laugh with Him, or do we think the sky is falling? The difference is easy to see in real life, but it can be quite difficult to codify meaningfully in the standard form of a doctrinal statement.

Basics

6.  I believe the historic Christian faith expressed in the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds, the Definition of Chalcedon, and the National Association of Evangelicals statement of faith.

7.  I believe in the biblically attested miracles — crossing the Red Sea, Joshua’s long day, virgin birth, water into wine, all of it, because the Bible says so. I believe in a recent, six-literal-day creation and a worldwide flood for the same reason.

8.  Since I don’t approach the Scriptures with the skepticism of a 19th-century liberal, I don’t approach the history of the Church that way either. Having been taught by the Scriptures to believe in such things, I believe in the miracles of the Christian Church, reported in the ministries of such notable saints as Augustine, Patrick of Ireland, George Wishart, John Knox, Charles Spurgeon, and Francis MacNutt. And I’ve seen some myself.

9.  I have personally experienced the exegetical bankruptcy, practical impotence, and willful historical ignorance of cessationism. Never again. That said, supernatural ministry can be mightily abused, as in Corinth. 1 Corinthians prescribes a solution; cessationism ain’t it.

10.  Just to get it out of the way, I am not a Calvinist, and still less of an Arminian. Both Calvin and Arminius did good service to the church, but they were both Calvinists, and shared a number of assumptions which the Scriptures do not support. Talking about “the theological spectrum from Calvinism to Arminianism” is like talking about “all the colors of the rainbow, from red to pink.” There were 15 glorious centuries of Christian theology before those two worthy gents came along, and a few centuries after them, too. For which all thanksgiving.

11.  I am Protestant, and happy to be. I am deeply in debt to the magisterial Reformation; it remains one of the finest creations of the Roman Church.

Prayer

12.  A strong view of divine sovereignty is necessary to the integrity of the Christian faith. The Scriptures require it, and there’s no point in praying for things unless God is in control.

13.  I believe that God’s hand moves in response to prayer, and sometimes we do not have because we do not ask. This is tough to square with divine sovereignty, but if we only know enough to be obedient, then we know enough. So I pray; resolving the mysteries can wait.

14.  I believe we should learn to pray by praying in the categories of the Lord’s Prayer, because Matthew says so, and in the words of the Lord’s Prayer, because Luke says so. Many struggle to pray effectively because we do not honor our Lord’s instruction in this matter.

The Unity of Christ’s Body

15.   I am small-c catholic. Those who belong to Christ belong to me, and I to them.

16.  I believe in the unity of the Body of Christ. Unity is a cardinal doctrine and practice, essential to maintaining justification by faith (as Paul said in Galatians), and a crucial part of our witness to the world, not to mention being Jesus’ dying wish for His people. Our real convictions on unity are demonstrated in our choices of whom to eat with, pray with, worship with, and work with. If we don’t do those things outside the narrow confines of our home community, we might think unity is permissible, but we don’t think it’s important.

17.  I believe in historical unity. All Christ’s people, everywhere and everywhen, are My People, more so than my family, my fellow Americans or the members of my martial arts club. In the second century, my Church was still finding her feet. In the eleventh century, my Church had suffered an unfortunate split that has yet to be healed. In the fifteenth century, my Church was hopelessly corrupt. She has always been headquartered in the New Jerusalem, no matter what some folks believed about Rome. If we celebrate Veteran’s Day but not Purim or the Feast of All Saints, we have an odd notion of where our primary loyalties lie.

18.  Today the Church lives with denominations and highly denominated nondenominational entities by the million. These tribal loyalties are a blessing insofar as they inspire greater love for God and our neighbors, but when we cease to act as one Body with others who belong to Christ but not to our tribe, we are failing in exactly the way Peter failed at Antioch.

The Church Service

19.  Every regularly held public meeting has some kind of liturgy to it; some churches are more conscious and competent at using their liturgies to achieve their goals. I prefer them.

20.  I believe that worship is about what God wants to receive, not about what we happen to want to give (cf. Cain), and still less about what’s fashionable this month. I believe God has told us to be a Psalm-singing people. If we sing the Psalms and follow the directions they give, we will experience richer worship than is typical in the American church.

21.  Having been taught by Psalm-singing, baptism, communion, and anointing with oil, I believe in physical expressions of worship. I believe that the arts have a strong place in the church’s worship. There’s nothing wrong with spontaneous worship, but I believe in the value of planned prayer, painting, and dance as I believe in the value of planned music and sermons.

22.  I believe in the use of the supernatural ministry gifts in the worship service, because the Bible says so. I also believe that if you’re serious about that, you leave space for it. If you have a 90-minute service time, and you plan 90 minutes of content, you don’t value supernatural ministry. If you schedule a move of the Spirit 27 minutes into the service, you are attempting to control something you shouldn’t. He blows where he wills.

23.  I believe the church service ought to end in communion, with its attendant implications of security and fellowship, rather than an invitation, with its attendant implications of insecurity and crisis. Invitations are fine for revival meetings, but have no place at family gatherings. Repeated invitations of the “Maybe you know a lot about Jesus, but have you ever really…” type have done much mischief to impressionable children who were unfortunate enough to grow up hearing them every week.

Sacraments

24.  I believe in baptizing believers immediately, like they did in Acts. Baptism is the New Covenant analog to circumcision. Of course, we circumcise the baby after he’s born, but since New Covenant members are born twice, we have to ask: “Which birth are we talking about?” If baptism is the new circumcision, then what is the new birth? Well…the new birth. Paedobaptism is a throwback to the days before Christ broke the power of the clan.

25.  I believe in weekly communion, but I also believe that weekly communion will be unbearable until it is celebrated as the feast of victory that it is, rather than observed as an orgy of ungodly introspection. It is vile for a shepherd in Christ’s flock to turn the Corinthians’ sin — which no one is committing today — into an excuse to torment the sheep with every imaginable doubt. Self-examination for the sins discussed in the passage is fair game.

26.  I believe that the wine in the communion cup should be wine, because the Bible says so. I also believe that it is foolish and wicked to divide the Body over how we conduct the Table, so when necessary, I drink my grape juice with joy and thanksgiving.

27.  It is not my Table; it is Christ’s. I am nowhere commanded to fence it; how dare I? All who are His are welcome; all who desire Him are welcome. Jesus did not stint to give Himself to the children, the outcasts, and those who did not yet believe. Of course giving the body and blood of the very Son of God to such people (to any people, for that matter) is blasphemy and sacrilege. But it is Jesus’ sacrilege, not ours. Who am I to argue?

28.  I believe we must speak of the Table as God speaks of it, without hedging. I believe in the real presence of Christ in the elements, without feeling a need to explain the details. I follow the examples of John Knox, John Williamson Nevin, and other stalwart Protestants in refusing to let vain Romish speculation ruin this for me, as it did for poor Zwingli.

Living as a Christian

29.  Eternal life is knowing God. Salvation is irreducibly relational, and individual conversion is absolutely necessary; well-remembered crisis conversion is another matter entirely. Seeing a child on the playground, I can be sure the child is alive without knowing the moment of his birth. Striking up a conversation, I might find that the child himself does not know when he was born. It does not follow that he was never born.

30.  The new birth is a miraculous, gracious act of God which we receive by trusting God. Like any birth, it is the work of the parents, and not the child, that accomplishes it.

31.  The body is dead because of sin, but the spirit is life because of righteousness. Continuing to grow in Christ requires an ongoing miracle, and again, we must be willing to receive that miracle. But if we are, God will do it.

32.  It is the birthright of every child of God to hear and understand his Father’s voice, in the Bible and in his heart.

33.  Uncertainty is a poor foundation for a life of righteousness. Like any good father, God assures us that we are His own, and urges us to live on that basis. The accusations and doubts that cause us to question our place in the family come from the world, the flesh and the devil–or from our fellow believers, doing the devil’s work for him.

34.  Living as a Christian is a life of continual repentance. We always fall short, and God’s grace is always there to transform us and move us closer to Him. We need only be willing.

35.  Willingness is being open with God: openly communicating to Him what we think, believe and have done, openly hearing His approval and correction, and obeying.

4 Comments | Meditations, Theopoetics | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Reflections on Catalyst One-Day Conference

10 May 2015

I had the opportunity a few months ago to attend the Catalyst one-day conference here in Denver with Andy Stanley and Craig Groeschel. A lot of good things were said, especially Andy Stanley’s ruminations on autonomy and why it’s a bad idea. I can think of a couple  whole movements of pastors and activists who need to hear that talk, and will refuse to listen to it. There were also some deeply stupid things said — CEO-think getting the better of following Jesus. I don’t intend to write a review of the whole thing, but here are some thoughts I wrote down just after the event.

By any biblically recognizable definition, these guys are not pastors. The organizations they lead are not churches — again, by any biblically recognizable standard. In some circles, that would be the whole critique. There was a time when that would have been my whole critique.

But these guys and their organizations are doing significant work for the Kingdom of God. They’re not pastors and not churches, but they’re not nothing either–so what are they? They are parachurch organizations that provide a variety of religious goods and services. For the purposes of the Internal Revenue Code, they happen to be organized as an entity called “church,” but let’s face it, the IRS doesn’t have the best possible grasp on spiritual reality.

Church happens within these organizations — in small groups, student ministries, other smaller cadres where there is real accountability, shared mission, and life together. And it doesn’t just happen by accident — quite often, those things are what they’re aiming for.

The organization itself, however, is not a church. It is a monastic order. Craig Groeschel is not a pastor, he’s the next Ignatius of Loyola, leading a militant, dedicated cadre of broadly Protestant monks and nuns in a rigorous program of spiritual discipline and leadership development to serve the Church and the world. It is impressive, admirable work.

There is an argument to be made, perhaps, that doing the work of a monastic order under the guise of being a local church muddies the water and causes trouble. I’ll let someone else make that argument if they can. For me, the issue is simpler than that: this is good work that ought to be done, and someone is doing it. The Lord of the Harvest has heard our prayer and sent laborers into His harvest, and we should thank Him and ask for more.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Eight Notes on the Art of Reading

27 April 2015

I had occasion to write down some reflections on the art of reading for a friend. Here are some selections:

The really big pieces of advice for readers are the same as for writers:

  1. Finish things.
  2. Figure out your process and stick to it.

Everything else is subordinate to those.

Accept reading into your life as a discipline that you will mostly practice in the interstices of your schedule, when other people are doing nothing. Most of my reading, prayer, and martial arts practice happens this way. It is amazing what you can get done when you attend to the “dead spaces” in your life, and put them to work for you over a long period of time. For example, I recently finished a book on spiritual direction. I read the whole thing on the toilet using the Kindle app on my phone. Took me two and a half weeks.

Pre-read. Get a sense for what’s in your “to-read” pile so you know what to pick up next. Flip through the book, skim a few pages here and there, just to learn what kind of book it is. Does it have short chapters or long ones? Are there section breaks? Books that break up into smaller chunks go into my toilet reading pile. Books that are going to take extended study mostly get saved for weekends.

Re-read. Don’t be afraid to go back and read a paragraph again, or a chapter. Or a whole book, for that matter. In fact, the whole-book re-read is often the most effective for comprehension. It’s easier to grasp the finer points after you have a rough idea where the whole thing is going.

If you drive places, use audiobooks and lectures. Even if you only live 10 minutes from work, that’s an hour and 40 minutes a week, just on your commute. You can finish a good-sized book in a few weeks that way — and if you use the rest of your drive time, it goes even faster. I use audiobooks while I’m cooking, too — my hands are busy, but it’s not complicated work, so I can listen well. I have an acquaintance who listens to audiobooks during his workouts. I can’t do that; listening takes up too much of my attention, and I’m prone to hurting myself when I get distracted during a workout. Figure out what works for you.

Read at night, before going to bed. I usually reserve that slot for popular novels or poetry, although I’ve done some heavy reading that way too. I have learned the hard way to stay away from Lee Childs at night — I wind up awake at 2 in the morning, telling myself, “It’s only another 75 pages to the end.”

One book or several? There are two schools of thought on reading in parallel. The single-book school says that your concentration is better if you focus all your reading time on a single book until you finish it. The other maintains that it’s more fun to read a few books in parallel. In case you haven’t caught it yet, I’m definitely in the latter school, but find what works for you.

Speed reading. Stanley D. Frank wrote a book about the Evelyn Wood speed reading method. I don’t do it the way they teach you to, but working through their exercises was very helpful to me.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Taking It Literally

7 December 2014

So I had occasion to talk with a feller — well-educated Christian and all — who was a bit unsure about various Old Testament miracles — Joshua’s long day and so on. It got me to thinking.

As I observed in another post earlier this year, allegorizing your way over the first eleven chapters of Genesis at 30,000 feet is downright common. Once you get past the flood, most people who would think of themselves as theological conservatives settle down and swallow the supernatural texts. There are some Red Sea doubters and like that, but it’s pretty uncommon among self-professed conservatives.

By the time we get to Jesus feeding the 5,000 or doing miraculous healings, pretty much everybody has landed the plane and is prepared to take the supernatural doings quite literally. And of course, you have to land the plane sometime before the resurrection and ascension in order to remain a Christian in any meaningful sense.

But if you have the sort of sensibilities that are offended by miracles, the resurrection is just as much an offense as any other supernatural text. Once you’ve conceded the need to land the plane, is there any reason not to land it earlier? Why is the resurrection of Jesus plausible, but turning water into wine is not? Why are Jesus’ miracles plausible, but Joshua’s miracles suspect? Why believe the Red Sea crossing, but doubt the Flood? Why believe John 1’s account of creation, but doubt Genesis 1’s account of it?

If you’re going to swallow the resurrection, what’s so hard about reading the whole Story as sober history from end to end?

This is far from the only area in which we balk at the Bible because it offends our sensibilities in some way. I have begun to feel generally that taking it literally — far from being a bonehead hermeneutical move — is in fact badly underrated.

I hope to explore this idea more in upcoming posts.

3 Comments | Meditations, Speaking as God Speaks | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

The Kingdom Has Come

15 October 2014

In the theology I grew up with, the kingdom of God is future, period.

We were aware that Jesus said the kingdom was near, in passages like this one, for example:

Now after John was put in prison, Jesus came to Galilee, preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God, and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand. Repent, and believe in the gospel.”

We interpreted that the same way you interpret a guy on the street corner with a sign that says, “The end is near.” In other words, “near” meant that it was still future, coming soon.

There’s an obvious way in which that was true. The consummation of the kingdom promises is still future. Obviously, the knowledge of the glory of God has not yet covered the earth like water covers the sea.

I’m aware that people have issues with the eschatology, but let’s not get sidetracked onto that at the moment. For the sake of discussion, let’s grant a future literal kingdom of exactly the kind envisioned by pre- and post-mil theologians.

Granting that, is the kingdom entirely future?

No.

We know it isn’t, because it wasn’t entirely future even in Jesus’ day. Notice what He says in Matthew 12:

Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation, and every city or house divided against itself will not stand. If Satan casts out Satan, he is divided against himself. How then will his kingdom stand? And if I cast out demons by Beelzebub, by whom do your sons cast them out? Therefore they shall be your judges. But if I cast out demons by the Spirit of God, surely the kingdom of God has come upon you.

“Has come.” Not “will come” or “is about to come.” Has. In other words, when Jesus cast out a demon, the kingdom came right there. And this is what Jesus meant all along when He said that the kingdom was near. The old King James translation, “The kingdom of heaven is at hand” is exactly right. “At hand” is where you keep your cell phone–close enough you can reach out and grab it.

The message of Jesus, from the inception of His ministry right down to the present day, is this: the kingdom of God is close enough to you, right now, that you could reach out and touch it. Do you want to?

2 Comments | Kingdom of God, Meditations | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Finding the Road

4 August 2014

Heresies, cults and new religions are the unpaid debts of the Church coming back to bite us; this is true throughout Church history and it is true today as well. The pomo/emergent phenomenon is the unpaid debts of the modernist Church coming back around. It is just not the case that the modernist Church got everything right — in certain areas, we sowed the wind and are reaping the whirlwind. The thing to do is accept the whirlwind as God’s just judgment on our sins, and repent of them.

The prevailing enemy strategy in cases where the Church has unpaid debts is to exploit our very real sins and weaknesses in order to build credibility, which credibility is then imputed to a new (often equal and opposite) set of sins and weaknesses — hence the postmodern revolution in the church, which has led to so much mush-mouthed uncertainty. The other, equally important enemy strategy is to get the old guard to level valid critiques against the new, revolutionary set of weaknesses, and then use those valid critiques to steal credibility from the call to much-needed repentance from the original set of unpaid debts.

See how it works? The young and the restless, outraged by the sins of the old guard, will hear no call to repentance from the old guard. The old guard, outraged by the sins of the young and the restless, will hear no call to repentance from the likes of them. And this, when a lifestyle of constant repentance is what following Jesus is all about.

The devil gets to sit in the corner and clap. He doesn’t even have to do anything.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Three Critical Questions on the Christian Life

18 May 2014

I had the privilege of going to the inaugural facilitator training course for the Paul Tripp/Tim Lane How People Change small group curriculum, several years back. One point that Tripp made over and over has really stuck with me. “If all we needed were principles, then God could have done everything we needed on Mount Sinai. If all we needed were principles, then why did Jesus come and die? Because we don’t just need principles; we need rescue.”

Indeed. I’d like to address that same line of thought at a slightly higher resolution.

1. If Sinai is sufficient, then why Calvary?

If principles/doctrine alone were sufficient, then God could have gotten it all done at Sinai. If that were true, then why Jesus? Because living by principles is never enough. We needed to be saved from ourselves, and this is something we simply could not do for ourselves, no matter how good the principles might be. The seeds of the problem are inside us, and we can’t excise them.

We have sinned “in thought, word and deed, by what we have done and by what we have left undone,” as the Anglicans say. We simply could not resolve the problem for ourselves; it took Jesus dying our death on the cross. We participate in His death, and in this way we are reconciled to God.

2. If Calvary is sufficient, then why Pentecost?

If Christ’s finished work on the Cross was all that we needed, then why send the Holy Spirit? Isn’t the work all done? No, it isn’t. Calvary reconciled us to God, but reconciliation is only the beginning of what God wants to give us. He wants to give us life.

Through our union with Christ, we participate, not just in His death for us, but also in His life. Ongoing participation in the life of Christ is a continuing miracle of the Holy Spirit, who indwells us and comes upon us in anointing for service just as He came upon Jesus for His earthly ministry. It is through the guidance of the Spirit that we advance God’s Kingdom here on earth.

3. What does it look like to live Sinai, Calvary, and Pentecost?

If we mess up the first question, we make the moralistic mistake of trying to earn God’s acceptance. Life turns into a never-ending round of “service” that is much more about our need to see ourselves as useful than it is about meeting actual needs. We become the sort of person that C. S. Lewis was talking about when he penned the epitaph, “She lived her life for others. Now she has peace…and so have they.”

If we mess up the second question, then we make the mistake of trying to seek God’s Kingdom and His righteousness without taking advantage of all His guidance for us. We’ll operate based on the general principles in Scripture — which (to be fair) give far more guidance than most people think. But the Scriptures also give far less guidance than is needed for the life that God would have you to live.

If we get both questions right, if we live into Sinai, Calvary and Pentecost, then we live a life that is guided by the Scriptures. Our character becomes deeply aligned with God’s character as He has expressed it in the Scriptures. And our lives become masterpieces, unpredictable works of art. Just applying the principles on our own would generate a decent life, but it would never yield the beautiful surprises that come from a living relationship with God.

For example, God used me to help a homeless guy named Michael last year. The biblical principles would lead me to helping homeless folks–the stranger in your gates, the least of these, and all that. But I have no shortage of opportunity to minister to homeless folks, and Michael was not hanging around the places I would usually go to minister. What led me to Michael was that God literally told me to turn the car around, go back to that exit ramp, and give him $5 and a message: “God has not forgotten you.”

I did. As the relationship developed over subsequent conversations, it turned out there were certain truths Michael needed to hear, and then to live. It just so happened that these were the same truths God was teaching me right then.

Was the guidance to engage that specific homeless guy at that specific time biblical? No. It was far more specific than I could have gleaned from the Torah, or from the Old Testament, or even from the completed canon. But it didn’t conflict in any way with Scripture; it just went further than general instructions to the whole Body could go. Was it God? Of course, and the good fruit bore that out, as Jesus taught us that it would.

In other words, to add to Tripp, we didn’t just need principles; we needed rescue. And we don’t just need rescue; we need relationship.

Comments Off on Three Critical Questions on the Christian Life | Cessationism Or Not, Meditations, Mystical Union, Person/Proposition | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Liars

16 March 2014

Americans love liars. We say we don’t, but we do.

In American politics, our financial policy is an obvious disaster and has been for years. Any thinking person knows that no matter how big you are, you can’t just keep creating money out of thin air forever. You can’t live on a credit card forever. Life is not a something-for-nothing kind of game, and that’s all there is to it. Yet — Democrat or Republican — we keep electing people whose only differences of opinion are about how much money to create out of thin air. We do not elect people who will tell us that this is a bad business from end to end, and we need to stop it right now.

We tell ourselves that all these politicians are liars, and we will blame it all on them when, inevitably, the consequences of our poor decisions catch up to us. And it’s true. They are liars. But we focus on that only to distract ourselves from a much more important truth: we elect liars. We do it on purpose, and we do it again and again, because we would rather have liars than be told uncomfortable truths.

This is also true in the church. We have no end of scandal as prominent pastors and ministry leaders fall publicly, their double lives exposed for all to see. They were lying to us. Some of them were lying to us the whole time! Most of them, though, started off well, and gradually became hypocrites and liars. But who put these particular people in positions of prominence to start with? Us. Who didn’t want to hear it when they were having an off day? Us. Who cheerfully kept supporting them without taking a deeper look at their lives? Us. Who rewarded flashy stories of street evangelism and pictures of converted headhunters with attention and showers of money? Us. Who couldn’t be bothered with hearing about building relationships over a cup of coffee or leaving the ministry behind for a week to go on a much-needed marriage retreat? Us.

We didn’t know what was really going on. You know why? Because we liked it that way. We liked it that way because for us, it was never about building the Kingdom of God. It was about idolizing the celebrities; it was about how it made us feel. As long as we felt like we had a piece of that perfect celebrity action, we didn’t give any of it a second look. And in order for us to feel like we had a piece of the action, something flashy had to happen. Paying for a marriage retreat so the couple could recharge and reconnect just didn’t do it for us.

Scandal wasn’t the only consequence of this kind of foolishness on our part. Writing a useful support letter became an exercise in spin control. (You can read more about that here, and I highly recommend it.)

Want to do better? Here are three suggestions:
1. Go local. Support a ministry you can actually see, so you know what’s going on. There’s nothing wrong with sending money halfway around the world, but start with what is near and clear. If you can’t handle the issues involved in feeding the undernourished kids that live within an hour’s drive of your home, how do you propose to be wise about feeding undernourished kids in Sudan?
2. Support people you actually know, and actually know the people you support. Don’t just throw money at things; along with your money, commit the time and effort to build and maintain a real relationship. (Big bonus here: you’ll pray passionately for people you know. That’s really good for them, believe me–and for you too.)
3. Be a missionary. Invest your time and effort in tangibly loving your actual neighbors, the people who live just a few yards from your door. Nothing reorients your priorities faster than being on mission yourself. Nothing will give you a better reality check. And besides, Jesus said to do it.

When missionaries and pastors talk to other missionaries or ministry people in the know, they tell a different set of stories than the ones in the prayer letters. The real stories. You know why? Because they trust people who are in the trenches with them, who understand what it’s really like. You want to know what’s really going on with your missionaries, your pastors? Then be one of those people in the trenches.

This has got nothing to do with what you do for a living, and everything to do with living on a missionary footing, in everything you do. Take the risks, struggle, fail, try again. And for the love of all that is holy, talk about it! Share your stories — good and bad — with your friends, with your pastor, with the missionaries you support. Two reasons to do this. First, notice who reciprocates. Those are people you want to support. Second, we’ve got to change the conversation. Missionary living is a messy business, and we need to be comfortable with the mess. If we want truth in prayer letters, we’ve got to tell the truth ourselves.

1 Comment | Meditations | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Swimming in Cap and Gown

13 January 2014

There’s a lot of talk lately about pastoral plagiarism. It even got a mention in the NAE’s code of ethics a year and a half ago. Christianity Today’s Andy Crouch has a different, and extremely helpful, perspective on the real problems involved, and Doug Wilson has weighed in, in his own inimitable way. I won’t try to repeat what they have said so well. But as a working pastor (albeit in a nonstandard venue), I have my $0.02 to add to the conversation, for whatever it’s worth, and here it is.

In a nutshell, we’ve lost all sense of proportion, in two ways. We’re acting as though the citation standards for a college research paper apply to everything, which is nuts.  Even more importantly, we’re getting distracted from what pastoral work is supposed to be, about which more in a moment.  But let’s talk about citation standards first.

Apparently some academics would have me wear my cap, gown, and hood when I go swimming, but I ain’t gonna do it, and I don’t see any reason to pretend like I’m the crazy one here.

It doesn’t help that the citation “requirements” being advanced come from the academic world and have little relevance to other venues. (We’re now hearing about Twitter plagiarism, for heaven’s sake.) I’ve encountered the problem of academic customs being misapplied in pastoral settings in a number of places, but D. A. Carson’s article on the subject is a representative example.

Carson’s very restrictive stance is not surprising; he is an academic. In the academy, plagiarism is a major issue, because academics are being paid to come up with ideas and propagate them. An academic who is merely curating the ideas of others is not doing the job for which he is being paid, and he ought to be fired — especially if he’s trying to pass those ideas off as his own. A student in that arena is in the process of paying his dues to the academic guild, and has to learn to stick to the guild standards. This is not just a matter of “do it ’cause we said so” either. When I assign an essay in the classroom, I am finding out what (and how) my students think. I can’t learn what I need to know if the student appropriates someone else’s words or thoughts and doesn’t tell me that he’s done it.  Academic citation standards are right and good, and glory to God for them; Carson’s article is wise counsel for the academic workplace. Unfortunately, Carson for some reason thinks that the standards of his workplace also apply to the pastoral workplace. They don’t.

A pastor is a shepherd and a physician of the soul. He is responsible for feeding the sheep, for facilitating their healing and growth, for delivering food and medicine. He is not responsible for documenting the provenance of every last bit of food and medicine any more than your waitress is responsible for documenting what farm the lettuce in your salad was grown on, or your surgeon is responsible for documenting which Chinese factory worker sharpened his scalpel.  Now, should the lettuce or the scalpel blade turn out to have been contaminated with E. coli, we shall want to know exactly where they came from. Under the pressure of that sort of necessity, we will undoubtedly be able to find out. But under normal circumstances, no one cares, and no one should.

Now, a pastor may also be an author, an academic, a conference speaker, etc., and the overlapping roles can make things complicated. A popular book, a sermon, a master’s thesis, and a session at a marriage seminar all have their own standards and expectations. My Master’s thesis was expected to be my original work, and it was. Anything that wasn’t mine was supposed to be footnoted, and again, it was. If I one day publish a book, a similar set of expectations will apply, although exactly how it works will depend on the sort of book. An academic treatise will of course have many footnotes. In a different kind of work, credit may be given via a bibliography, a line in the acknowledgements, or a comment in the text itself. The genre sets the expectations.

When I preach a sermon on Romans 8, nobody expects the sermon to be made up entirely out of my own head. After all, I am preaching a passage that thousands have taught before me, and a truly original take on it is likely to be neither true nor helpful to the flock. Originality in this context is hardly a virtue, and adorning the simple truth of the passage by name-dropping famous commentators is just a waste of breath. My goal is to tell the truth about the passage, and to tell it in such a way that my people will live the truths of the passage, and be fed and healed as a result. If they are fed and healed, I have done my work well. End of story.

Moreover, when I construct a sermon, it is a collage of my own exegesis and experience, the insights of friends and mentors, things I’ve read and heard over the years, and more. Some of the influences I’m aware of, such as the commentaries sitting on my desk as I work. Others are half-remembered — analogies, exegetical insights or turns of phrase that I know I heard somewhere, but I can’t remember where. There are also influences that I’m wholly unaware of, things I ran across years ago that I have long since forgotten about, but that pop out in response to the need of the moment. I might very well believe that some of these are original with me — and I might very well be wrong. I am blessed to be well-read, well-traveled, and widely experienced, and there’s a lot of other people’s wonderful stuff lying about in “the leaf-mould of my mind,” as C. S. Lewis once put it. Any researcher with Google and a grudge might very well catch me out at any time, proving that someone else said thus-and-such long before I came along. In the event that happens, I’ll be happy to acknowledge that whether I came up with it independently or just read it and forgot about it, somebody else clearly said it first, and deserves credit for same. But the real problem there will be with the guy who spent 16 hours in front of a computer in a vengeful effort to convict me of “plagiarism,” not with me.

I have never tried to conceal my sources, and I have always been open with anyone who asked where I learned something. I appreciate it when people give me credit for stuff they learned from me, and I try to do the same for others as best I can. But I don’t pretend that academic practices of citation are appropriate for every venue for the same reason that I don’t wear my graduation regalia everywhere I go — because academic trappings are fine for the hothouse environment of academia, but woefully out of place elsewhere. Apparently some academics would have me wear my cap, gown and hood when I go swimming, but I ain’t gonna do it, and I don’t see any reason to pretend like I’m the crazy one here.

Of course, taking a whole sermon script from somewhere else — whether it’s a history book or one of those download services you can subscribe to — is another matter. I haven’t ever done that, and I don’t imagine I ever will, unless it’s a historical re-enactment of “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” or some such thing, and presented that way. A pastor who thinks he can download a sermon once a week and in that way effectively feed the people God has given him doesn’t know his people very well, or doesn’t understand his task very well. But the problem here is much more serious than plagiarism or the ethics of ghostwriting; it’s poor shepherding. He isn’t tailoring the food and medicine to the needs of the unique sheep God has committed to his care — and that is his task.

That is a serious problem, and it is by no means limited to people who are willing to crib whole sermons from somewhere else.  We are up to our necks in pastors who don’t know how to make disciples, which is the thing Jesus gave us to do.  The people are wounded and starving, and all too often their pastors don’t know how to help them.  It’s not entirely the pastors’ fault; little in their training prepared them to minister nourishment and healing in a timely fashion to actual people, so that they really heal and grow.  And we’re worried about pastors that don’t footnote properly? Jeepers.

There is such a thing as a real case of appropriating someone else’s work and pretending it’s your own, and that’s a violation of the eighth and ninth commandments. There is such a thing as inadvertently failing to give credit for something that’s clearly someone else’s work — which seems to be what happened in the recent Driscoll situation — and that’s an honest mistake, to be confessed and rectified when it’s discovered. But this obsession with the bugbear of pastoral plagiarism is a waste of time, and distracts attention from a much more serious problem. “The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed.”

Perhaps we’ll be better off if we worry less about how pastors footnote, and more about how seminarians don’t learn to make disciples.

Update: more here and here

2 Comments | Ecclesiology, Meditations | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Goals

31 December 2013

New Year’s Day is upon us, and with it, a flood of New Year’s resolutions. Gym memberships and workout DVDs will be purchased. Yoga pants will be worn (once). Classic works of literature will be opened. Journal entries will be written. Healthy recipes will be googled, and wheat grass juice will be guzzled. Scales will be dusted off. Credit cards will be cut up. File folders and closet organizers will be purchased. Hopes will be high. This year, I’m gonna do it! No, really!

And by Valentine’s Day, all will be forgotten. Because New Year’s resolutions, like Christmas trees, Jack-o-lanterns and fireworks, are a seasonal thing. You would no more keep a New Year’s resolution in May than you would carve a pumpkin in July. It’s the American way.

That said, the end of a year and the beginning of another is a natural time to stop and evaluate. For a few years now, I’ve had a practice of setting annual goals. Here are my rules:

  1. Standard goal-setting wisdom applies. Goals should be realistic, measurable, etc. Metrics can be totally subjective, but they need to be meaningful. (e.g., if the goal is to exercise enough to feel better, then me feeling better is the measure. If the goal is to be more tender toward my wife, my subjective evaluation is not worth much — but hers is.)
  2. Cover the range. Hitting my goals for the year should mean a fairly balanced life. This means, at minimum, goals that will challenge me physically, mentally, relationally, and spiritually.
  3. Review goals constantly. I write my goals out and keep that piece of paper on my desk where I can see it all the time. I consciously review the list at least once a month, and evaluate how I’m doing. How I’m doing has to boil down to a simple statement, with no shilly-shallying about: “I am on track.” “I am lagging.” “I am ahead of schedule.” “I am failing.”
  4. I am free to fail. If something that seemed worth doing in January just turns out not to be worth doing in the cold light of March, then I won’t feel obligated to do it. This is not a contract with myself. That said, it stays on the list through the end of the year. I will have to face it no less than once a month and say, “I am failing at xyz.” If I am pleased to be failing at it because the other things that are taking precedence really are more important, then so be it. If not, maybe I need to get back on the horse.
  5. No repeats on failed goals. If it wasn’t important enough to do last year, then I’m not going to clutter up my list with it again this year. If I still think it’s important a year from now, it can go back on the list. Note that this does not apply to partial successes. The difference between partial success and abject failure is somewhat subjective, but it mostly hinges on whether the goal changed my lifestyle. Let me illustrate with a couple of my goals from last year. I set myself a goal to read through one book a month in a certain area. I think I did it through February, and stopped. That’s a failure. I still think it’s a good idea to do, but it clearly wasn’t a priority, and therefore it’s banned from this year’s list. I also set a goal of learning Sun Lu-Tang’s 98-posture Taiji form. It crossed my mind that it might take more than a year, but I figured I could handle it in a year if I really tried. In fact, the foundational movements and power-development exercises I had to master before I could even start the form ended up taking the first half of the year. I’m finishing the year with only about a third of the form learned. But I practice 4-6 days a week. The goal changed my lifestyle, so I consider it a success; I just didn’t get as far as I was hoping. I had never done Taiji before, and didn’t have a realistic appreciation for the learning curve. This year’s goal (to learn the remaining 2/3 of the form) is much more realistic.

I don’t have a rule about this, but I’m a big fan of brevity. My entire list of annual goals will fit on one side of a 3×5 card. More than that is too much to juggle, and makes it hard to constantly review.

Here’s a partial (but representative) look at my evaluation for the past year:

  • Spirit: Develop in marital and spiritual leadership. Success. I’ve been presented with leadership roles that I couldn’t have handled a year ago, and been able to step into them handily. The spiritual focus in my marriage is stronger than it was a year ago — we’re more in sync with God and each other. (Sounds fuzzy, but I can feel the difference.)
  • Body: Regular workouts. Partial success. My martial arts workouts were regular and numerous. My workouts for attributes (strength, endurance, looseness, freedom of movement) were no less than once a week, but much more sporadic than they could have been.
  • Body: Focus on power generation in my martial arts practice. Success. I had occasion not only to focus on power generation in my own practice, but to teach a lot of what I know — and I probably learned more by teaching than I’ve ever learned any other way.
  • Mind: Write the novel I’ve been working on over the course of the year. Failure. I did nothing until October, prepped a little, and then tried to ram through it in November, using NaNoWriMo as a vehicle. It didn’t work; I can’t improvise my way through a mystery story — just too much to have in my head at once.
  • Career: Greater control of my schedule. Success. My better choice of bus route package this year allows me more freedom to make and honor commitments. We are well positioned to begin curriculum sales that have a good chance of freeing me from the need to drive a bus over the next couple years, which would greatly increase my flexibility. Meanwhile, I have increased my margin by dropping a weeknight commitment, and I have successfully maintained a day of rest most weeks.

Where there is success here, it is very much God’s doing. In a number of these areas where I was seeking growth, I didn’t have a clue how to make it happen. The goal was more a prayer than anything else, and overwhelmingly, God answered those quasi-prayers, often in very unexpected ways. It’s been my pleasure to learn from what God did, and apply what I learned to setting further goals for this year.

Do you set goals for your year? How do you decide on them?

2 Comments | Autobiography, Meditations | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

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