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

Beware the Abstract Nouns!

4 June 2024

A bit back, I posted a link to this article on my Facebook feed. The response was predictable: my comments were full of Christians objecting to the notion that Jesus wasn’t a nice guy. 

Now, I’m not complaining; this is trouble I’m happy to be in. Jesus was not, in fact, a nice guy, and I don’t mind annoying folks who think He was. As you can see, I have a mug in the cupboard for just such occasions. 

(Yes, really. My daughter-in-the-faith Anna got it for me, and I love it!)

If you need a demonstration that Jesus was not a nice guy, go ahead and re-read the gospels. I’ll wait. This post isn’t about that. This post is about the trends I’ve noticed in the outraged (or “concerned”) responses to such observations. I’ve noticed three major defenses against the council of God here: christological heresy, pragmatics, and abstract nouns. 

Christological Heresy

Now obviously, there are the folks who will trot out the old chestnut, “Well, Jesus was God and you’re not, so….” Ignore these people. Their objection is functionally a christological heresy, the notion that Jesus is not human the way you are human, such that He presents you with an example of what a human life should look like. Besides, honestly, they’re being intellectually dishonest. These same people are in favor of being christlike when we’re talking about humility or caring for the poor or washing someone’s feet; it’s only when you start talking like Jesus in ways that will get you uninvited to the cool kids’ table that they trot out their “Jesus was God” excuse. 

Besides, John the Baptist wasn’t God, and he called the religious leaders a “brood of vipers” too. Amos wasn’t God, and he famously called the mall rats of Jerusalem a bunch of cows. Ezekiel wasn’t God, and his comments about donkeys continue to scandalize 2500 years later. Paul wasn’t God, and he publicly wished the circumcision party would just chop it off. All these mere humans were led by the Holy Spirit to describe scandalous things honestly, in a scandalous way. Obviously this is a tool a righteous man can be led by God to employ. 

Pragmatics

Some folks won’t bother to argue about whether Jesus did, in fact, say these things, or even about whether we’re allowed to say them. They’ll just encourage you to “keep the main thing the main thing,” remain “gospel-centered,” and promise you that you’ll see better results if you just focus on the gospel rather than “getting sidetracked.” What these folks are missing is—in their terms—that the gospel is supposed to be the center of something. We’re here to proclaim the full council of God, and to follow Jesus’ whole example, not just a core sample of Jesus’ praxis that happens to fit some tight-shoed schoolmarm’s canons of niceness. They seem to honestly think they can get better results than Jesus got by taking a different approach than He did. All I can say is…good luck with that.

Abstract Nouns

Finally, there are the folks who will bury you under an onslaught of abstract nouns. This approach will start with an appeal to a basic biblical command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” “Let your speech be always with grace.” “Be kind to one another.” 

Then you will be challenged to be loving/gracious/kind based on the biblical command, which , ex hypothesi, means that you’re not allowed to talk like Jesus did. 

Any appeal to Jesus’ example will generally be met with the “He was God” objection, above, and any appeal to any other example will be met with “That passage is descriptive of what the person did in his human frustration, but what makes you think it’s prescriptive for us?” The net result of this hostility to the biblical narratives is that there are no concrete examples to which one might appeal for anything. Then, the abstract nouns like “love,” “kind,” or “gracious” become empty suitcases that we can fill up with whatever we like.

In the absence of having our tastes catechized by the biblical stories, we tend to fall back on whatever our sentiments dictate to us. In the early 21st century church, that generally means we’re falling prey to weapons-grade niceness. In our imaginations, being loving or kind means you would never say anything hard; gracious speech means nobody is ever offended. If someone is offended, that automatically means you’ve done something wrong.

But no. When grace incarnate walked among us, He regularly offended the respectable people. In a particular moment, “children of snakes!” was the kindest, most loving thing anybody could say to the Pharisees, and we know that because Jesus said it.

Go thou, and do likewise.

Comments Off on Beware the Abstract Nouns! | Controversies, Doctrinal Inconsistencies, Speaking as God Speaks | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Actual Humanities at Princeton?

1 June 2024

A propos of my recent post Not Dead, Just Relocated, I just ran across a Free Press story about a professor who is trying to revive the humanities at Princeton, of all places. May his tribe increase!

Comments Off on Actual Humanities at Princeton? | Uncategorized | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Proposition on a Cross?

21 May 2024

We all agree that how one gets from ‘unbeliever’ to ‘believer’ is a critical question. But the question of precisely what one must believe…that can go really bad places if you get too tight-fisted about it. There are serious problems with demanding a single proposition that accounts for every person’s journey from the one category to the other.

1. It simply is not a question the Bible ever poses or answers.

2. No proposed “saving proposition” accounts for all the recorded conversions in Scripture — a fact which should register WAY more prominently in the content of saving faith (COSF) debates than it does. Read the latter chapters of Gordon Clark, Faith and Saving Faith for a good treatment of this.

3. The COSF question makes a significant category error. It assumes that getting the proposition right is what matters, and that’s incorrect. A proposition was not nailed to the cross for your sins; you’re not saved by faith in a proposition, you’re saved by a Person in whom you trust. The Bible–Jesus Himself, in fact–uses multiple propositions to elicit and support that faith. The proposition is a window, and it’s true enough that not every window points out at Jesus. But if the conversion accounts of Scripture itself are to be believed, there are many windows that do. The point is not to get the exact right window, as if there were only one; the point is to be looking through the window at Jesus.

2 Comments | Bare Minimum Gospel Foolishness, Controversies | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Self-Medicating With Memes…or Laws

14 May 2024

If your approach to public policy is dictated by your empathy, then you are self-medicating. You feel other people’s pain, and you want to do something to relieve the pain. That’s a genuinely good desire, but understand that you are prone to the risks and temptations that always attend self-medication, chief among them numbing the symptoms without finding the real cause, and low sales resistance to hucksters. 

As to numbing the symptoms without uncovering the cause: the pain you feel is mostly not from people you directly know, it’s from media images. The pain you are dispelling isn’t their pain; it’s yours. Here’s how I know: when you hear the plight of whoever, you feel the burning need to do something. Then you do a thing, and you feel better. But that thing you do — what is it? You sign a petition, share a meme, make a donation, vote for a particular measure or person. Even if it was the right thing to do vis-a-vis the problem at hand, you feel better long before your actions could possibly have rippled out to the point where they’ve had any real effect on the actual situation. That person’s pain has not yet been alleviated, but you already feel better. That means you’re not in pain because they’re in pain. You’re in pain because you heard about their pain. 

Your pain doesn’t go away because their pain went away. Your pain gets alleviated because you obeyed your internal mandate to “do something.” Long before you have any way to know for sure if what you did helped them, hurt them, or simply did nothing, you’re going to feel better regardless of the eventual outcome.  

That serves to make your low sales resistance even lower. You’re a decent person; confronted by human suffering, you genuinely want to relieve it. Which means you want to believe (1) that there’s a way to relieve it, and (2) that way is accessible to you. Can you see that your thirst for an accessible fix already makes you more likely to fall for a smooth operator with a slick line of bullshit? It may not actually help anybody except the charity professionals making a salary off your contributions, but if it sounds good, your vicarious pain will evaporate when you click the ‘donate’ button or share the meme. Under those circumstances, the proposed fix barely even has to be plausible, because you already want to believe it. It’ll alleviate your discomfort just because you “did something.”

That sort of foolishness is an abuse of your drive to do something. That drive is given to you by God for the purpose of moving you to change the world. Don’t fritter it away sharing memes; get off the couch and actually do something for the problems that are nearest and clearest to you.

Comments Off on Self-Medicating With Memes…or Laws | Discernment, Meditations, New Fundamentals, Social Reality of the Fall | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Bible Class Debrief

10 May 2024

We taught through the entire story of the Bible over two years in two middle school classrooms, and every week we debriefed afterwards…in front of microphones. If you’d like to listen in, the episodes are now dropping every three days or so on the Headwaters website.

Comments Off on Bible Class Debrief | Exegesis, News | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Confess With Your Mouth

7 May 2024

Do you have to confess Jesus with your mouth to be saved?

YES!!! That’s literally exactly what Romans 10 says. In case v. 9 was somehow unclear, v. 10 clarifies it. The belief leads to righteousness, but salvation comes of confessing with your mouth. That’s just what it says. The only thing for any faithful Christian to do here is shout a hearty “AMEN!”

Having done that, we need to be sure we understand what Paul actually meant, because he’s not a post-Great-Awakening American like we are, and in contemporary English we have some ways of using religious language that are–by biblical standards–a little odd. When we use the word “saved,” in a spiritual context, we pretty much always mean “going to heaven, as opposed to going to hell.” So you can say “The lifeguard saved me,” and we all know you mean that he pulled you out of the wave pool, but when you say “Jesus saved me,” we all think of heaven.

Our default meaning for “saved” is a biblical usage–you can see Paul use it in Ephesians 2:1-10–but it’s not the biblical default meaning. When you see the word “saved” in the Bible, you need to ask a few more questions, like “Saved from what?” In Romans in particular, we need to remember that by the time we encounter 10:9-10, we’re ten and a half chapters in. Let’s not forget what came before it–you did read what came before it, right? Paul has already told us what he means by “saved” here; he began the theme in ch. 1 when he told them he was ready to preach the gospel (1:15) to the faithful saints in Rome (1:7-8), explaining that he’s not ashamed because the gospel saves–there’s our word–those who believe (1:16). We tend to impose our default meaning on 1:16 — you believe and now you’re going to heaven, i.e., “saved” — but that’s not quite what it says. Paul is saying that the gospel saves those who already believe, and he makes that clear in the next verse by quoting Habakkuk 2:4, which is plainly talking about someone who’s already a just man being saved from physical death by his faith. (Think Daniel in the lion’s den, or the three Hebrew children in the fiery furnace — they are among the direct recipients of the promise in Habakkuk.)

Paul goes on to discuss how we’re all justly damned in 1:18-3:20, and then begins to discuss the possibility of attaining God’s righteousness apart from the Law, through faith in Christ (3:21-4:25), and then moves on in 5:1 to discuss our status once we’ve attained that righteousness, being justified by faith. Here’s where our word “saved” comes up again: “MUCH MORE then, having now been justified by His blood, we shall be SAVED from wrath through Him” (5:9). Being “saved” in Paul’s usage here is much more than being justified. Like Abraham, your faith is accounted for righteousness, and you are justified on that basis — the same thing 10:9-10 says: “for with the heart one believes unto righteousness.” But God has more — “much more!” — in store for you than that.

Paul goes on to discuss how we deal with sin in this life (according to 6:23 it’ll kill you). As he develops his argument, Paul makes it clear that while arranging your mental furniture correctly is important (ch. 6), it’s not enough to keep you out of sin (ch. 7). Actually living resurrection life in your dead/mortal body requires active intervention by the Spirit (8:10-11), and when we allow the Spirit to work through us, He intervenes not only in our deeds, but even in our prayers (8:26ff). And if our own mortal nature can’t separate us from God’s love, then nothing can (8:31-39). So “saved” in Paul’s usage here has nothing to do with going to heaven when you die, and everything to do with being delivered from physical death. To borrow a paraphrase from St. Schwarzenegger, “Come with me if you want to live.” God’s faithfulness to His people is nowhere better demonstrated than in His continuing pursuit of His people Israel, which is Paul’s subject in ch. 9-11, where our text appears.

In that context, Paul asserts that we receive righteousness through faith (as discussed in ch. 4, and which is what we mean in contemporary English by “saved”), but being delivered from God’s wrath on sin in this life requires more than that. Specifically, you need to be willing to speak up.

2 Comments | Exegesis | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

“We Can’t Be Amish…” or Can We?

30 April 2024

Throughout our time in the positive and neutral worlds, we have been able to take it for granted that a conscientious Christian could be involved more or less anywhere that mattered in our culture. Naturally certain vices were always off limits, but in the positive world they were generally acknowledged as vices, and you could be a fully-participating member of respectable society without them. In the neutral world, these vices were more readily accepted in mainstream society, but still regarded as largely optional.

Under those circumstances, discussion of the ethics of cultural engagement and participation would usually include the line, “Well, we can’t be Amish, so….” “We can’t be Amish” was shorthand for a series of related ideas: “we can’t just abandon cultural production,” “we have a duty to participate in every realm of the culture” and so on. How could you be salt and light, so the reasoning went, if you didn’t participate?

That reasoning no longer holds. As the enemies of God solidify their hold on gate-keeping positions in various institutions and fields, the question is actually quite the opposite: If you meet their criteria for participating, can you still be salt and light? If you had to affirm all manner of sin and wickedness get the job, and if you can only keep the job by soldiering on in complicit silence, are you being salt and light?

I think we all know the answer.

But we should also remember that God is endlessly creative, and loves to insert His people into places where they “have no business” being. Do not forget that Daniel ended up the leader of a pagan emperor’s “wise men” (read: magicians), and no matter what it said in the employee handbook, he got that position without eating the king’s unclean food and without giving up his daily prayers. Joseph was the minister-in-chief of another pagan king. Cyrus rebuilt the temple. Obadiah was in charge of King Ahab’s house, and saved 100 prophets’ lives. Naaman the Syrian was given God’s permission to escort his master into a pagan temple. Jesus got invited to the parties good Jewish boys didn’t go to…and He went. “God moves in a mysterious way, His wonders to perform.” In the same way that we ought not take someone’s millionaire status as proof that he musta stole something, we have no business deciding that if that guy has that place or position, then he musta betrayed the faith. “I can’t see how a faithful Christian could possibly…” we will say. Just so—you can’t see. But what does that have to do with reality? Once upon a time, Peter couldn’t see how Jesus could possibly die on a cross, either. Turns out God’s more creative than we give Him credit for.

So go ahead and try for positions you “shouldn’t” be able to get. It will be easy enough to look at a particular institution’s public persona and conclude that no conscientious Christian could long survive in that environment. That might be true, but individuals within the institution often vary in their ideological zeal, and some of them still care more about getting the job done than they do about a hard-to-replace employee’s ideological soundness. Any number of conscientious Christians may be laboring away heartily, as unto the Lord, in the bowels of an institution that (on social media, at least) has impeccable pagan credentials. If God is leading you that direction, then off you go!

At the same time, you should remember that God also finds use for a wide variety of sacrifices and martyrdoms. Stephen represented the Lord faithfully and got murdered for it, following the example of Jesus and all the prophets before Him, “from the blood of righteous Abel to Zechariah son of Berechiah, whom they slew between the temple and the altar.” Many of us have since followed Stephen’s example, including the young fellow, one Saul of Tarsus, who ran the coat check at Stephen’s murder. Fortify your soul with their stories. If you’re looking for a good starting point, get Fox’s Book of Martyrs. Read the tales of what they did to us back in the day.

Then, when they’re going to fire you, reflect on the precipitous decline in the quality of our opposition over the past few centuries. They used to be creative. The saints of old were burned alive, fed to lions, staked to the ground at low tide, sewn into a leather bag with wild dogs and thrown into the Tiber. Today, you stand for Jesus, and you get some buffoon ominously talking about…H.R.? A cardboard box and a security escort to the parking lot? “They’re not even threatening to cut off my hand,” you’ll think to yourself, suppressing a giggle.

The Lord gives, and the Lord takes away. If he wants you to get that fellowship, that job, that professional license, that political appointment, then nobody can stop you. And when His purposes will be better served by demonstrating your immovable conviction in the face of persecution, you will be persecuted, ostracized, fired, expelled.

This to say: be curious about what God might be doing. Don’t decide in advance what God can’t do. But also, be faithful. Don’t bow to the idols. If that means you’re going to get consigned to “being Amish,” then so be it. Don’t take full participation in the culture for granted; as the culture gets grosser, you won’t want to fully participate anyhow.

Comments Off on “We Can’t Be Amish…” or Can We? | Discernment | 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

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »