All Your Base Are Belong to Us

Alright.  Enough downers for now.  How about something to make you smile?

From time to time I like to check a website called Engrish.com for a good laugh.  This site is devoted to snapshots from Asian signposts, labels, warnings, etc which mistranslate the English in funny ways.   Some of the funniest would probably offend some of my readers (whoever they are), so I won’t post them.  But here are a few samples of some that crack me up.

That’s all you have to do.  Isn’t that comforting?

 

---

 

 

People in Japan seem so polite.  I should visit there some day.

 

---

 

 

Well, somebody has to connoct our poopie.

 

---

 

 

Not gonna do it.  Wouldn’t be prudent.

 

---

 

 

Well, I suppose that’s a logical name…

 

---

 

 

For people with really stubborn nails…

 

---

 

 

It’s clean and blue!

 

---

 

 

That’s why you gotta keep off the grass!

 

---

 

 

I don’t know which to start with… the chicken-brown fungus or the fungus of old people’s head?

 

---

 

 

I like number 9.  I think some of my students have “stupid disease.”

My Place in this World

My blog posts are not often intensely personal. That’s as it should be, I believe, because cyberspace is no place to broadcast your deepest struggles. People get hurt that way. But I want to share something very current that I’m struggling with because someone out there might identify with it. Plus, at some level, it helps to put it into words.

I have a calling of some kind, but I don’t know what to call it — how to label it. I can describe one aspect of it his way: Something drives me to ask hard questions, think deeply, and do my best to get to the bottom of things in order to understand them. Along the way I also feel compelled to verbalize what I am discovering. Back before I learned to pathologically distrust myself, I would have told you that I have a knack for taking what I find and expressing it to other people. I also discovered early on that I can pretty comfortably address a large group of people, even numbering in the thousands. It came very natural to me and I was told that I was pretty good at it.

So I should be a preacher, right? Well, not so fast. As I look around, I find that what we call being a preacher doesn’t work for me at all. The popular version of the pastoral office flies right in the face of many of my most deeply held convictions about the priesthood of all believers, and about the need for the whole Body of Christ learning to function rather than a handful of specially certified people.

For another thing, I never got officially ordained. My childhood pastor, Frank Pollard, didn’t believe in ordaining people for ministry. He considered it the Holy Spirit’s job to do that, and it was the job of the local church to recognize it. Since he had been a seminary president and a mainstay on the Baptist Radio Hour, I figured I was on safe doctrinal ground listening to him about that. I’m comfortable not having a piece of paper to prove my calling (although I do have a seminary degree–does that count?).

All that aside, a calling remains. I have things wired into me that could be of great benefit to the Body of Christ. But I see no place in most churches where my gifting fits. Most places, it turns out, don’t respond very well to people “thinking deeply” about stuff. On the contrary, if you question enough things, you just disturb the status quo. Folks don’t appreciate that, it seems. It doesn’t matter how gently you do it, how nicely you put it, or how articulately you express what’s on your heart. Most seem to prefer what Brian McLaren once called “the massage of familiar words.”

Well-meaning people often advise that you should pick your passion and pursue it. They say you should find work that you would do for free and find a way to get paid for it. That’s a fine idea, really. I’d love to actually get paid for what I’m good at. But there’s hardly a place for what I’m good at in most churches, let alone an actual paycheck. I reconciled myself to that reality a long time ago, but I still have to make a living. So I teach high school. I don’t teach what I love because my real expertise is in Bible, and you can’t teach that in most public school settings. I have to support a family of six, and I can’t get by with a private school teacher’s salary. So I’ve had to learn to teach Math, History, English, and Science–four subjects about which I know just enough to “fake it.” As a school teacher, I’m mediocre because my passion lies in teaching stuff that nobody pays you for, or at least not enough to pay the bills.

In the end I feel ill-fitted for the kind of work I do. It probably doesn’t help that I’m also teaching a population of students whose cultural world doesn’t value school for anything other than providing social connections. In fact, many of the kids I teach only come to school in order to stay connected to their drug supply chain.

I could live with professional mediocrity a whole lot better if that were it. But it really eats at you after a while if your passion is the church, yet your church environment doesn’t value your gifting, either. Before long you, too, learn to devalue your gifting. That leaves you pretty deflated. It’s no wonder I’ve become so bad at accepting praise from other people (see my last post). I’ve fallen into the habit of thinking that people could only approve of me or my actions if they are either misinformed or delusional. That sounds more like an insecure teenager than a grown child of the King of Kings.

True happiness comes from being a blessing to other people, benefiting others by serving them according to your unique gifting. My problem these days is that I’m having a hard time finding, as Michael W. Smith once sang, “my place in this world.” I’m starving from a lack of opportunity to function in the Body of Christ according to the shape of my particular calling. There once was a time that I felt I was heading toward a fulfillment of my calling, but circumstances changed. It’s a long story, one that will have to wait for probably a long time. All you really need to know is that either God closed some doors on me really slowly, or else I just didn’t notice they were already closed until recently. Ultimately, I know that his hand is behind it, and now it falls to me to trust him in what he is doing. I hope I can hold on to that one responsibility.

All this introspection is meant to serve a useful purpose. As long as I can remind myself that God has his own reasons for putting me in all these circumstances which are so incongruous with how he wired me, then I can find comfort. I can try to take a deep breath and trust that God hasn’t shelved me permanently. Maybe I’ll be like a wine that gets better only after it’s had time to collect dust in a dark cellar somewhere for a long time. I only hope he sees fit to pop the cork and let me breathe once in a while

Hide It Under a Bushel? NO!

I’ve discovered that I have an addiction. I am addicted to self-criticism. As is often the case with addictions, it was not obvious to me, the addict. It became apparent first to someone close to me, and it didn’t demand my full attention until I discovered it was hurting someone else.

Some people think more highly of themselves than they should. I’ve never understood those people. I suffer from the opposite problem. I look at things God has put in me and I downplay them like they are of no value at all. My insightful wife explained to me yesterday how that dishonors God and ultimately robs others of the benefits that could have been theirs if not for this compulsive commitment to self-deprecation.

If you have ever tried to compliment me (or the book I wrote), you probably have no idea how quickly I dismantled your praise in my own mind moments later. Without your knowing it, I found multiple reasons to discount what you said, almost as fast as you could put it into words yourself. That’s sick, isn’t it? I’ve been doing this for a long time, but somehow I had never seen a legitimate reason to curb this compulsion because it seemed to serve a useful purpose for me. I figured it can’t be a bad thing for someone to keep their ego in check. And how embarrassing it is for someone to have his bubble burst after thinking he was “all that” only to discover he’s not! I’ll explain in the next post how this came to be, in case it could be helpful to someone else. But here’s what my wife helped me realize yesterday:

It does a kind of violence to God’s creation when you excessively disparage the good things about who you are and what you do. It dishonors him because it implies that he has done a bad job in making you who you are. I suppose that’s a failure to follow the first of the two greatest commandments: Love the Lord your God. Then again, it fails on the second one, too: Love your neighbor as yourself. When someone gives you something, it is rude and uncaring to immediately throw it away like it isn’t worth anything. I suppose a compliment is no different.

And maybe it goes deeper than that. When you repeatedly discount some skill a person has (including you yourself), he or she learns to bury it like the money that guy buried in the parable of the “talents.” That gifting could have brought life to people, but instead you stuck it in the ground. I think I’m in danger of doing the same thing myself.

To some degree, my circumstances have led me to this point. But I don’t imagine I’m free from responsibility here. There’s a strange self-gratification in being down on yourself. It ultimately keeps your attention on yourself, when you could be asking how you could be spending yourself and your gifts to benefit others. You prefer the safety of burial. If your gifts were to see the light of day, then you would risk the exposure of your all-too-sensitive ego. Someone could find a flaw in you that you missed yourself (how awful!). Or maybe you could become susceptible to pride, which, let’s face it, would totally ruin your perfect state of humility, wouldn’t it? I suppose even humility carries with it a kind of pride in being so humble. “At least I’m not like all those other cats who think they’re something.” Whoops.

Well anyway…For the next little while it looks as if I will need to take on a new discipline. I will be attempting to check my own tendency to dismantle the praise of others. I am going to try to see me the way other people are seeing me, even if that means admitting to myself that I did something right. How else will the good things ever be reinforced? If I denied my students all positive reinforcement, then how could I ever expect them to keep doing it right? I’ll have to learn to think the same way about myself. I’m no super human after all.

Perhaps God will be honored more by that, after all. So I’ll give it a shot.

Making Jill-o-Lanterns

Aahh, pumpkin time.  What other time of the year will two little girls willingly stick their hands into a gooey slippery mess and smile about it?

This year we had a Mama pumpkin and a baby pumpkin.  The girls always sketch out the design and I do the cutting.  They do the gutting these days.

Always fun celebrating what one of the girls’ classmates calls “Satan’s Birthday.”

The pumpkin gutting has become quite the family tradition.  I clicked around on the old hard drive and found this little gem from six years ago.

I don’t care what the pagan origins of this holiday are.  It’s just fun.

Nine Marks and Holiness

I always like it when an author asks questions like: “For what purpose does your church exist? How do you know if it is fulfilling its purpose? How do you know that things are going well in your church?” (186)

In other words, What’s it all for?

I find myself drawn back to that question again and again. It’s like a North Star or the Big Dipper for me. I can make sense of what’s going on around me as long as I can relate it to that question. I can tell that Nine Marks was written largely in response to so many wrong answers to that question. Many books out there pre-suppose that bigger must be better (how could a church that’s growing by the thousands be bad, right?). Dever takes dead aim at that. Numbers, according to Dever, are not the best indicator of a church’s success or health.

Paul hoped the Corinthians would grow in their Christian faith (2 Cor. 10:15). The Ephesians he hoped, would ‘grow up into him who is the Head, that is Christ’ (Eph. 4:15; cf. Col.1:10; 2 Thess. 1:3). It is tempting at times for pastors to reduce their churches to manageable statistics of attendance, baptisms, giving, and membership, where growth is tangible, recordable, demonstrable, and comparable. However, such statistics fall far short of the true growth that Paul describes in these verses, and that God desires. (215)

So what is a good indicator of this growth and maturity?  For Dever the answer is holiness (190).

What then is the evidence of true Christian growth?  According to [Jonathan] Edwards… the only certain observable sign of such growth is a life of increasing holiness, rooted in Christian self-denial. (215)

Do I agree with this?  It depends.  Only a fool would presume to disagree with a theological heavyweight like Jonathan Edwards.  And here I go…

I see a flaw in this conception.  It’s very Reformed and I recognize it clearly.  You naturally feel bad for disagreeing with it.  But I think the way we understand holiness is skewed.

Earlier in the book, Dever explains that we were created to bear God’s image and reflect his character.  “Our lives are the storefront display of God’s character in His world” (191).  Well put.  And I’m cool with the holiness target as long as it is defined in those terms.  What makes us “holy” (i.e. specially marked — different) is our tendency to love as He loves.  Since that’s the essence of his character, then our differentness is expressed fundamentally in that very thing.

I suspect that holiness means, for many people, that there’s a bunch of things we don’t do.  We don’t smoke, don’t drink, don’t cuss, don’t chew, don’t run around with folks who do.  We don’t listen to those kinds of music or watch these kinds of movies, etc.  It’s all about avoidance of dirt, keeping ourselves clean and undefiled by contact with the world.  But that sounds exactly like the kind of “perfection” that we people think up on our own.  It’s all about us.  Our goodness.  Our righteousness.  Our status.

Loving someone, on the other hand, gets you dirty sometimes.  It means going where they are, and in many cases doing what they do.  Like Jesus going to all their parties.  Was that being holy?  We know we’re supposed to say yes but come on!  Doesn’t that really mess up our categories just a bit?  I have often wondered, if the incarnation had happened first in my day, and if I were to run into him somewhere, would I have associated with him?  I wonder sometimes if I would have only been offended by him.

The ultimate mark of maturity in a church is that they love well.  They love one another and share that love with the world around them.  Will that make them a large church?  Maybe.  Maybe not.

I know what ingredients make a church large.   A dynamic speaker in the pulpit.  Gifted musicians.  Well-run programs (choir, children’s activities, support groups).  These things work.  But I don’t think they produce mature saints.  I don’t see them making what I’ve heard called “disciple-making disciples.”  For that to happen, I think smaller is actually better.  Even if we’re talking about a huge network of smaller groups.  Healthy churches in the future, I believe, will not meet in gargantuan buildings with thousands of people in attendance.  They will consist in hundreds of small groups meeting for encouragement, instruction, discipleship, worship, etc.

One can dream, right?

A Day in the Life

If  you noticed the pause in blog entries, it’s because my grandmother passed away last week and I’ve been out of pocket and pretty busy.  She was 91 and lived a full life.  I’ll probably write some stuff about her passing, and about the funeral, another day.  For today, I think I would rather try something different.

One of the reasons people read blogs is to sample the lives of other people.  We live pretty disconnected lives these days, and Facebook, email, and blogs give us a way to be connected to people.  We don’t even have to know the other person well.  It somehow soothes the loneliness to get to peek into the mind and experience of another person, whether you know them or not.  Of course, I’d rather taste real community, which is far better than virtual community.  But in the absence of the real thing, I guess we’ll deal with the digital kind for the time being.

Wanna walk in my shoes for a day?  Here’s a blow-by-blow itinerary from my day today.  It’s not necessarily a typical day, but then I’m not sure what one of those looks like anyway.  So here is my day today:

5:15am   Wake up.
5:20   Stretch for a half hour or so.
6:00am   Run two miles around my neighborhood.
6:30   Stretch some more, push ups, etc.
6:45    Wake up the rest of the family, take shower.
7:15am   Eat Breakfast, brush teeth, etc.
7:40   Take the kids to school, drive to work.
8:00am   Get to work, check email, walk to trailers for first period (9th grade Math).
8:30   Discipline that one kid for the 18th time this month, warn several others.
9:35am   Listen to co-teacher gripe again about how much he hates his job.
10:05   Planning period begins, check email, file some paperwork.
10:15   Sign out to leave campus…tracking down lost cell phone.
10:45   Go home to caulk leaky external wall affected by last month’s flood.
11:30am   Figure out where cell phone is thanks to April’s help.
11:35   Stop by carpet outlet where cell phone fell out while I was buying replacement padding from flood.
Noon   Back to work to scarf down lunch.
12:15pm   Third period: attempt to teach Algebra to a room of guys with behavior disorders. Fail miserably.
1:45pm   Back to trailers for fourth period (9th Math again) for more of what I had first period.
3:25pm   Corral swim team members in student parking lot and carpool to swim practice, 5 miles away.
4:00pm   Coach swim practice. Most of the new swimmers don’t know any of the strokes
5:15pm   Dismiss swim practice, swim a mile or so, shower and head home.
6:15pm   Pick up three of four daughters from home and drive to Marietta.
7:00pm    Honors Chorus performance for my 5th grader.
8:00pm Drive back home with all four girls and get them ready for bed (make snacks, brush teeth, etc).
8:30pm   Read stories, put the older three to bed (this can take up to an hour).
9:00pm   Sing to the toddler for 15 minutes or so and put her to bed.
9:30pm   April comes home from teaching night class for Mercer University.
10:00pm   Hang out with April, watch the news, catch up on the day.
11:00pm   Bed time. Maybe.

Sounds kinda crazy when you type it all into one place, doesn’t it? I guess it is a little crazy. The amazing thing is that we intentionally avoid signing our girls up for many extracurricular activities because we don’t like being stretched so many directions that we get overly tired, stressed, or whatever. But somehow stuff demands our time anyway. Kids still need braces. They fall down and break an arm. A grandmother dies and we have to leave town for several days. Someone gets sick. I lose my cell phone. It floods and we have to replace some padding under the living room carpet. Our oldest gets picked to sing with the Honors Chorus. You just can’t keep these kinds of things from happening, can you?

So the day gets busy. Leisure really isn’t in my vocabulary these days. Some people go to movies when they come out, or take vacations, or eat at a restaurant every so often. My wife and I spend our time raising kids and working. That doesn’t leave time for much else. We go to a Baptist church now, too, so you can add Choir, Bible Drill, Sunday School, etc. Not sure if I would call those leisure, though.

Well, there’s A Day in the Life of me. Now you’ve sampled my life. I’ll bet yours is interesting, too. Write it out just for fun and post me a link or something.

Nine Marks and Ownership of the Church

Permit me a couple more negative critiques of Nine Marks, after which I will go back to telling you where Dever and I agree.

Dever says:

“In a funny way, when we hear expositional preaching we become less dependent on the preacher.  We’re more concerned about the Word of God.  And so, if your pastor is away, if God calls him somewhere else or if he’s gone and someone else is in the pulpit, that’s okay.”(206)

I get what he is saying, and ideally we want this to be true.  Too many churches (including one I know very well) are built entirely around a single personality.  When that person leaves, the church as it used to be ceases to exist.  Ideally, as Dever would like it, the preaching of the Word, not the preacher himself, would be central to the life of the church.  Dever argues that expositional preaching will safeguard against the cult of personality.

But I say the preacher is still too central either way.  An expositional preacher still dominates the gathering of the saints way too much.  The whole worship service points to the moment when everyone else gets very quiet and very still in order to let the one guy do all the talking.  The very existence of the monologue teaches the rest of the Body of Christ to be passive.  It screams volumes about who really has the ability to “minister.”  I agree that it is a problem when a church becomes overly dependent upon one personality.  But the bigger, deeper, more universal problem is that churches in general depend too much upon the guy who fills the pulpit, regardless of his preaching style.

Topical preaching isn’t the problem.  The pulpit itself is the problem.

Well, that’s oversimplification, of course.  I don’t think there’s anything wrong with someone getting up in front of a church to preach and teach.  I’d like to see more people do it.  That might help us see more of the Body as viable vehicles for God’s word.  Ultimately, furniture is not the problem–lopsided functioning in the Body of Christ is.

Elsewhere, Dever says this:

“Joining a church increases our sense of ownership of the work of the church, of its community, of its budget, of its goals.  We move from being pampered consumers to becoming joyous proprietors.”(157)

Again, I’m feelin’ ya, Dever.  Isn’t that what all church leaders want?  Don’t we all want to see the average church member catch a sense of ownership of the mission and purpose of the church?  But how can I feel like a proprietor when I have no say in what is taught, what is sung, or how the church goes about its work?  If I am not on staff, I am out of the loop.  Merely becoming a member changes very little.  If I really want to make a difference, I have to become a pastor myself.

I wrote an article several years ago entitled “Why Men Don’t Go to Church.”  It must have struck a chord with a number of people because it still gets quoted on people’s blogs from time to time, and it even helped one author think through his material for a book he later wrote using almost the same title.  In my article, I argued this same point–that the only way to make much of a difference in the direction of a church is to crossover and become one of the clergy.  As long as that’s the way it is, I’m afraid the consumer mentality will be very difficult for most church members to avoid.

***

One more thing I gotta take issue with:  Dever’s take on different leadership models was three-quarters right, in my opinion.  But the first of the four leadership styles he proposes is called “the boss,” and he considers it a legitimate mode of leadership in the church.  I do not.  Dever gives good scriptural support for the other three:  the example setter, the support giver, and the servant leader.  His top-down “boss” model just doesn’t mesh well with the other three or with the New Testament.  The scant scriptural references he gives to illustrate it (238) just don’t say what he seems to think they say.

To me, this “commanding” mode of leadership flies in the face of Dever’s earlier chapter on authority in the church, which I liked very much.  In that earlier chapter, he cites Matthew 18:15-17 to illustrate that, in the church, the ultimate court of appeal is the church itself–not a specially-marked individual or group of leaders.  He also recognizes that when Paul sought to correct the saints in Corinth, “he instructs the whole church–not just the leaders–to take action” (223).  Likewise, when the Galatians heard that they were supposed to get circumcised in order to be good Christians, he made his appeal to the whole church, not to a dominating group.  ”They had an inescapable duty to judge even those who claimed to be apostles” (224).  Where’s “the boss” in those scenarios?  It’s not there.

Top-down is simply not the style of leadership envisioned by Jesus or the New Testament writers.  Bottom-up is more like it.  Or even the “alongside” kind, as Dever characterizes two of his four styles.  But top-down won’t do.  Maybe things in the world work that way.  But not in the church.

“It will not be so among you,” Jesus told us (Mk. 10:43).   How quickly we forget.

Life Intrudes, and So Does Weed

No post about Nine Marks today.  You see, I have this thing called a “job” and I’m pretty thankful to have it.  The thing is, I have to do stuff for this job, so sometimes I don’t have time to really blog.

Yesterday one of my students got pulled from class because he started a fist fight before class.  When asked for a witness to his version of the story, he named another kid from my class, so they pulled him, too.  Problem for him was, he had six bags of marijuana hidden (somewhere on his person, I assume).  So I don’t think I’ll be seeing that student for a long time.

There aren’t many things that can get you expelled from school anymore.  Even things they say they have “zero tolerance” for really don’t mean much in the end.  I had a kid bring a gun to my classroom a couple of years ago.  We realized later that it was a pellet gun, but it sure looked like a serious weapon.  That student was gone for a little while, but a few weeks later he was right back in my classroom.  So it’s hard to get thrown out of public school these days.  I am told that dealing weed will get you thrown out for good.  We’ll see.

I was trying to get that student to understand Algebra.  It was an uphill battle since he had already failed the class twice before, but I figure he still had some hope for getting it.  Unless he gets a cellmate who knows how to distribute polynomials, I’m guessing he’s lost his chance now.  Really sad when you think about it.  So I’m just not going to think about it.  Fiddledeedee.

Nine Marks and the Centrality of the Preacher

Let me begin my most critical post about Nine Marks of a Healthy Church by affirming something I really like about this book.  Dever places the speaking of God at the fountainhead of the life of the church.  I completely agree with him there.  Several pages in his first chapter sound just like a section in my book about the centrality of the Word of God in the life of the church.  He argues that God’s people have always been constituted as a people by the speaking of God (44).  He points out how often “the word of the Lord came” to Israel–3,000 times (45)!  He illustrates from Ezekiel how God gives life to dead things by simply speaking to them (46).  He goes on to teach that “His Word not only gives us life; it also gives us direction as it keeps molding and shaping us in the image of the God who is speaking to us” (51).  Absolutely right!  Couldn’t agree more.

But I contend that God speaks through the whole church, not just through one man.  That perpetual “guy up front” concept may have been exactly right for the Old Covenant people of God, but he is up to something else now.  I wish everyone could see this.  God told us that when the fullness of time had come, he would pour out his Spirit on all his people, not just on a select few.  When he said, “Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your old men will dream dreams, your young men will see visions” (Joel 2:28), he was using what in Hebrew poetry is called a merism (also defined here).  It means every one of God’s people will have his Spirit and every one of them will become his spokesmen.  And in case you missed it, Peter announced that Joel’s prophecy was fulfilled the day the church was born (Acts 2:14ff).  In the New Covenant community, everyone becomes a mouthpiece for God.

Reformed thinkers don’t see it that way, and neither does Dever.  Reformed theology tends to blend together the Old and New Covenants so that each one bleeds into the other, affecting what we see in each.  While Hebrews tells us clearly that we have NOT come to Mt. Sinai (Heb.12:18-24) but to something much better, several professors at the Reformed seminary I went to actually taught that Sinai is our best model for how worship should happen today.  For them, it is an extension of something called the “regulative principle of worship.”  God’s people gather to the feet of an elevated platform to hear him speak his demands and the people respond with “all this we will do.”  In this model, only one person is authorized to speak for God, and that’s the preacher.  That’s the model that Dever apparently adheres to, and it still makes my Baptist stomach turn.

Listen to Dever’s unqualified championing of this regulative principle in preaching:

“Permit me to suggest that the one-sidedness of preaching is not only excusable but is actually important.  If in our preaching we stand in the place of God…then surely it is appropriate that it be one-sided…the univocal character of God’s Word comes as a monologue to us” (33).

Did a Baptist really write that sentence?  I can hardly believe it!  Where does he find support for this in the New Testament?  Surely he is back at Sinai with our Reformed friends, but he assumes this model rather than demonstrating it.  Reading the following statement, I’m certain of it:

“…there is something appropriate about us all gathering together and listening to one who is standing in the place of God, giving His Word to us as we contribute nothing to it other than hearing and heeding it” (54, emphasis mine).

Standing in the place of God?  I heard an Orthodox priest tell me the same thing once.  That’s the Orthodox/Catholic view of the role of a priest.  It shouldn’t even fit within a “Reformed” ecclesiology, but somehow it has anyway.  I’ve never understood how.

Peter said we should all speak as those speaking the very words of God (1 Pet.4:11 ).  That’s why I can’t support this notion that one guy gets to be the lone mouthpiece of God when the church assembles.

I just don’t follow this reasoning:  First he argues that the New Testament teaches a plurality of elders.  At first it is assumed that elders are synonymous with pastors (aka shepherds).  But then some distinctive singular office called “the preacher” emerges and becomes synonymous with THE pastor (suddenly singular) with no warning or explanation.  Dever says: “My main role, and the main role of any pastor, is expositional preaching” (39).  Says who?  What verse did you get that out of?  More crucially, why do you insist that this function falls only to one person in a church?  Why aren’t at least the other elders “preachers” as well?  And what happened to the rest of the members of the Body of Christ to make them suddenly passive receptacles for such a uni-directional ministry?

This is the point where Dever and I part ways, and it’s a crucial point.  Dever himself argues that the preaching of this singular individual, since it is the only way for the church to hear from God, “is far and away the most important [mark] of them all…if you get this one right, all of the others should follow.  This is the crucial mark” (39).

Well, there you have it.  It all hangs on the preacher, and he’s all alone in his role.  All the hopes and dreams for life in the church rise and fall on the capabilities of one individual.  Forgive me, I simply cannot find the priesthood of all believers in that notion.  I certainly cannot find a living, functioning Body of Christ supplying its own needs through what every joint supplies (Eph 4:15-16).  We’ve got two very different models here for how a church functions, and I don’t see any way they can mesh.  If Dever’s model is your model for how God communicates with his people, then I don’t think we’re thinking about the same thing at all.

One man cannot feed God’s people week after week, year after year without them  becoming passive receptacles.  A room full of ears sitting underneath one giant mouth.  That’s just not the Body of Christ.

Last Sunday I went to church at a local Baptist church.  For the first hour, in Sunday School, I sat quietly, listening to a lesson on the second coming.  It was taught by an intelligent woman who did a good job teaching it.  There still were a number of points I would have disagreed with if it had been really appropriate to do so, but under the circumstances, that would have been just rude and annoying.  So I sat quietly and listened.  When that hour was done, I filed into the sanctuary for another hour to hear the choir sing and the preacher preach.  When that was done, my family and I went home and put on our comfortable clothes and ate lunch.

Since actions speak louder than words, it seems to me that this setup is teaching me that I am a spectator–a passive recipient of ministry–and not a minister myself.  You can say every member is a minister until you are blue in the face.  You can preach all you want about mobilizing the “people in the pew” for mission.   But this arrangement undermines that message in the most fundamental way.  I’m sticking by my original contention that this has to change before average believers will ever come to see themselves as active participants in the mission of God in the world.

Think about it.  Isn’t it obvious?

Nine Marks and Reformed Stepchildren

Returning to Baptist life after almost ten years away, I feel a little like Rip Van Winkle.  Apparently, while I was gone Southern Baptists found something new to fight about.  Back in the day, the fight was over biblical inerrancy.  Then it was over speaking in tongues.  Then they decided to crack down on women in ministry.  I don’t really know what else–I lost interest nearly 15 years ago.  In fact, I left the SBC fold entirely.  I did something that, to my mind, was the most historically Baptist thing I could do:  I forsook denominational life and went primitive, meeting in homes with other non-conformists like myself.  We devoted ourselves to a thoroughly consistent belief in the priesthood of believers.  We had a great run for a while, too.  But the time eventually came when my wife and I needed to move on to something else (still not sure what!).  But I’m going to miss them and I know I’ll always thank God for my time with them.

By the way, have you heard the one about the guy who tried to start a Non-conformists Club?  He couldn’t get anyone to join.

Well, back to Dever’s book.  It turns out that while I was away, Southern Baptists got bit by the Reformed bug.  Not all of them, mind you.  Many of them vehemently oppose this new development.  They see Calvinism as a mortal enemy of evangelism, which is the Baptist’s main focus.  But huge swaths of young Southern Baptists have begun reading Puritans for their devotions.  They’re downloading John Piper and C.J. Mahaney messages.  They’re reading R.C. Sproul.  The’re reading Jonathan Edwards for fun!  What happened?

Well, I know the story, some of it.  A Calvinist became president of Southern Baptist Seminary and he cleaned house.  I read that 96% of the faculty got replaced in just a few years.  Small wonder, then, that tulips are blooming now in Baptist pulpits all over the country.  I’m sure there’s more to it than that, of course.  Ultimately I suspect Reformed theology has gained ground lately because it has substance and depth to it.  It has intellectual bite.  In an age when people know less and less what they believe, this tradition gives people something solid to stand on.

Incidentally, I happen to agree with much of Reformed theology, and not just because I studied at Reformed Seminary.  For all the things I don’t like about most Calvinists (like intellectual arrogance and a strong clergy/laity distinction).  I still believe in a sovereign God.  I still believe he had to quicken my heart before it could even sense its own need for him.  I’m at least a four-point Calvinist myself.  That won’t satisfy hardcore Calvinists, of course (I’m convinced that, unlike the other four,  one of the five points doesn’t come from scripture at all–it is inferred from the other four).  But I’m not that befuddled by a grassroots return to what Reformed folks call the “doctrines of grace.”  To my mind, most of this stuff just comes from reading the New Testament.  The idea of election, for example, comes from Paul, not from some French guy in the 1500’s.

But in the Baptist world I grew up in, this kind of talk would have made me the butt of many jokes.  I didn’t know of any Calvinists in the large SBC church I grew up in, nor had I even heard of them anywhere else except in Presbyterian churches.  I remember how amazed I was when I first read through the New Testament and discovered verses like Acts 13:48:

“When the Gentiles heard this, they were glad and honored the word of the Lord; and all who were appointed for eternal life believed” (emphasis mine).

I brought that verse to Sunday School one morning and everyone insisted I must have been reading from a bad translation.

But now as my wife and I have started church hunting among Baptist churches, we’ve discovered that most of them around here are preaching Reformed theology from the pulpit!  It’s like Bizarro world for Baptists!  One of those pastors handed me Mark Dever’s Nine Marks book and said, “Here is basically what I believe.”  I open the book and read him affirming the following:  “The history recorded in the Bible shows us very plainly that God is a creating God and that He is an electing God” (62).  He does not see a contradiction between election and evangelism.  He rather asserts that “God used the doctrine of election as an encouragement to Paul in evangelism” (143), citing as his proof Acts 18:9-10, which says:

“And the Lord said to Paul in the night by a vision, ‘Do not be afraid any longer, but go on speaking and do not be silent; for I am with you, and no man will attack you in order to harm you, for I have many people in this city.‘”

Belief in election isn’t the only evidence of the Reformed influences on Dever’s thinking.  One of his main points is that churches should be receiving a steady diet of systematic theology (a clear mark of a Reformed influence) and that they should learn a biblical view of God.  He then summarizes this biblical view of God by including a long excerpt from the classic statement of Reformed theology, the Westminster Confession (see 84-85).  He closes his extensive quote by saying, “This is the God who reveals himself in the Bible” (85).  That’s some pretty hearty props for Reformed theology there!

Then there is the notion of elders.  In the Baptist world of my growing up days, nobody had elders.  They had pastors, ministers of this and that, and then there were deacons.  But deacons just do grunt work for the church–taking care of practical needs and such.  Most of the time they don’t have any real authority in the church, like elders would.  Dever, however,  cites “a growing trend to go back to this biblical office”.  He contends that “the Bible clearly models a plurality of elders in each local church” (229).  My own reading of the New Testament reinforces this for me.  I’ve like the idea of a plurality of elders (grown locally) for a while now.  I just can’t believe the idea is gaining popularity among modern Baptists!

Dever points out that Baptist churches used to have elders, back in their earliest days.  He even says the first president of the SBC wrote a book advocating a plurality of elders in church life (229).  The idea just never got universal acceptance and it eventually fell by the wayside.  Now here we have a stirring of writers and influential preachers calling for a return to ways of thinking and governing which will strike many people as thoroughly un-Baptist.

For example, Monday night a local pastor paid me and my family a visit.  We have been visiting his church and he maintains the unheard-of habit of personally visiting every prospective member in his or her home at some point.  We chatted, discussed common acquaintances, talked theology a bit, then he prayed with us and for us.  I was impressed with the pastoral faithfulness that showed.  It went a long way toward making me like him.  So it didn’t bother me that much when I figured out that his views about the second coming are very different from mine and that he has no warm feelings for Reformed theology.

“Sometimes I think those folks should just go ahead and become Presbyterians,” he said finally.

But wait a second.  I know just enough history to be dangerous, and I know that many, if not most, of the earliest Baptists were thoroughly Calvinistic in almost every way.  They just disagreed with the notion of an unregenerate church membership.  They believed in a believer’s church, where only professing believers get baptized (e.g. not infants) and where the State doesn’t own the church, or vice versa.  This put the earliest Baptists (and their ideological grandparents, the Anabaptists) at odds with the established churches of the Colonial (or Reformation) Era.  It got them exiled, arrested, or killed, depending on which country they inhabited.

Baptists have been called the “Stepchildren of the Reformation.”  That’s because Baptists really were like an offshoot of the Reformation–Calvinistic in theology but Anabaptist in church practice.  They saw churches as self-governed and composed of only regenerate believers, so they weren’t really Presbyterian to begin with.  And that’s not what people like Dever are after, either.  They belong to a committed minority of people who read the Scriptures for themselves and find there a set of teachings which do not fit perfectly with either the Established Churches of the Reformation or with the revivalistic churches that sprung up later in the U.S.  I don’t think they’re so crazy because “I is one myself.”

So there.  I admit it.  I’m a Reformed Baptist in my theology.  But I’m also organic/house/simple church in my ecclesiology, which means that I chafe when Dever goes on to claim that “In the New Testament, we find hints of the main preacher being distinct from the rest of the elders” (230).  I’m gonna need more than hints to buy that idea.  His only noteworthy evidence for this is Paul, who was a preacher but not a pastor by any means.  So he doesn’t really count.

Dever does what many pastors and theologians do:  He confuses the function of an itinerant apostle/church planter with that of a local pastor.  I know he does this because he did it earlier with Timothy and Titus.  He calls Timothy the pastor of Ephesus and assumes Titus must have been a pastor of  a church somewhere as well (177).  But the letters he cites make it clear that these guys were supervising large clusters of churches, and it fell to them to appoint pastors in each city where they planted a church.  Does that sound like the function of a local pastor to you?  That just doesn’t make sense to me.  All I can figure is that it has always been customary to call these letters “pastoral epistles.”  But that’s misleading.  And it seems to have misled Dever as well.

Here we find ourselves bumping up against the most sacred cow of evangelical church practice:  the single pastor tradition (by that, I don’t mean unmarried ones…I mean singling out one leader over all the others).  Even in a book that advocates a plurality of elders, we seem unable to conceive of a church without a main guy up front, doing all the teaching and preaching for the church.  It simply baffles me.

But I’ll take a shot at that in the next post:  Nine Marks and the Centrality of the Preacher.