Full Contact Christianity

What Would Jesus Doubt?

31 August 2014

So the other day a feller named David R. Henson delivered himself of the passing odd conclusion that God’s Not Dead is not a Christian movie. Here, from the horse’s mouth, is the critique:

I’m not going to mince words about this.

Heaven is For Real and God’s Not Dead are not Christian movies.
They are not even religious movies. They are schmaltzy, vacuous, “inspirational” movies.

If a film leaves viewers with a fist full of answers rather than questions, with declarative reassurances that heaven is real and God is alive, then it’s not really a movie about faith and it’s certainly not a Christian movie.

Those films are little more than mindless memes.

You can read the rest of the article here. I haven’t seen Heaven is for Real, so I’ll confine my comments here to God’s Not Dead.

Twenty years ago, I had a chance to hear Billy Sprague speak on the interaction of Christian truth and art. He told us about his own grief when his fiancee died, and how angry he was at God for allowing it to happen. He described his feelings when he got in his car one day and Twyla Paris’ song “God Is In Control” came on the radio.

God is in control
We believe that His children will not be forsaken
God is in control
We will choose to remember and never be shaken
There is no power above or beside Him, we know
Oh, God is in control,
Oh, God is in control

Furious, he turned the radio off. Of course God was in control, he thought. The problem was, God just didn’t seem to care.

Later, another song, “Show the Way” by David Wilcox, got his attention.

You say you see no hope
You say you see no reason we should dream
That the world would ever change
You’re saying love is foolish to believe

‘Cause there’ll always be some crazy
With an army or a knife
To wake you from your day dream
Put the fear back in your life

Look, if someone wrote a play just to glorify
What’s stronger than hate
Would they not arrange the stage
To look as if the hero came too late?

He’s almost in defeat
It’s looking like the evil side will win
So on the edge of every seat
From the moment that the whole thing begins, it is

Love who makes the mortar
And it’s love who stacked these stones
And it’s love who made the stage here
Although it looks like we’re alone

In this scene set in shadows
Like the night is here to stay
There is evil cast around us
But it’s love that wrote the play
For in this darkness love can show the way

So now the stage is set
Feel you own heart beating in your chest
This life’s not over yet
So we get up on our feet and do our best

We play against the fear
We play against the reasons not to try
We’re playing for the tears
Burning in the happy angel’s eyes, for it’s

Love who makes the mortar
And it’s love who stacked these stones
And it’s love who made the stage here
Although it looks like we’re alone

In this scene set in shadows
Like the night is here to stay
There is evil cast around us
But it’s love that wrote the play
For in this darkness love will show the way
Show the way, show the way

He sang the song for us. Then he said, “Did you notice that they both make the same point?” Both songs tell us that God is in control, that He cares about us, that it’s going to be okay in the end. But “God Is In Control” just says it straight out. It’s–Billy’s words–“a sermon set to music.” “Show the Way” isn’t. It’s a parable. It takes you down an indirect, more artistic path show the truth to someone who might not be ready to hear the sermon yet. Then he said something that I wrote down in my notebook, something I’ve never forgotten: “Art takes truth past doors where truth can’t go alone.”

Then he did something else I’ve never forgotten: he urged us not to be contemptuous of “God is in Control.” There’s nothing wrong with a sermon, he said. There’s nothing wrong with setting a sermon to music. It didn’t have the power to reach him in his deep grief, but that’s not a defect in the sermon. At that time, he needed a song that would take the indirect path, and help him to see God at work. “To everything there is a season, a time for every purpose under heaven.”

“God’s Not Dead” falls into the same category as “God is in Control.” It’s a cinematic sermon, and a bit of a heavy-handed one at that, telling rather than suggesting, driving home its point without a hint of self-doubt, posing questions only in order to answer them.

That’s what bothers Henson so much. “If a film leaves viewers with a fist full of answers rather than questions, with declarative reassurances that heaven is real and God is alive, then it’s not really a movie about faith and it’s certainly not a Christian movie.” In Henson’s mind, a proper Christian movie would make you struggle. It would leave you questioning, doubting.

Henson goes on in his article to talk about one such film, and I’m looking forward to watching it. I expect it to be a good experience. There’s certainly room for such films, and we could do with a few more of them.

Doubts and questions are okay–God can handle them. When we have doubts and questions, we certainly should be honest about that. And it’s true, sometimes good art can reach us in our doubts and questions when simple assurances leave us cold. Art takes truth past doors where truth can’t go alone. But it is possible to be too much the cynic, too enamored of the doubts and questions. It is possible to fall in love with one part of the process and forget the goal.

Isaiah had answers by the bucketload, not that anybody wanted to listen. Jeremiah’s answers were likewise unpopular. John the Baptist got himself tossed into jail for having one answer too many, and being a little too certain about it. If only he’d had some tolerance for ambiguity where Herod’s marital choices were concerned…. And what they did to him was nothing compared to what they did to Jesus for speaking out His answers a bit too loudly.

All these guys were sure–as God’s Not Dead is sure–that God really is not dead, that He really does sovereignly control events, that He really does find people in their time of need, and they really do respond–even people who hate Him, or think they do. Lots of answers there, no question.

That has its place. There’s a time for every purpose under heaven.

In ninth grade, I entered public high school academically well ahead of most of my peers (and lagging behind socially, just to complete the stereotype!) Predictably, I tested into honors classes in history and humanities. There were about 40 of us in my grade who were in all the same classes, and what a mad little coterie of brainy sophists we were! Now, we weren’t so far gone, back in those days, that we just celebrated all the different interpretations of a thing. We argued ferociously over whose interpretation was a better reading of the facts. But — sophisticates, we — we all understood that it was a conflict of interpretations. We would always say, “This is my interpretation,” never, “This is just how it is.”

So one day, the girl who sat in front of me in World History class–a gorgeous, willowy blonde named Danielle–turned around and said, “Tim, I have a question. What does the Bible say about having sex before you’re married?”

No rube I, I said, “I can tell you my interpretation.”

“I don’t want to hear another interpretation, Tim,” she said. “I want to know what it says.”

Now, a philosophy or a hermeneutics professor would be tempted to point out the inevitability of interpretation, and intellectually speaking, the prof would be right. Spiritually speaking, though, the prof would be an idiot to voice that notion at that moment. Danielle didn’t need a lecture on philosophy or hermeneutics. She had a boyfriend that she loved, she was making a really important decision, and she needed a clear word from God. She was asking me, as God’s representative, to give her one.
God be thanked, I was not too sophisticated to see that.

So I told her. “It says to wait until you’re married.”

She gave me a long look. “It’s that simple?”

“Yes.”

And it is.

God’s Not Dead isn’t high cinematic art. It’s direct, simple and straightforward. Perhaps even childlike. But unless you become like one of these, you will by no means enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

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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

Why Bother?

27 July 2014

A good friend recently asked a question I’d like to share with you. I can’t quote it exactly off the top of my head, but the gist of it was something like this: the church is an absolute disaster of silliness and dysfunction, and God often seems absent in the doings of His churches. Given that, why would we want to lead people into the church? Why bother?

Let that sink in a while before you read any further. Why do you bother with the church? Do you think it’s maybe not as bad as all that? Do you think it’s exactly that bad, but you still have good reasons for staying engaged? What are your reasons for staying engaged? It’s a question worth pondering.

I’d challenge you to take a few minutes and write down your reasons. Below, you’ll find mine.

It is a worthwhile question. Why bother?

I have two answers. Because God bothers, and because it’s the only game in town.

Because God bothers. Because He has not lost hope. How do I know? Because I watched the sun shine through the clouds today. Because feldspar is the commonest rock on earth, but when two kinds of it intergrow just right, you get moonstone, a frozen rainbow you can carry in your pocket, a portable parable to remind you of the glory that’s released when God unites the different. Because when I confessed my sin to Him at the worship service this evening, He spoke to me. (Yes, even in church.) Because He gave grace and glory to the Englewood churches to cancel their Sunday morning services and meet together on the high school baseball diamond on Pentecost Sunday. Because yesterday in a cafe in Littleton, He met my friend and opened her eyes to new dimensions of His love for her. Because a few months ago He spoke to my homeless friend Michael and helped him get off the street.

We’re badly broken, each and all. Every gathering we pull together, whether it’s a ragtag band of tie-dyed hippies in a park or a country-club demographic wearing suits under a pine-paneled ceiling, is broken. From ties to tie-dye, I have seen pathologies that stagger the mind. I have wondered how anything could possibly get done with so much brokenness. I have second-guessed inviting anybody into such a messy environment. But then, who am I to have higher standards than God?

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but God’s standards are appallingly low. The two most out-there broken groups I have ever experienced have also been two of the most faithful, directly productive for the kingdom. When we walk in the light–which just means not hiding, read 1 Jn. 1–we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus Christ cleanses us from all sin. I have seen Jesus cover amazing weakness with His strength, and give the gift of fellowship to people who, by all rights, should barely be capable of human speech, let alone friendship. He has not given up.

While it’s true that the Sons of Korah would be excommunicated in some churches for their “unChristlike” song lyrics…they exist. And they have a thriving ministry. As do a number of other people crazy enough to take the Bible seriously. Sure, they take a lot of flak, but they exist. God could have completely given His Church over to its silliness. Instead, He has given His Church these godly madmen. If He has not given up, then why should I?

And anyway, my second answer–it’s the only game in town. I have a friend who has worked in Iraq, Jordan and Israel building reconciliation between Christians, Jews and Muslims. He does it by introducing them all to Jesus–once they are united to Him, they find that they are also united to each other. It doesn’t erase their longstanding divisions, and the issues don’t simply evaporate. But they are united and they love one another, and they call on God together to give them the wisdom to resolve their differences. Through him and a few others I know of, there are literally thousands of Taliban and Hezbollah fighters (and many others) who are followers of Jesus seeking to live in the kingdom of God, seeking real solutions instead of just the momentary gratification of violence. Is there a better idea for peace in the Middle East? I haven’t seen one.

Here in Englewood, we’ve had a bunch of homeless folk who are busily destroying themselves and making certain parts of the city much less enjoyable in the process. Nothing that anybody tried worked. But we’ve got a dedicated corps of volunteers who have spent the last 3 years building relationships and loving our homeless people in Jesus’ name. Some of those hopeless folks have jobs and apartments now. And yeah, some of them are every bit as bad as they ever were. Some of the success stories have relapsed. One of the guys we baptized recently went back to jail for something stupid. It isn’t perfect. But it’s working, and it’s working better than anything else that anybody else has tried. It’s working so well that the mayors of the metro Denver area recently came down to see what these folks are doing–because it’s working better than any of their programs.

There are lots of days that are painful and confusing, when I don’t know what God is up to and the whole thing looks like nonsense. But even on those days, like Peter said on one painful and confusing day 2000 years ago, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of life.”

He does. That’s why I bother.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Reading Literally

25 May 2014

The covenant with Noah was a terrifying precursor to Pentecost, an outpouring of divine anointing previously unmatched in the history of the human race. In its wake, Noah’s children and grandchildren walked as gods among men, outliving their great-great-great grandchildren and ruling as no one has since. The great river valley civilizations were born overnight, deliberately created from whole cloth by men and women divinely commissioned to build human culture from the ground up.

A non-literal reading of Gen. 1-11 is boring, boring shit. Why do theological liberals persist in the silly notion that Tolkien is better at world-building than Yahweh?

The irony here is that these same people can’t help noticing the evidence of literary design in the text, but can’t imagine that God would display marks of authorship in the actual world. They can imagine God telling a dramatic story, but not making one.

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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.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

What I’m Getting for Lent

31 March 2014

I attend an Anglican mission church (PEARUSA, for them as keep track of such things), and Lent is kind of a big deal for us. But I don’t believe in Lent.

Why not? Well, Lent is a 40-day fast, a time to meditate upon and lament your sins. That is a great thing to do, but it’s badly imbalanced. When Yahweh Himself created a religious calendar, He had a time for fasting, meditating upon sin, and (as He put it) “afflicting your souls.” It was called Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. The operative word, for our purposes, being day. All the rest of the religious festivals in Yahweh’s calendar were parties. Under the Old Covenant, it was mostly through parties that you learned to fear The Lord (Deut 14:23). It cannot be that now, after the victory was won on Golgotha and the Messiah is ascended to the right hand of God until His enemies are made His footstool, now we get less celebratory and more into mourning and fasting.

You will say, “But Jesus did it! Jesus fasted 40 days; following Jesus is what Lent is about!” Yes. Yes, He did. Once. When He was 30. And He didn’t just give up ice cream and swearing, either. So fine, if you want to be like Jesus, go for it — fast for 40 days when you’re 30. If you live to 60, you can do it again.

Of course, meditating upon one’s sins really is a good idea, which is why God built it into His calendar in Yom Kippur. I don’t particularly observe the Jewish calendar, so Good Friday seems to be an appropriate day for that.

And yet here I am, part of a community that observes Lent. These are my people. We observe Lent. We have for centuries. Nobody will complain if I just blow Lent off — we’re not legalistic like that. But I don’t want to just blow it off. These are my people.

So how can I navigate this in a manner that is agreeable to my conscience? Well, this year, I settled on a positive Lenten observance. I can’t get my head round a 40-day period of mourning and flagellation, but I certainly can get my head around a 40-day period of waiting and receiving from God. So I selected a stack of books for devotional reading — about 900 pages altogether — that I’m committing to get through during Lent. It’s enough of a load that I will have to alter my lifestyle to get through it. I’ll end up giving up something for Lent, just in the course of re-prioritizing to get through the reading. A few weeks into it, I’m well into the 900 pages — definitely on track to finish before Easter. But I’m honestly not sure what I gave up.

Whatever it was, I don’t miss it. But God’s giving me a ton.

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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.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

On Getting Vetted by the Priests of Dagon

5 March 2014

I resigned my post teaching and writing curriculum at the seminary a couple years ago, and owing to the vicissitudes of small-school scheduling, my classroom presence had been spotty the year before that. I must admit I wasn’t really looking forward to this much time away from the classroom, but in hindsight, I’ve found it refreshing, and it’s not as though I’ve lacked for other work to do.

The disengagement has allowed me time to reflect on our ways of preparing people for ministry, and alternatives that might actually be preferable to our existing classroom methods. As I contemplate what sort of partners I want for the front-line work I’ve been doing in the past few years, I’ve got to admit “seminary graduate” doesn’t leap to the top of my list of desirable qualifications (doesn’t even crack my top five, actually) — about which more in another post, perhaps. In fact, my present partners include at least one guy who, a couple of decades back, dropped out of seminary in disgust and seems none the worse for the experience. Another partner got all his (very thorough) preparation for ministry in a local church, and looks at the whole seminary enterprise with more than a little suspicion. I get asked periodically whether I’d seek to re-engage in the academic milieu if the opportunity arose. As I consider it, I find myself thinking of it as a fairly dangerous undertaking.

There are several reasons for this, but the first one is that engaging in scholarship in our society is not a neutral endeavor. As in any field, there are (relatively arbitrary) conventions. Credit must be given where due, but how? Style manuals have whole chapters on footnote, endnote, and bibliography formats to answer this question, and MLA has different formats from APA, which is different from Chicago, and so on. This is not a bad thing in itself. Every guild has its standards, and it is important to the corporate identity and cohesion of the discipline that this be the case. Every initiate chafes at seemingly pointless constraints, but it’s a matter of loving your guildmates enough to show that you value their wisdom and have a place in their discipline. You will never have an opportunity to give to them if you can’t show them that you have something worth giving.

On the other hand, Christians have always had a very tense relationship with professional guilds. Making sacrifices to idols always seems to be a membership requirement in guilds controlled by pagans, and the American academic guild is unequivocally controlled by pagans and administered for purposes that, at very best, are in service of secularism.

Secularism is a false god; it is a competing theology, as antithetical to Christianity as the worship of Dagon. In it, “neutrality” toward all things religious is a sacred duty, and bowing the knee to any particular deity in any way that affects the public sphere is blasphemy. If it is to be practiced publicly at all, a religion must agree to the equal validity of all other competing religions — or at least manage to behave as though all other religious paths are equally valid. You’re allowed to practice whatever religion you want, as long as you don’t act like it really matters. A private hobby-religion is fine. Some people build ships in bottles; some people juggle geese; some people go to church. Whatever floats your boat.

Christians are required to be at war with secularism, root and branch. The earth is Yahweh’s, and everything in it, and we are not allowed to pretend otherwise for the sake of getting along. In the sphere of education, even the education of ministers, we are not doing well at honoring the Lord who bought us.

Churches and individuals give sacrificially to seminaries in order to support the training of the next generation of pastors. But few, if any, such donors show up at the school to give it a thorough review and see exactly what their money is supporting. We simply assume the work is getting done; we believe seminary newsletters and press releases as if they were the fifth gospel. On the other hand, the authorities of the academic guild — who owe their allegiance to Dagon, let us not forget — police their boundaries religiously. If you’re going to award Ph.D. degrees, you must have x number of faculty, themselves with recognized Ph.D.s in this or that field, y number of books in the library to support the program, and so on–and they do show up on campus to check and see that you’re in compliance. Some of these standards make sense. Others not so much. The point, however, is that we allow ourselves to be inspected by the priests of Dagon, and attempt to manage the affair without making any compromises. Since the results of this have been discussed elsewhere as well as I could write them here, I’ll just link to one such discussion.

For my purposes, though, the point is that submission to the priests of Dagon is not a particularly helpful posture for a minister of Yahweh’s gospel. Perhaps in a given instance no harm comes from it, but does anybody really think it’s desirable?

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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:

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.)
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.
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.”
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.
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