Full Contact Christianity

Health clubs thrive on the people who sign a one-year contract on January 3 and then never actually come to the gym.  All the paying members ever showed up on the same day, the fire marshal would shut the place down.

Storefront martial arts studios live on beginners.  There are people who stick with it into the upper ranks, of course, but the endless parade of white belts who join, stick with it for six months or a year, and then quit?  Those people are the ones that are paying the rent.

What’s this got to do with training ministers?

Everything.

Say your pastor’s getting older, and the church realizes that come five, ten years, you’ll be needing a new pastor.  You’ve got a guy in the church, promising young fellow who’s definitely got the character and the gifts, but he needs the training.  Now, you could ship him off to seminary for a few years, and then hope you get him back.  But he’s got a wife, three kids, a mortgage, a dog, a steady job, and you’re asking him to pull up stakes, move to another state, struggle through four years of the most demanding academics he’s ever seen, spend his evenings waiting tables or sitting in a booth at a parking garage, trying to keep body and soul together on minimum wage and still be a good husband and a good father, only to come out of the experience thousands of dollars in debt, so he can come back to your church and get paid less than he’s already making right now–and for a lot more work.  He ain’t going.

Wait just a minute, you say.  What happened to dedication?  The church needs him!  Yeah, sure.  So do his wife and kids, and the needs of the wife and kids come first.  “He who does not care for his own has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.”  As long as that’s the deal you’re offering, the only takers will be guys who are willing to put themselves a whisker away from disqualifying themselves from the very ministry they’re preparing for.  (And then we wonder why it’s so hard to hire a pastor who understands the church budget…)

So you think, “Well, okay…what if he could take evening classes right where he is?”  Ah, now you’re getting somewhere.  But there isn’t anybody offering evening classes within reasonable driving distance.  Now what?

Start something, of course.  Just to be talking about it, let’s say you can score a classroom in a church basement somewhere, and let’s say you have the skilled people you need to teach.  (That’s granting an awful lot, but let it pass for now.)  You’ve got one student, anyway…

…but where do you get enough to make this worth doing?  If you decide, right out front, that you’re training pastors for church leadership and pulpit ministry, and that’s it, then you won’t accept anyone unless you think they have a reasonable chance of being a pastor.  Right out the gate, that means you’re accepting nobody who seems to lack the pastoral gifts, and for many in the conservative world, no women, either.  So you’ve excluded a huge part of the population.  You’re happy, because you’re doing a narrow, well-defined job, but costs mount.  You need a photocopier for class handouts.  You need money for rent for your classroom.  Maybe you get enough things going at one time that you need two classrooms.  You need books for your library.  These are largely fixed costs, and you don’t have a lot of students to offset them.  You get some donors, but the truth is, with so few students, you’re serving a very small community, so the number of donors is small, and they don’t give much. A few years of barely making it, and you’re facing the possibility of having to close your doors.  You’ve got to bring in more money, or you’re going to go broke.  You’ve done everything you can think of to bring in more qualified students, but you can’t give people the pastoral gift — either they have it, or they don’t.

Meanwhile, you’re taking three or four calls a week from people who “just want to take a few Bible classes.”  You turn them down, of course, because you’re only training pastors.  But eventually, you start to wonder if maybe there’s another source of funds there.  So you give it a shot — you open up your entry-level courses to auditors.  They pay less, of course.  But you have a number who really want to do the work.  If your instructor’s grading the work, then he ought to be paid for that — so you let them take the class for credit, and charge them accordingly.

Shortly, you have a group of satisfied students who’ve taken everything that’s open to them and are hungry for more.  You open up the next group of courses.

And so on.  Fast-forward a few years, and you’ve got a Bible college on your hands.  Most of your students aren’t going to be pastors.  But anybody who shows up at the front door with a high school diploma and the tuition money can take classes, and then declare a “pastoral ministries” major.  Since you have the institutional memory of being a training institute for pastors, you’ve never made any sort of serious attempt at offering a well-rounded education.  Out of necessity, you’ve added an English Comp course or two, just because you had too many students coming in who couldn’t write a paper to save their lives.  You added English Grammar because you had too many guys flunking out of Greek and Hebrew because they didn’t know their own language.  But still, you mostly teach Bible.

Result: you graduate people who never had the pastoral gifts, never would have been selected to be pastors, and whose training is suited for nothing at all except pastoral work.  Churches hire these people because they have the training.  Disaster ensues.

What’s the answer?  I don’t know for sure (I have some ideas, but they’ll keep til next week).  One thing I can say for sure: this ain’t it.

Two days ago, I returned from a 10-day trip to visit some friends and family in Minnesota.  It was an incredible time, filled with joy and tears and good fellowship, and I came back home in desperate need of some down time.  I have not been able to rest as completely as I really wanted to — a friend is getting married this weekend — but it’s all good.

Taking rest in the middle of the hurly-burly is a growth area for me right now, and this is a golden opportunity to practice.  I’d like to say something about how it’s all about attitude or whatever, but I don’t know what it’s all about.   I’m just fumbling along, trusting God to deliver me from my anxieties and give me peace.  The Lord has not given us a spirit of fear, as the apostle once said.  For all that I’ve been a Christian for most of my 37 years, I’m still kinda new to this dimension of walking with God.

***

I’m new to a lot of things.  Although I had been aware of 1 Timothy 2:8 for a long time, I’d never really been convicted that it was something important to follow until pretty recently.  Suddenly I find myself lifting up my hands in prayer, and I don’t really know why other than that God says to do it.  I’m a theology geek — I want to understand before I dive into things like this.  I don’t understand, not at all.  I can dig through the biblical passages that talk about lifting hands (there’s a fair few, it turns out), and I can get a general concept for what the practice is about, more or less.  Some conclusions rise to the surface pretty readily.  But to be honest, I don’t really get it.  So I find myself having to simply rest on the Father.  He knows what it’s about; He’ll take care of it.  I’m just aiming for obedience seeking understanding.  I expect to understand in a year, or five.  But understanding comes from the Father; He’ll give it when it’s time.

I fumble about with this one too.  Sometimes I just plain forget.  Other times I find myself caught in a cleft stick between obedience to the command on one hand, and on the other hand, obedience to other commands like loving my neighbor or not putting a cause to fall in my brother’s way.  I do have a few people in my life who are thoroughly put off by the whole thing; seeing me raise my hands this way grieves and annoys them.  I’m not sure what to do about that.

Re-introducing obedience to a culture that has grown comfortable with disobedience has a lot of inherent problems, and I don’t navigate the territory perfectly.  There’s no recipe for this; I’m making decisions on a case-by-case basis, and sometimes I make the wrong call.  All I can do is try to remember to keep an eye on the Father and follow what He leads me to do.

And rest.  He knows what He’s doing.

There are times when advice is exactly what you need, because you don’t see as well as other people.  There are many other times, though, when you aren’t quite that helpless.  This does not mean, however, that you do not need the collective wisdom and experience of the community.

Let’s say you ignore all advice that boils down to “Do it the way I did.”

Let’s say you also ignore all advice that boils down to “Don’t do it the way I did.”

What do you have left?

Quite a lot.  What you’re looking for is not advice.  What you’re looking for is experience by proxy.  Ask “What did you have to give up to get what you have?”  “What were the advantages of your choice?”  What were the disadvantages?”  “How would your life be different if…?”

If someone gives you flippant, easy answers, just move on.  Find someone else to talk to.  You’re listening for thoughtful reflection on a life unlikely at every turn, a life where there were always thousands of other choices — as you will always have thousands of other choices.  Your interlocutor will value certain outcomes and devalue others; that is his (or her) affair.  You might adopt some of those values; others you might pass by.  But the experience, the chance to learn how the world works by looking closely at someone else’s story — that’s gold.

You can’t just do what someone else did before you.  There are millions of little details that make your situation different from theirs.  Teenagers learn this and endlessly argue that they aren’t about to repeat a stupid mistake: “This is different!” they whine.  Of course it is.  But as their parents know, often the differences don’t really make a difference.  You aren’t looking for anything so simple as “I did it this way; you can too.”  No, you are looking for paths, for well-worn trails where many individuals, each of them with their own story, motives, and dreams, each one different in endless ways, nonetheless wore a common rut in the world.  Don’t want to wind up where the rut ends?  Don’t start where it starts.  But if it goes where you want to go…now you’ve got something.

To see the ruts in the world, you can’t think like a lab tech.  It’s not a science.  The world you live in is not a mechanism.  Yahweh is not a watchmaker; He is a spoken Word artist, and everything you see and smell and taste and touch, He spoke into being.  He is upholding it all, even now.  If you would live in harmony with His world, His art, then you have to make decisions artistically. You have to think in metaphors and symbols and types, in foreshadowing and themes.  You think typologically, not technically.

You can’t plan your life.  You can make plans and blueprints and timelines until you’re blue in the face, but God is the One who speaks the world into being, who fashioned the days for you, when as yet there were none of them.  He allows you to collaborate with Him, but there are thousands of other paths, and many of the critical decisions in your life are not up to you.  Will that car suddenly swerve across the double yellow line and hit you head-on at 55 miles an hour?  You don’t get to decide.  You drive straight on, trusting that it won’t.  So far, you’ve been right.  The next time, you could be wrong.  All is mist, as the Preacher once said, and all your plans are shepherding mist.

You can’t plan your life.  What you can do is live in a way that matches the sort of world in which you find yourself, a way that honors the Artist and His intentions for the work.