Christian Counseling Service -- Devotions

Giving God the best we've got

Friday, March 13, 2009

Psalm 105:1-7
Give thanks to the Lord, call on his name; make known among the nations what he has done. Sing to him, sing praise to him; tell of all his wonderful acts.

Glory in his holy name; let the hearts of those who seek the Lord rejoice. Look to the Lord and his strength; seek his face always. Remember the wonders he has done, his miracles, and the judgments he pronounced.

O descendants of Abraham his servant, o sons of Jacob, his chosen ones, He is the Lord our God; his judgments are in all the earth.

These verses read like a mission statement for church. Come together and give thanks, then send out missionaries and support them. Or become one. Remember God's power and control as often as we can. And remind ourselves that God has chosen us. Let God love us.

In the churches I've been part of, this is what we do. Not as well as we could, but we have good goals. Yet we are often misunderstood and even disliked by those outside the walls. On both his blog (www.internetmonk.com) and in the March 10 Christian Science Monitor (http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0310/p09s01-coop.html), Michael Spencer writes about the "coming Evangelical collapse."

Why is this going to happen? Here are his bullet points:

1. Evangelicals have identified their movement with the culture war and with political conservatism. But being against gay marriage and being rhetorically pro-life will not make up for the fact that massive majorities of Evangelicals can\'t articulate the Gospel with any coherence. ...

2. We Evangelicals have failed to pass on to our young people an orthodox form of faith that can take root and survive the secular onslaught. ...

3. There are three kinds of evangelical churches today: consumer-driven megachurches, dying churches, and new churches whose future is fragile. Denominations will shrink, even vanish, while fewer and fewer evangelical churches will survive and thrive.

4. Despite some very successful developments in the past 25 years, Christian education has not produced a product that can withstand the rising tide of secularism. Evangelicalism has used its educational system primarily to staff its own needs and talk to itself.

5. The confrontation between cultural secularism and the faith at the core of evangelical efforts to \"do good\" is rapidly approaching. We will soon see that the good Evangelicals want to do will be viewed as bad by so many, and much of that work will not be done. ...

6. Even in areas where Evangelicals imagine themselves strong (like the Bible Belt), we will find a great inability to pass on to our children a vital evangelical confidence in the Bible and the importance of the faith.

7. The money will dry up.

Spencer is not a negative thinker. He has great hope for the church:

We can rejoice that in the ruins, new forms of Christian vitality and ministry will be born. I expect to see a vital and growing house church movement. This cannot help but be good for an evangelicalism that has made buildings, numbers, and paid staff its drugs for half a century.

But he has compelling complaints about his fellow evangelicals, which allow many of us a look in the mirror:

Here's my list of why evangelicals are among the most disliked persons in America (surveys from 2002):

1. Christians endorse a high standard of conduct for others, and then largely excuse themselves from a serious pursuit of such a life. Jesus is the most admired person in history, but evangelicals are far more likely to devise ways for Jesus to be like us than for us to be like Jesus. ...

2. Evangelical Christian piety in America is mostly public. Jesus had plenty to say about this, and the essence of it is that when your piety is public, then there is almost certainly a lack of serious, life-transforming, private obedience and discipleship. ...

3. Many evangelicals relate to others with an obvious- or thinly disguised- hidden agenda. ... You know that feeling you get when a telemarketer interrupts your dinner? I get that feeling sometime when my Pentecostal/Charismatic friends are trying to persuade me into their camp. This same feeling is prevalent among those who dislike evangelical Christians. They are annoyed and sometimes angered that we are following some divine directive to get them to abandon their life choices and take up ours.

4. We seem consumed with establishing that we are somehow "better" than other people, when the opposite is very often true. Many evangelicals are bizarrely shallow and legalistic about minute matters. We are frequently psychologically unsound, psychiatrically medicated, filled with bitterness and anger, tormented by conflicts and, frankly, unpleasant to have around. ...

5. We talk about God in ways that are too familiar and make people uncomfortable. Evangelicals constantly talk about a "personal relationship " with God. Many evangelicals talk as if God is talking to them and leading them by the hand through life in a way only the initiated can understand. ...

6. Evangelicals are too slow to separate themselves from what is wrong. Because ours is a moral religion, and we frequently advertise our certainty in moral matters, it seems bizarrely hypocritical when that moral sense is applied so inconsistently. ...

7. We take ourselves far too seriously, and come off as opposed to normal life. ... We are frequently unable to see humor, absurdity, and the honest reasons for humans to laugh at themselves. ... The message here isn't just that we are humorless or Puritanical. The message is that being human or being real is somehow evil.

These ideas help me see a little more clearly how God wants me to live and what I might be doing wrong. I'm thankful for that.

You offer me magnificent opportunities to know you and be loved by you, Lord, and then to pass on to others what you've shown me. Clean up my selfishness. Open my eyes to how others see me and what you want me to change.

Devotions Archive

Giving God the best we've got

Friday, March 13, 2009