Millennials, Mainline, and Methodists: The Cure for What Ails Us

I’m tired. I’m tired of the posts and ads and quick fixes. I’m tired of the head-scratching and magic bullet appeals for how to “reach” millennials. I’m tired of marketing tricks and demographic reports that promise to hold the key to attracting customers. In conversations about the problems with the church, with mainline decline, with the “nones,” etc., in our culture today, I hear recommendations for everything from increasing parking to Instagram to inclusivism, and many sure-fire fixes in between. What I hear woefully little of is the need to make disciples…real disciples.

Churches and leaders feel the need to add descriptors to the word disciples: dynamic disciples, fully-committed disciples, faithful disciples, disciple-making disciples, and on and on. This need for qualifiers indicates to me that we have a weak and desperately underdeveloped understanding of what a disciple even is.  And, thus, we don’t see the value and necessity for disciple-making as the cure for what ails us.

Read More

Running as a Discipline

I used to play basketball, and was actually fairly decent at it for a 6’4" white guy from Southern Idaho.  Playing basketball in college for three years was a great experience. I had fun playing and improving as a player, and met a lot of great people, like Daniel.  A few years ago while playing a church league basketball game, which is often not anything like church, I tried to make a back to the basket post move, like one that Tim Duncan of the San Antonio Spurs makes look routine, and my body moved slower than I expected and the move did not play out like I had pictured it in my head.  At that moment I knew it was time to change my game, and now settle for the occasional straight on lay-up, spot up jump shots, lots of three pointers, and hardly ever playing basketball.

Read More

It is for Freedom Christ Has Set Us Free

An important challenge for Christians is to be able to distinguish between the freedom celebrated on the 4th of July and that described in the scriptures. They aren’t identical (which I’ll explore below), and I think the efforts of many well-meaning pastors and churches in their worship services around the times of our national holidays actually serves to confuse many happy church goers about what freedom for a Christian really entails.

In Galatians 5 Paul says that it is for freedom that Christ has set us free. This particular verse follows a section in chapter 4 where Paul uses the allegory of Hagar and Sarah to illustrate the difference between being born the child of a slave (the law) and being born the child of a free woman (grace). Through Christ, Paul says, we are “children, not of the slave, but of the free woman.” And it is for this reason we have a share in the inheritance. Not because we do this or that, not because we follow the law, not because we always do what is right, not because we are circumcised, but because in Christ we have become children of freedom. It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. And so, the only thing that counts, according to Paul, “is faith working through love.” 

Read More

Forgiveness Isn't the Marriage

I have a philosopher friend (who sells insurance for a living) who, if given a chance in conversation, has a tendency to say something simple but very meaningful. One day we were talking about how we both grew up within the same streams of Christianity (for which we are both very grateful), and one of the things we picked up along the way was the version of Christianity that goes something like this: you’re a really bad sinner, and Jesus died on the cross so that you could be forgiven. Therefore, you need to ask him to forgive your sins so that you’ll get into heaven when you die.

Then my philosopher/insurance salesman friend made the following observation:

Something that seems to make more sense is to think of it like a marriage. Forgiveness in a marriage is kind of like the foundation poured for a house––there’s no chance for the marriage to exist without forgiveness in place. A marriage has to has forgiveness to begin, and it has to have forgiveness to keep going, but forgiveness isn’t the marriage.

Read More

“If there is to be a next stage to the so-called spiritual formation movement, this must be it.”

I first read an article by Dallas Willard when a college professor handed out copies of Willard's "Discipleship: For Super-Christians Only?" during my final semester of school. After that article, I was hooked and had to find out more about what Dallas taught. He had just released a new book that same year, The Divine Conspiracy. I got it and...didn't make it through on my first attempt. Anyone who's ever tried to read Dallas who hasn't done so before finds it a bit of a challenge at first.

But the challenge is ever worth the effort. I returned later to the book–and then again, and again...and read all of his others reading or listening to everything I could find by him. It is not an overstatement for me to say that his teaching, particularly in The Divine Conspiracy, revolutionized my understanding of what it means to be a Christian and to seek to follow Christ. Since my introduction to Dallas came at the point of my life that it did, his teaching has also shaped everything I've tried to do in ministry since.

So following Dallas' death last year, when I learned that there was another book he had in the works which would still be published, I couldn't wait. When I found out that it was The Divine Conspiracy Continued, I was like a kid who knows that Christmas is coming. 

While the title for this book is appropriate, it is not only a continuation of Willard’s work in The Divine Conspiracy, but it is an extension of all of his works. As one who has read and re-read Willard’s previous books for years, I always found myself fascinated with the summary implications he tended to sketch toward the end of his books. Particularly in the final chapter of The Spirit of the Disciplines, titled “The Disciplines and the Power Structures of This World,” Willard intriguingly used broadly descriptive language to portray how disciples of Jesus in all walks of life would affect the entire world for good. Whereas that chapter was the brief, general description of how that would happen, this book is the detail that I and many readers of Willard’s previous work have been longing for.

Some readers who expect another “spiritual formation” book similar to Willard’s previous work may find themselves initially disappointed. Even though it is thoroughly consistent with Dallas’ previous writings, it is also very different. However, the book should be very appropriately be found on the shelves of readers of spiritual formation classics, because it is the most thorough, inspiring, and thought-provoking explanation yet available on how true Christian spiritual formation is always, inevitably for the sake of others. “If there is to be a next stage to the so-called spiritual formation movement, this must be it.” (Kindle loc. 711)

When I first heard that this book was to be released after Dallas' death and had been co-authored with Gary Black, Jr., I was initially skeptical. I’m not alone in saying that The Divine Conspiracy transformed my understanding and practice of Christianity, so to have a follow-up to such a masterful book to be co-authored by someone I didn’t know of and released after Dallas’ death made me expect a letdown. However, Black proves himself to be up to the task of coauthoring a book whose title will invite such high expectations. Having been a close friend of Willard, as well as having focused on Willard’s theology for the subject of his PhD studies and first book, The Theology of Dallas Willard, there is no one better qualified.

As anyone familiar with Willard would hope and expect, this book will make the reader think and requires willingness to do mental work and be challenged. It is well worth the effort, though, for it is a gift for all of us who long and hope for the day when the kingdoms of this world will conform to the kingdom of our God and Christ.

Why Theology?

While scanning over some recent posts on Facebook I came across one that has got me thinking (again). It really was just a simple little post, only nine words. This person just plopped it down on the Wesleyan-Anglican Society’s page seemingly from out of nowhere. Perhaps I was reading too much into it, or maybe I was looking too hard for some deep antecedent cause for the post, but it just seemed so out of character with the sort of things people posted on this page. I wondered if perhaps it was a dig, a sort of tacit rebuke—I, at least, took it that way. Maybe I’m just too sensitive, too defensive, but my anti-intellectual radar started going off. 

The words were true enough, powerful words I’ve often preached on. They are indeed words I try to live by, even if it is only haltingly and with great struggle. But here they held a tone, and tenor, that was off-putting to me. The post simply said, “Jesus said: Take up thy cross and follow me.” It was the “Jesus said” that put me off. It seemed to have a sort of literalist, the-bible-said-it-so-that-settles-it-so-stop-all-your-theologizing air about it. 

My first thought was, “Yea, Jesus said it. But what does it mean?” What does it mean to take up my cross? What does it mean to follow Jesus? These are not easy questions with easy answers. Simply saying “Jesus said it” doesn’t help; it doesn’t answer anything. Really, when you think about it (and I don’t mean to be irreverent here), the words in and of themselves are empty, without meaning. So, if the words themselves are empty, void of meaning, where does meaning come from? If meaning is in some sense external to the words themselves, where do we look to find meaning?

The simple answer is: that is what theology is for.

Read More