iChurch, or Christian Consumerism Syndrome

Tomorrow at our ministry staff retreat, our agenda has an hour blocked off to discuss what I've long been thinking of as "Christian Consumerism Syndrome." But it's probably better articulated in this article by Skye Jethani in March's Christianity Today:

http://www.christianitytoday.com/le/2006/003/3.28.html

I hadn't read it before last week, when one of my elders forwarded it to me. After I had read it, I asked for it to be included on the agenda.

My home church - with a new Family Life Center (including the Cafe) and a wide variety of opinions present on preferred worship styles - runs the risk of being perceived as [or becoming?] just another boutique church.

- Unless we can establish a way to express to our corner of Little Rock a strong commitment to living a Christlike life above every other available choice in the marketplace.

In my opinion.

What's yours?

Anyone Can Criticize

It's true.

Any idiot like me can have a free blog. Any doofus with two lips and a voicebox who can form words, can form them into criticism of others.

You don't have to be smart, credentialed, unbiased, logical or even a critical thinker in order to be able to criticize.

You don't have to be willing to spend hours in research, or to write or create or dream or do. You don't have to take the time and engage another person's soul in the fine art of friendly persuasion.

All you have to do is know what you like, and what you don't.

You don't have to have a reason for it.

And if you have one, it doesn't have to make sense to anyone but you.

If that.

I don't even know quite what has suddenly prompted this moment of outrage in my soul - maybe it's cumulative - because nothing has really happened in my life of late to nudge it on.

If anything, it's probably a sudden realization that I spend too much of myself in criticism.

It costs nothing. Requires nothing. Generally yields nothing.

And, yes, I'm even talking about constructive criticism. Not just the so-called kind that sugar-coats pure bile; I mean even the best-hearted, best-intentioned kind of criticism.

What does criticism add to anything? At the same time, what can it destroy?

As a general rule, the characters in the Bible, in literature, and in life whom I've encountered spending a lot of themselves in criticism are not my heroes. They aren't happy people. And they don't add to the joy of others.

As a general rule.

I don't want to be one of those people.

Criticism is judgment expressed, and it can be helpful or harmful or neither, depending on the recipient(s). But because it is expressed, it's relational - and has power. Criticism is the nitroglycerin of relationships. It can heal hearts. It can explode them.

It is best used in very small quantities by people who are keenly conscious of what they are doing.

I beg your forgiveness if I have been uncritically critical, whether harsh in disapproval or lavish in praise or shruggish in my indifference.

What you create in your life before God and others is among you and Him and them.

It's not that I don't appreciate criticism - especially the thoughtful, caring kind. It's that I don't want to need it. I don't want to feel so compelled to give it.

And I sure-as-judgment don't want to abuse it.

Cheers Without the Beers

That's kind of a short description what I think church should be more like.

Oh, it's not original with me; lots of folks have said so.

But church really should be the kind of place that unanimously, joyfully greets: "Norm!"

Except with one major difference.

Not the beers.

The greeting.

Church should also be the kind of place that unanimously, joyfully greets: "Cliffy!"

"Lilith!"

"What's shakin', Frasier?" "My faith in humanity." "Bet we got something for that behind the bar. What'll you have?" "I'm in a poetic mood tonight. How about a KJV, straight up?"

Then it would really be church.

Money, Sex and Christians

Time Magazine wonders if God wants us to be rich.

"But God said to him, 'You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?' This is how it will be with anyone who stores up things for himself but is not rich toward God. ... But seek his kingdom, and these things will be given to you as well. Do not be afraid, little flock, for your Father has been pleased to give you the kingdom. Sell your possessions and give to the poor. Provide purses for yourselves that will not wear out, a treasure in heaven that will not be exhausted, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also." - Jesus of Nazareth, Luke 12:20,21,31-34

Hmm. Jesus seems to want us to be rich toward God.

Joe Beam suggests that married Christian couples could have much better relationships through less-inhibited sex.

Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything. Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated his own body, but he feeds and cares for it, just as Christ does the church - for we are members of his body. "For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh." This is a profound mystery - but I am talking about Christ and the church. However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband." - Paul the Apostle, Ephesians 5:21-33

Hmm. Paul seems to think that husbands and wives should love and respect each other as deeply as we love our own bodies, and submit to each other's needs in everything - even in something as intimate as helping with a bath - just as Christ and the church relate to each other.

Seems to me that both items involve our demonstration of love for God and for others that His Son died for.

And that they have nothing to do with what we as individuals want.

Selflessness. Christlikeness.

Could it really be that simple?

The Moment of Epiphany

I wonder when it was.

I wonder what it was like.

"It" being the moment when Jesus realized what He had to do, and that it would cost Him His life.

Was it when He first saw a common criminal suspended on a cross? Was it when He first gave life back to a dead body? Was it when Satan tried to compel Him to leap from the temple's highest point? Or when He closed the scroll in a little synagogue and said "This prophecy is fulfillled today" - realizing all the import of Isaiah's words about the suffering servant?

In this life, we may never know when it was.

But I think I have the vaguest, shadowy picture of what it was like. For every once in a while, I get the stark, electric realization of something I have to do to follow Christ - and that it will cost me my life.

Not - so far - to the point of causing my immediate death, mind you. But what I do will cost me my life as I know and cherish it. I will lose something I have treasured; something I have valued ... more than Him. It will be gone forever and there will be no going back to it. And leaving it behind will just lead me to more and more such choices, as God slowly strips away my protective wealth and armor and clothing to leave my naked soul before Him.

So He can clothe me with Christ.

All too often I meet such moments of epiphany and choose the transient few pennies, the rusty armor, and the moth-eaten rags.

I know I'm in trouble when my choices are less and less frequent. God is being patient with me. I, however, am delaying His effectiveness through me while He waits.

You see, I don't know that there could be only a single moment in Jesus' life - or ours - when the cost is realized and must be counted. I think God sends them in His own time, at His own rate. He can stop sending them when He chooses.

And that kind of epiphany freezes me right down to the marrow.

When DeLoreans Fly ....

... and travel through time, I will have spent quite a bit of time studying to speak and read Arabic.

And then I will travel back to approximately August 22, A.D. 610 to a cave to talk to a guy named Mohammed about Jesus.

For that, as I understand it, is our best guess at the night when Mohammed supposedly saw his vision of Gabriel, who reportedly encouraged him to recite verses from Allah, a new revelation to be recorded by scribes.

That's the moment of man's history I would choose to unwrite.

I would seek to speak soothingly to the fevered brow of that displaced and disowned young man that the God of whom he had heard from the Christian traders really does have a Son who came to our world as fully human and loved him to death, even death on a cross ... that it was no mere appearance, but perfect blood shed at the hands of murderous conspirators ... that this sacrifice means forgiveness and reconciliation and a home among brothers and sisters and God Himself.

I would give it a shot.

I am not smart enough to know how Mohammed might react or whether he would slay me on the spot or how it might change history, but I would be willing to trust God and take a shot at it.

It might have prevented the writing of a Koran that says Allah (Mohammed's god) has no son, nor need of one, that we should say "Trinity;" or the contrivance of an entire religion named after peace but which decrees that the doctrine of any imam is equally binding as the Koran itself - including ones that encourage murdering the innocent as infidels and committing suicide in the effort.

It might have intercepted the desire to force whole cities to convert to the Prophet's dictates at the point of a scimitar.

It might have forestalled the blood feud over Mohammed's successor that still divides Islam; might have stanched the flow of blood over several Crusades; might have minimized some of the differences between many nations; might have even stemmed the desire to bomb embassies, obliterate entire villages, hijack airliners and fly them into buildings.

Or not.

Satan might just have sent a fake "Gabriel" to the next poor, illiterate, disfranchised Arab who happened to take refuge in that cave.

But it would be worth trying - if I had a flying, time-travelling DeLorean.

And the time.

Pick Your Favorite Time Machine, Then ...

Mine would be the DeLorean from the Back to the Future trilogy. Oh, I know it's very limited in some ways; that you have to fuel it and that it has to be going 88 miles an hour to get when you're going ... but it has style.

Nothing against police call boxes that are bigger on the inside than they are on the outside, or Victorian armchairs with spinning dials and flashing lights, or op-art tunnels buried beneath the desert, or even starships slingshotting around the sun (or cold-mixing antimatter with matter, or sending folks through glowing Guardian portals).

I just like the DeLorean. I like the Mr. Fusion power plant on the trunk. I like the ice that forms on it due to energy loss. I like the flashing blue body lights and sparks it generates.

Now that you've picked your time machine, tell me why.

Then tell me what you'd do with it.

Tell me the ONE moment you would go back to in human history and erase. (Because, as Dr. Brown intimates, the future is unwritten.)

What event would you "unwrite?"

I have my nomination in mind - and I'll share it later - but first, I'd like to know yours.

Dividing Ye Indivisible

If thine elders have sought
in a prime preacher search
that has turned up but naught
and left all in the lurch

Or thy deacons, o'erwrought
with a yen to besmirch
some lone doctrine mistaught
by some bird they'll un-perch

Or thy flock is distraught
after holy research
by a sinner they've caught
and are eager to birch

... shall it be worth thee cleaving thy church?

If two souls can't agree
on a pattern for praise
whether scripted or free;
or if arms shouldst thou raise

Eye-to-eye ye don't see
on thy new version's phrase
or the lectionary
or the next worship craze

If each other's poor pleas
ye wilt never appraise
though diversity
be the Maker's wild ways

... shouldst ye part for the rest of thy days?

When the Lord, ere He hovered
toward lofty expanse,
said "Love one another
whilst I build my plans"?

When ye part from each other
wouldst thou soil thine own pants
o'er a spat with a brother
with whom thou'lt share a manse?

Shall it be worth thy bother
to act like spoilt infants
Back-to-back to each other,
nor a glare nor a glance?

... or just join in the heav'nly danse?

- Watsem Longwords Worthfellow