Over the next several blogs I will post a tribute to Ravi Zacharias which I gave when he was honored at the Centre for Theological Mentoring and Reflection at Tyndale University College, Toronto.

RAVI ZACHARIAS A Tribute Centre for Theological Mentoring and Reflection June 10, 2010

I have had the privilege of knowing Dr. Zacharias for much of my life. He was wrapping up his time at Trinity Evangelical Divinity school while I was doing an M.Div. at Wheaton Graduate School. I remember preaching in the evening service at an Alliance Church and he and his wife were there. Ravi and I have also sat together on an airplane and discussed C. S. Lewis and since been on various platforms together. I always felt that our mutual background in Youth For Christ and our admiration for – as I have just mentioned – C. S. Lewis have created a certain bond. Underlying that is Ravi’s choice to begin with the Alliance in Canada and to continue as an official worker of the Alliance, something that cannot but help to please denominational types like myself.

In Ravi we meet a person who has given the total energy of his life to proclaiming the Gospel of Jesus Christ. As a young man he became well known for his powerful preaching which sought to bridge the gap between the man on the street and the great philosophic currents of the day. He expanded his outreach in 1992 with the VERITAS FORUMS, the first held at Harvard University. The mission statement for these forums: We create forums for the exploration of true life. We seek to inspire the shapers of tomorrow's culture to connect their hardest questions with the person and story of Jesus Christ.

As we bring Ravi before us tonight we should give special attention to his extensive writing. Over the past two plus decades he has written many books, with each and every one aimed at bringing the full force of the Gospel into the arena of intellectual as well as existential encounter. Let us briefly survey Ravi’s writing project.

The Writing Project 
Ravi began his evangelism career in India, his native land, and what we might describe as the cry of India has shaped his preaching and writing in ways that few of us can fathom, but which we sense in his abiding concern for the questions of suffering and pain. As well, he began his preaching as post-modernism was just beginning. Ravi’s apologetic project seeks a two pronged thrust at post-modernism. First, we notice that the modernistic reliance on arguments for the existence of God is by and large passed over. However, he continues to critique both left-over modernism and post-modernism with logic. Logic requires that if we complain about injustice that we actually have a transcendent standard of justice. His direct assault on atheism is found in …  

A SHATTERED VISAGE: THE REAL FACE OF ATHEISM; WOLGEMUTH & HYATT, 1990 There are few books like this either in scope or depth. In a way it reminds me of some of the early enlightenment projects in that it maps out the ground that apologetics needs to cover and gives guidance as to how that ground should be covered. The first five chapters sketch out the growth of late nineteenth century atheism fed by Darwin and Nietzsche and its overflow into the sewer of twentieth century totalitarianism and the fields of western academia, both of which have dedicated themselves to the proposition that man is the measure of all things. It is true that the tracing of this journey has been done before, but what Ravi brings is the call of the evangelists, a call issued continually with a certain existential angst. Where does atheism leave us? He answers in reference to morality:  

… we are devoid of moral assumptions and responsibilities, we have bankrupted ourselves, so that honor, truth, and morality have been sacrificed at the altar of autonomy and self-worship.” In reference to meaning: “[T]he delights of love, the loveliness of a baby, the wonder of a mother nursing a child, the exquisite strains of majestic music—all these transcend reason yet have real meaning in our lives. What meaning do they have if life itself is meaningless?” 

And when facing death, poets and scientists who deny God still seem to exhibit what Ravi calls “Grave Doubts.”

In response to all the devastation of the death of God and the birth of man as the measure of all things, Ravi again preaches, not the abstract God of the philosophers, but God who is the treasure of life, the one whose love “gave us life in creation” (p. 133), whose love calls for a response of gratitude which will be shown in a commitment to morality, a life of meaning suffused with divine and human relationships, a life that answers to Jesus promise that he is not like the thief that has come to kill and to destroy, but that he has come “that they may have life, and have it to the full.” John 10:10 (p.151). Thus, in Shattered Visage the apologetic program is laid out. Pascal said that inside of every human there was a God-shaped vacuum, and I might say that Ravi is seeking to describe that vacuum, or to raise consciousness so that we might know that in fact the vacuum is God shaped.
To be continued....

Being a Mirror of the Coming Kingdom

Is there a way forward from cultural withdrawal on one hand (20th century pre-millennialism) and recurring optimism (21st century post/a millennialism) on the other? Yes, I believe that what is known as classic pre-millennialism gives us a way to meaningfully engage society. Classic pre-millennialism recognizes that conflict with society is endemic to a fallen world. The world is indeed ruled by evil principalities and powers and people not only seek their own interests but also will harm others for no reason. This mixture of demonic presence and original sin creates the cosmos, the world which John warns us against loving. This cosmos is a spiritual construction and its deconstruction can only occur by a supernatural event, namely, the resurrection of the dead. This event has occurred already in Jesus Christ, but its full manifestation awaits the Christ’s appearance at which time death – which is the spiritual lynch pin of the whole world system -- will be defeated.

Thus for God's people there is a true waiting, a true anticipation of an event yet to come, the inbreaking of God in Jesus Christ. However, while waiting Christians are not to be quiet or passive in their interaction with the world. They are instead to be agents of the Kingdom, agents of the second coming. And yes, this calls for the aggressive expansion of the church as the work of announcing this good news of the Kingdom is aggressively around the world. While doing the work of evangelism the church must also display the coming Kingdom.

What I mean by display is that the world should be able to look at the Church and see what the future kingdom will be like. The Church is the called out people of God and as such should be a mirror, so to speak, of the coming Kingdom. In the lived community of the Church we should find the old order of the world, with its lust for power and aggrandizement, in other words all the things that are driven by the fear of death, disappearing, and in its place a robust growth of all the things that grow from a belief in the resurrection.

Let me give a try at an example. An exclave is a part of a country that is surrounded by another country. And example is Ceuta, an exclave of Spain which is surrounded by the country of Morocco. Spain proper is across the Strait of Gibraltar, but this small spot of territory, surrounded by Morocco, is part of Spain. For me this is a partial picture of the church, in the world as some have said, but not part of it; a foreign country within a foreign country, with real and dynamic connections to the real country, for Ceuta - Spain, for the Church - The Kingdom of God, but in dynamic relation with the surrounding country, Morroco in the case of Ceuta, the world in the case of the Church.

So, in summary, the world is structured by sin, rooted all the way back in what we call the fall. This structure finds its operating principle in the fear of death, which the Bible shows as the primary motivation of this present age. And finally, it is evilly empowered on the supernatural level. While, as I stated above, this system can only be changed by the supernatural action of God in Jesus Christ the risen one, it can be affected, its evil can be mitigated, and by God’s grace, good can be accomplished in its midst.

I believe this is the way forward; to cross the border of our exclave and bring the grace and goodness of our God to the culture. I am not sure of Hunter’s eschatology, but I believe he has something like this in mind when he speaks of “faithful presence.” He gives this quote from the Prophet Jeremiah.

Jeremiah 29:4—7:

4 This is what the LORD Almighty, the God of Israel, says to all those I carried into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon:
5 "Build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce.
6 Marry and have sons and daughters; find wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage, so that they too may have sons and daughters. Increase in number there; do not decrease.
7 Also, seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the LORD for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper."

Hunter sees these instruction to the Children of Israel in exile as being instructions to Christians who are “strangers in a strange land.” Christians need to be involved as citizens, they need to have a theology of work that praises the jobs that people have, they need to live in ways that bring the grace and presence of Christ to those around them.

Not that these thoughts are new, but in the current deteriorated state of Christian thinking about the surrounding society they need to be restated and re-explored.

Hunter spends a great deal of time calling for a theology of work which includes seeing ones work as a calling, a vocation. Here he is especially concerned with what he perceives as the stance of the neo-Anabaptist movement which in his opinion denigrates work, especially work that is part of the capitalistic system – which is most work. This commitment to a vague economic model where there are neither poor nor rich means that all the business people in the church and all the ones who are working for them are simply aiding and abetting the anti-god powers of this age.

Instead we need to instruct people that they have been called to their field of work to be the presence of Christ, not only in the workplace, but in the culture.
I must say that our own movement, the Alliance, has to an extent reflected this sense that if a person goes into full time Christian work, that is golden, but what others do is not really a concern of the church. Thus our people may lack a sense of spiritual fulfillment in their work and as a result the local church frequently competes with the community and the workplace for time and attention.

Hunter uses the old categories of the true the good and the beautiful to divide up human activity. All that humans do falls into one of the three categories, or, is opposed to one of them. Those working on the true are those who, among other things, comment, write, teach, and establish laws. The good are those who care for our health, maintain our cities, houses and machines, work on public policies – it is a wide category. The beautiful is perhaps more obvious as it is those who create art and media in all of its variety.

So, the exhortation “whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your heart” applies to the Christian at work, that is, we are to do all our work as a service to the Lord. This is the first response and it shapes us in the work place because we do not work to rule, we do not simply work to get by, but we seek to make our work an offering to Christ.

In this way we do not enter into a false reaction against the proper work of the Church which is to speak the good news of Christ to people, to invite them to faith, to initiate them into the church and to teach them to obey all the things that Jesus taught. I see this false reaction growing in a number of places and so I want to speak against it with some vigor. It is a betrayal of our commission to downplay evangelism, to make the mission of the Church the changing of the ills of this world, to project that somehow we can in fact obliterate disease, heal the environment and bring justice for all. No we cannot, for those things are tied to, are outgrowths of, the primary architecture of the cosmos. One day they will change, they will in fact be shattered, but not by our doing. So, to throw out the work of evangelism, of church planting, of discipleship, for these goals is to go off mission so severely that the Church itself will be in danger of being lost.

Instead of this false reaction we act as agents of the kingdom that is still yet to come. Christianity Today interviewed James Hunter and asked him for an example of “faithful presence.” He asked us to imagine if 20,000 Christians in the state of Illinois signed a petition in which they pledged that they, the undersigned, would be willing to adopt any child, regardless of race, creed or state of health, and then said, as a summary: “there are no unwanted children in Illinois.” This, Hunter said, would be a faithful presence response to the issue of abortion, and I would add that it is a response devoid of resentment, free of anger, and which abandons the will the power. It is a response that mirrors a whole new order, a new Kingdom that is yet coming.

I believe this is a way forward.

Several wonderful comments have been left and I will try to say some things in response in future posts.

Stop Driving in Circles, Turn on a GPS

I am going to take another trip. Where am I going? And what will I do when I am there? The answer shapes the means of travel, cost, time etc. The destination is everything. We have to know the final destination, and we have to know how to get there. Yes, I am one of millions of men who will be forever grateful to whoever invented the GPS.

The evangelical church seems to be driving without a GPS. In fact, we seem to have left the map at the last rest stop. What is the end? What does it look like? How are we supposed to get there? Does anyone have any idea?

For the church, what we believe about the end times is determinative in setting priorities and putting into play the methods we use. Somewhere in the mid-1980’s evangelicals became so fried with useless bickering over the fine points of eschatology that they fell into what I would coin as an "a-eschatology" which in reality is a solid step toward anti-supernaturalism. But I don’t want to get into that here. Instead I want to think about the fact that the very phrase “to change the world” is inherently eschatological, and therefore we cannot think deeply on the topic without surfacing our own eschatological assumptions and without examining their impact on whatever ministry project we are engaged in.

Here is my take on the relevance of eschatology to James Davidson Hunter’s book: To Change the World.

Hunter speaks of the Christian Right as having taken a position toward the current culture as “defense against.” He does not deny that there is good reason for this as the current culture is extremely harmful on many fronts to faith and also to people. I wish to ask, apart from Hunter, does the eschatology of the Right influence this “defensive position?”

Through the early twentieth century two factors shaped the evangelical stance toward society. First, liberalism, which proclaimed social engagement as the way to bring in the kingdom, caused evangelicals – including A. B. Simpson and Alliance leaders, to react by abandoning social engagement. Second, the rise of dispensational eschatology provided a theological underpinning for a stance that can be described as social non-involvement. It worked out this way. Please be aware that I know that the following summaries are not nuanced and are overly brief.

Dispensationalism positioned itself this way: if Christians are going to be raptured, and if then immediately thereafter a terrible and earth devastating tribulation is going to erupt, and if, after that Christ is going to return and rule, then there is no need to be involved in the improvement of society, no need to seek to establish justice or work for peace, because all of those efforts are going to be swallowed up in the tribulation. Christ will establish justice and peace when he comes; hence the main work of the church is to evangelize so that as many people as possible are spared from the future tribulation. Thus evangelism became the one and only focus of the evangelical church.

No one should gainsay the impetus to evangelism which this view inspired. However, there were two factors which evangelicals were not thinking about when they disengaged from culture. First, culture is the air we breathe and just like air we are not always aware of it. Evangelicals were in a culture which, while not an evangelical culture, and not a Christian culture, was nonetheless tied to enough Christian reference points to create a certain illusion of being a Christian culture. Consequently, evangelical cultural disengagement from approximately 1900 through the 1970’s was done from within a certain cultural comfort zone, however illusory that comfort zone might have been. Thus, they disengaged, but their disengagement did not leave them with a sense of danger.

When Francis Schaeffer pulled the fire alarm with How Shall We Then Live? everything shifted. Evangelicals suddenly tuned into culture and saw serious and real threats to their lives and their children’s lives. For Schaeffer the flashpoint was abortion; for Dobson, the rise and legitimatization of pornography; and other issues were targeted by other evangelical elite leaders, all of which triggered the rise of what we now identify as the Christian Right.

At the same time, Hunter points out; one of the tactics of evangelicals was to attempt to shield themselves from the culture by setting up what Hunter calls a parallel culture. The mainstream culture has rock music; we can do that with Christian rock! And entertainment stars? We can do that too. You want publishing companies, and television shows, even comedians; we can do all of that. In this way, through the creation of a parallel evangelical culture, we maintained the defensive postion of dispensationalism. Withdrawal from the world, withdrawal from the surrounding culture while we wait for the cataclysmic end, continued as the order of the day.

While trying to stay safe in its parallel evangelical culture, evangelicalism also took a cultural offensive by becoming involved in the political right. I would suggest that this shift from political non-involvement to involvement was caused by a weakening of dispensationalism and an uncritical absorption of the program of alternate eschatological matrixes. This weakening happened in part because of the excess of dispensational writers in predicting the end of the world, and also in interpreting current events and predicting that various end time events such as the rise of the antichrist were going to happen within the immediate future. When these predicted events did not occur, some pastors and theologians found themselves ready to move on to a different eschatology. For many this void was filled by the resurgence of post/a millennialism.

Enter post/a millennialism. These old relatives who had been banished to live in the evangelical basement now began showing up for dinner dressed in newly pressed tuxedos. I put these two together because while there are differences as far as the interpretation and timing of the appearance of the Antichrist, the conversion of Israel, etc., there is a commonality in regards to the possibility of a worldwide presence of the Kingdom of God which does not arise as a result of the sudden and cataclysmic coming of Christ, but instead arises from the work of God’s people in fulfilling the creation mandate and by the evangelization of the world. This I believe is at least one of the sources of language which speaks of “building the kingdom” and it seems to underlie much of the current talk about being a “missional church.” Many emergent church writers reflect this view which is clearly articulated by N. T. Wright.

At the same time there is a dissonance in current talk about the Kingdom and the missional church. This dissonance is found in the obvious disjunction between the call to reject the Constantinian project of making a Christian society, and the desire to see the kingdom of God fill the earth. I would ask some simple questions. In relation to the environment: how do Christians hope to see the environment restored without the whole world culture becoming Christian in the sense of being a people who see the environment as a gift from God and understanding that we are charged with caring for it? Likewise, justice for women, the end of poverty, -- how are any of those issues to be finally, once and for all resolved without a worldwide Christian society? You can’t have your cake and eat it too. In essence the a/post millennial project is the Constantinian project.

If I may I would like to risk reducing all of this to a small sentence. The project of the post/a millennialist is to bring in the Kingdom rather than to bring back the King. This brings us to Hunter’s forceful points, that while this or that particular effort at change may be successful, in the final analysis this is a neo-Constantinian project with the ultimate goal of changing the culture of America/Canada/the world into a Christian culture, a project which in reality is failing and cannot succeed. And, I will add, this is something that A. B. Simpson and Karl Barth both clearly understood.

I believe the shock with which Hunter’s book is being received by evangelical leaders is because there is an underlying awareness that Christians are not accomplishing their “change the world” agenda. At the same time there is a cry, a shout, to try harder, sign this petition, write a letter -- and on and on. Some of that is needed, but it can be just a continuation of the power agenda. On the other hand, should we go back to cultural withdrawal and wait for it all to burn? Should we collapse into Christian quietism? Who wants that?

Surely there must be a way forward.

No One Evangelical Hot Dog Stand Has All The Answers

Outside of Rogers Stadium are a number of hotdog stands. Whenever my wife and I attend a Blue Jays game we head for one, because eating on the street is to us a cool part of the experience, but not for everyone. Some like to eat in one of the many restaurants along Front Street, others wait for the game to start then bring hotdogs and beer to their seats. And even among the “street eaters” there are subtle differences in the hotdog stands. Those further away are cheaper, but if you buy near Gate 14 you may ensconce yourself in a tiny park and quietly munch away.

I see our pastors as milling about, ready to go into the game, but hungry. Around them are choices, and usually, instead of picking the best from each vendor, they become fiercely loyal to one. The Religious Right which is currently dominated in the United States by Focus on the Family and Chuck Colson, and in Canada and the United States given theological underpinning by a resurgent five point Calvinism, presented by Mark Driscoll, John Piper and others, represents if you will one family of choices for the church leader.

Another is the Left which is perhaps more popular in Canada. For awhile the writings of Brian McLaren and a whole raft of others calling for new paradigms in church and a re-orientation of denominations, doctrine and the Christian life received great attention in Canada.

Looming perhaps larger in Canada than in the United States, and particularly the Alliance in Canada, are the Anabaptists writers and thinkers such as Allen Hirsch who, while not Anabaptist, have a message which seems to resonate with the Anabaptist paradigm in certain interesting ways.

A brief synopsis of Hunter’s analysis of the three movements is that they have all succumbed to the dominant cultural motif of the politicization of everything. Hunter writes:

Politics has become so central in our time that institutions, groups, and issues are now defined relative to the state, its laws and procedures. Institutions such as popular and higher education, philanthropy, science, the arts and even the family understand their identity and function according to what the state does or does not permit. … Issues gain legitimacy only when recognized by law and public policy. It is only logical, then, that problems affecting the society are seen increasingly, if not primarily through the prism of the state; that is, in terms of how law, policy, and politics can solve them. (p. 103)

When one boils it all down, politicization means that the final arbiter within most of social life is the coercive power of the state. (p.106)

Hunter’s analysis is that the Christian Right and Left have both plugged into the politicization of everything in the culture in that they not only look to the state for solutions, but they also seek political power. While the Anabaptists eschew involvement in the body politic they define themselves as not being part of the body politic.

The Right seeks change by going back to what was. For Canadians the Christian Right is quite weak partly due to the backlash against its visibility in the United States. However, I sense a residual longing for what might be called the myth of a pristine past, a Canada defined by the Protestant consensus of the United Church and by the Roman Catholic Church.

The Left seeks a future which conforms in some sense to the Enlightenment ideal of a society where there is economic parity and libertarian social justice. Although the Christian left is not as strong in the United States as it once was, it is still very powerful in Canada. The Left has accepted the liberal concept of progress which Hunter points out as originally a secularized notion of Christian eschatology. (p. 134) However, the Christian Left has also capitulated to a motif of resentment and a will to power.

Thus, according to Hunter, both the Right and the Left are following along the well trodden path of Nietzsche in being motivated by resentment and having a will to power.

This leaves the neo-Anabaptists who have a growing appeal among younger Christians in both the United States and Canada. Historically the Anabaptist movement has self-identified as a church that stands apart from the world and its structures. Through history, with a few exceptions, Anabaptists have refused to be involved in politics, even to the point of refusing to vote. Government is seen to be an institution of the world held in thrall by the “principalities and powers” of this age.

To literally demonize such powers as the State and the market means that the neo-Anabaptists draw much of their identity and purpose from a cosmic struggle with, and dissent from, the state and the larger political economy; as those institutions are represented in the culture of late modernity. Thus, for Hunter, the neo-Anabaptist identity depends on the state and on the state's powers being corrupt. And the more unambiguously corrupt those institutions are the clearer becomes the identity and mission of the church. (p.164)

To what extent then are we influenced by the agendas of the Right, Left and neo-Anabaptists? As I pointed out above, in Canada the Right has not had as much influence as it has in the United States. Canada is the only major country in the world with no law governing abortion and there is no powerful movement to change that; same sex marriage came into law with little more than a whimper; and Canadians of all persuasions see universal health care as the right thing to do. In my opinion this is because the Left, i.e., the United Church and the Anglican Church, have driven the communitarian agenda for decades. Yes, in Canada, those churches certainly had dense networks of elites in high prestige locations.

For evangelicals the most pointed influence is from the neo-Anabaptist movement as it is filtered through various contemporary writers. As is to be expected such influence has, in my opinion, both a positive and negative aspect.

The positive aspect is the neo-Anabaptist examination of the contemporary evangelical church for spiritual coldness; an examination conducted from the platform of the church's need to stand in antithesis to the principalities and powers of this present age. From this analysis the neo-Anabaptist is able to identify spiritual coldness in the following: the evangelical church's symbiotic relationship to corporate structures, producing a consumer driven church which commodities ministry and, the lack of concern for the disenfranchised of society, i.e., a lack of concern for justice.

Having heard this piercing analysis I think there is a growing desire among many to move from such coldness into a place of renewed spiritual vitality. In some writers this desire is translated into a call for the church to be “missional,” – a label that seems to mean different things to different people – and a desire to more truly relate to people outside of the church by bringing love and compassion to them. Note, I did not say “bring love and justice…” and the reason for that, in my opinion, is that the evangelical church has for so long endorsed the surrounding culture that it is having difficulty identifying violations of justice and is having even more difficulty articulating how injustice should be addressed apart from the will worn paths of politics.

Negatively the influence of the neo-Anabaptists may possibly be seen in some of the following trends. Here what I say that it is very difficult to prove so these points should be taken as my private read of the current situation. Take it or leave it.

First, I see the naïve rejection of the institutional church with the hope for an ideal church that somehow is like the pristine pre-Constantine church, as a negative product of the neo-Anabaptist influence. This attitude: “I am above and beyond the institutional church” pops up in many ways and places, but has Hunter points out; it reveals an amazingly weak ecclesiology as well as a total lack of understanding of sociology. Institutions have a reality and are critical to the functioning of society. The church, from its beginning, is both a heavenly or spiritual entity and an earthly institution. Both its earthly structure and its heavenly dwelling must be embraced by Christians.

Second, I see the gradual drifting from doctrinal anchor points which give identity to both the Christian faith and particular church communities as arising from this movement. One spin off of the loosing of doctrinal moorings has been a deep controversy among those who work among people of other religions and a call for the use of a methodology that in its extreme at least flirts with syncretism. I am referring to the contextualization debate in missiological circles. Another is the growing inability to identify error and deception which continually presents itself to the church.

A legitimatization of compassion work (seen as a proper work of the church) and a commensurate de-legitimatization of evangelistic work (seen as a concentration on the individual which is a result of enlightenment thinking) is another by-product, so that, as a denominational leader, I can raise over one million dollars with a single email for any disaster that is highly publicized by the media, but must beg to raise an equivalent amount to sustain the training of young people in our university college or to sustain our worldwide evangelistic effort. Let’s be honest. Evangelism is virtually dying out in Canadian evangelical churches. And I can bring forward empirical data from our denomination to back this statement up.

The three segments, The Right, The Left and the neo-Anabaptists have each addressed legitimate issues, have raised consciousness in regards to those issues, and have created some legitimate responses. However, they have not delivered on the promise to change the world, or America, or even Canada. Next let’s pull together the reasons why.

Why We Are Not Going to Change the World -- Hunter's Sociological/Theological Analysis

After giving some of my own experiences with the three motifs for change presented by James Davidson Hunter in his book:To Change the World, I will now continue to present some of his key ideas.

To the thesis that individuals can change culture James Davidson Hunter presents a counter thesis: culture changes individuals. Cultural change does occur but not in the ways we as Christians have thought. We have thought that a great individual, acting alone has at various times changed the culture. We have thought that certain key ideas have changed culture. We have thought that if enough people became Christians and in so doing changed their values, culture would change. However, culture is changed very slowly, and with conflict “…through dense networks of elites operating in common purpose within institutions at the high-prestige centers of culture production.” (p. 274).

This statement is worth careful consideration.

Dense networks. Hunter gives example after example of dense networks throughout history that have worked together. Almost always there are key people within those networks, people who formulate and articulate concepts and modes of action, but without the network they would be mere voices in the wilderness. (For an excellent discussion of this read Malcome Gladwell, The Tipping Point.)

Elites. Culture, says Hunter, is about how societies define reality, and the capacity to do that is not spread evenly throughout the society. “Deep-rooted cultural change tends to begin with those whose work is most conceptual and invisible and it moves through to those whose work is most concrete and visible.”(p. 41). Thus there is what Paul Ricoeur spoke of as a sedimentation process. Picture a lake with various streams coming into it. The input contains various chemicals, minerals, salts, etc. which hang in the water, but which eventually sink to form the sediment. The input, says Ricoeur, is innovation. This is what Hunter’s elites do. They live in universities, they head major corporations and control the media. As they work and play together their ideas gradually sink down to form the sediment of society, that is, the culture.

Within institutions. One of the failures of contemporary evangelical thinking, in my opinion, has been to naively underestimate the importance of institutions. This, as Hunter points out, is especially true of those who do not grasp the importance of the institutional side of the church. Institutions, be they churches, universities, charities, various societies such as The Order of Canada, are places where elites can form networks, and are a vehicle for the elites to transmit change into the culture.

High-prestige centers of culture production. Culture is produced in many places, but there are places which have high prestige, and the culture production that comes from these places spreads. Thus, the high prestige place for theatre is New York City, movies, Los Angeles, social and political commentary, the Eastern seaboard, and much of that influence spreads to Canada from those centers. Canada’s social and political commentary as well as its media production is based in Toronto.

Culture production that comes from dense networks of elites operating from high prestige locations becomes the texture and fiber of society. Christians, but in particular, Evangelicals, have failed to be part of this production. Evangelicals have not produced enough elites to form dense networks, and they do not locate themselves in prestige locations. Hunter gives a stunning and, for an evangelical, embarrassing rundown of what appears to be almost a conscious effort to do the exact opposite, that is, to place ourselves as far from the centres of influence as possible; to maximize our marginalization in the culture.

Briefly:

• While there is evangelical scholarly work that is good, much of it is published by evangelical presses, not by high prestige presses.
• The works of literature produced by evangelicals are huge in volume, but are seldom reviewed in prestige publications, i.e., The New York Times.
• There is not one evangelical research university.
• There is little evangelical presence in the media, in any location.

So what’s the point? Is the point that we should, as James Dobson says in one place, work harder? Should we take Hunter’s analysis, absorb it, figure out what we are doing wrong, raise ten billion dollars and launch a new strategy to create a Christian culture, to change the world? No. Give it up. It’s not going to happen. Hunter points out that America has never had a Christian culture. And in my opinion Canada has never had a Christian culture. And, even if everything was done right it – elites were enlisted, culture production from high prestige locations began, etc., it would take about three hundred years to bring about the true culture change that is envisioned. And that won’t happen because the main problem with all of this will continue to be a problem -- sin, or, as Hunter puts it, the corruption of power.


This is the irony that lurks in the title. Those who have embarked on this project are quickly enmeshed in what Nietzsche called the will to power. This is especially true for the Christian right and the Christian left, but surprisingly it is also true of the neo-Anabaptist movement also. I might here recommend SJS' comment to my "If not Chicago, how about Detroit" post.

Next, a closer look at Hunter's analysis of the Christian triad of Right, Left and Anabaptist.

Institutions Can Be Change Agents

I have written of my own experience with the first two ways by which evangelicals believe they can change the world, namely, through evangelizing enough people to reach critical mass, and through changing values by gaining political power. Hunter also speaks of the institutions of society.

Those of us who have only a passing acquaintance with sociology sometimes overlook the crucial role that institutions play as they mediate between the body politic and individuals. I have been involved with many institutions through the years. I was on the board of a small Christian school in Chicago and in Detroit much action occurred through community organizations. However, those organizations seemed to be exclusively focused on being agents of influence on the political machine.

After our daughter was killed in a crash my wife and I became involved in one of Canada’s best institutions, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, or MADD. In my opinion the people who run MADD really know what they are doing. They understand how to act on multiple societal fronts at the same time, how to bring about political change, and how to influence a change of values in society.

MADD caries on a continual political lobbying effort. They gather statistics, they make presentations and apply pressure. As a result they have seen a gradual change in laws that have raised the penalties for drunk driving while lowering the legal tolerance level.

MADD also seeks to change the values of society. They do this through advertising and through presentations. My wife and I have spoken at The Rotary on behalf of MADD and we also coordinated a contest among school children in Grey County whereby children drew a billboard against Drunk Driving and the winning design was actually turned into a billboard and displayed.

MADD also cares for people who have lost family members to drunk driving. This was in fact our first contact as a nearby chapter called us and offered support.

What we see from this institution is an example of a number of things which Hunter speaks of. MADD speaks to the cultural forming elites of society. Because harm from drunk driving is no respecter of persons they have been able to enlist the support of a number of people who are part of Canada’s elite opinion making class.

As a result society has begun to change its values in regards to drinking and driving. Drunk driving is no longer a joke, it is no longer socially acceptable to drink and drive. That is not to say it does not happen, it happens all the time. But society no longer considers it to be permissible behaviour. And this real shift in attitude is largely credited to MADD which effectively, year in and year out, harnessed the power of the opinion making elites. Thus, as I see it, they have functioned brilliantly as an institution by mediating between the political sphere on one hand and seeking to influence the value system of individuals on the other. And further, to a limit extent, they have sought to give care to people at moments of great vulnerability.

MADD however understands its limitations as an institution. It does not, as far as I know, set as a goal the one hundred percent elimination of drunk driving. Nor does it seem to be tempted to go off mission and become involved in other worthwhile causes. Thus MADD seeks change but seeks it within a reasonable framework.

One more thing should be added from my perspective. Many of the people who are active in MADD are people who have lost part of their lives to a drunk driver. And this fact is ever before the organization. Yet, in spite of its title, the majority of people who compose MADD are not consumed with anger, or what Hunter would call resentment. They are people who wish to spare others the horror that they have experienced. This has added to the institution’s impact.

I do see in mediating institutions a way to bring positive influence on society.

If not Chicago how about Detroit?

In my seventh year in Chicago, while in the midst of the Vietnamese refugee re-location project, I was called by David Clark, District Superintendent in another district, and asked to consider coming to a church in Detroit’s inner city. This was quite a different situation from Chicago in almost every way. Chicago, under Mayor Daley, was a well run city. People worked, raised their families and were frequently involved in community organizations. Even so there were of course massive problems in Chicago, problems large enough to challenge thousands of pastors and workers for their entire lives and I don’t wish to understate that reality.

Detroit however sat in contrast to Chicago, for Detroit was then beginning the slide to its current decrepitude. Riots has seared the soul of the city. White flight took on epidemic proportions and was encouraged by various policies. City government had as its goal to establish political power and to skim money. I will never forget walking into a city hall office and reading a large sign which said something like this: “Employees are forbidden to talk to the FBI without permission of their supervisor.”

The church itself was a result of the split of Central Alliance -- the old mother church of the Alliance in Detroit. Wayne State University wished to buy the old church to make a parking lot and so the congregation sold and moved to Dearborn. But a small group stayed behind and took up residence in another large building which was already owned by the city and slated to be demolished for even more parking.This "stay behind" group was the church that called me. I answered the call and went.

When I arrived the whole city was politicized in a way which has only recently become familiar to wider society. The presence of the city government was like humidity on a hot day and I knew that we would not be able to establish ourselves or have any relevance without becoming immersed in the political milieu.

And so I did. To this day I display in my office a plaque of appreciation given to me by one of the community organizations. Voter registration drives, court injunctions to stop this or stop that, appearing before City Council and being on a first name basis with many, including the now well known United States Senator Carl Levin, I was there, fully present and active, I worked the system.

It was generally accepted by many that community political action was going to save Detroit. Individual houses would be spared demolition, work programs would be brought in, prostitution bars closed and “hot bed” hotels zoned out – by community action. And all of this happened, and more. If political action could save even a local society, Detroit would have been saved. But Detroit was not saved.

Perhaps Detroit activists have moved on from those dreamy days of believing in change through politics. An article on Detroit in The National Post September 13, 2010 reveals the current state of affairs. Individuals act to plant gardens or to develop farms, art projects are erected in empty areas, and local people band together to push out drug pushers from their neighbourhoods. Promises from the government are met with scepticism, a scepticism that I totally resonate with. From the article I sensed that there may be glimmers of hope, not that yet another Federal grant will be obtained, but that a modest sense of community may be formed in this once great city. People are doing good things, seeking to live healthful lives, bringing healing and joy where they can.

It seemed to me as I read The National Post article that the people being described were practicing something like what Hunter calls “faithful presence.” That is, they are trying to breath life into their society. This is something for us as Christians to think about in Canada. Can we breath health, temporal health and eternal health, into Canada?

Could I At Least Change Chicago?

Church planting in Chicago first brought me face to face with questions of the involvement of Christians/church in the world. Race, war, poverty, the environment, it was all on the table and Christians around me where trying to be relevant. As part of my Ph. D. studies at Northwestern University I was in classes at a seminary where the students were trying to apply the theories of social involvement which they drew from their studies of then contemporary theologians – trying to develop their praxis as some would say. A fairly large group of them decided to have a sit-in at the seminary to protest the development of a certain coal burning power generating plant in Chicago. As I walked by one day I noticed that the whole area of the sit-in was thick with cigarette smoke. Later I asked one of the participants if he did not think this a bit odd, that they would protest air pollution yet pollute each other’s air. He didn’t see my point. Of course now, everyone sees that point. This incident really brought home to me that Christians –desiring, as they do. the best for others-- are quick to get on bandwagons, right or left, without considering the wider ramifications.

As my wife and I planted a church, we faced the question: what should be our attitude toward the issues of the day? I took the stance of focusing on planting a church, believing that a church, a group of people committed to Jesus Christ, could best address the issues of the neighbourhood. Thus, most of our programs were in some way or another slated as “outreach.” Friday youth night with a full basketball program run by volunteers from Moody Bible Institute and Wheaton College. Door to door visitation, small group Bible studies by the dozens. I kept a written log of my time and sought to spend fifty percent in evangelism. As a result my wife and led more people to Christ and baptized more people than we have at any other point in our lives. It was an amazing period in our ministry.

However I did very little with the structural issues of the community. I would say there were several reasons for this. During that time the government answer to poverty was welfare, and I saw welfare destroy people’s lives. I also observed some effective government sponsored programs, such as one that trained youth in marketable skills. Ironically, that particular program was cancelled during a period of budget cutting while programs that produced few results continued.

In was for sure in Chicago that I developed a deep cynicism toward almost all government run/sponsored anti-poverty programs. At the same time I learned to respect the lives of the working people around me. My father was a member of a union and worked his whole life. The people I knew in Chicago were not rich like the people in the suburbs, but most of them brought home a paycheck and lived happy lives and hoped for better things. At the same time, teens dropping out of high school, a rising gang presence, the insidious entrance of drugs, these and other community dysfunctions were an incoming storm.

In the end I left Chicago for Detroit realizing that just being a church like all the churches I had known growing up was not enough for the tumultuous seas of the inner city. By then I had worked on a number of things beyond youth basketball night, but was still trying to see how the church could truly be a church and truly be a place where people’s lives could be holistically changed.

The Thesis: Our Key Assumptions on How to Change the World are Wrong

As a sociologist James Davidson Hunter begins To Change the World with an analysis of the social theory that has guided Christians (it needs to be kept in mind throughout that while Evangelicals are highly profiled, Hunter is including both Mainline Protestant Churches and Roman Catholics in his critique) through the past one hundred years or so. To do this he first gives a synopsis of the project of “world making” by which he means the creation mandate given to Adam and Eve to cultivate and keep the garden and subdue the earth, which he interprets to be the whole human enterprise of creating culture. Theologians have traditionally spoken of this as the creation mandate and there is general agreement that sin did not lift this mandate and therefore culture is an outcome of our mandate to “make the world.”

Currently Christians are not happy with the culture that has been created, especially Christians in North America, and Hunter agrees with their analysis that the Christian culture of yesterday has been severely eroded. Because he is writing for the American church, I will humbly undertake to comment on how I see the relevance of his analysis to Canada. I will venture to say that Christians in Canada also are not happy with the culture in which they live, and that they desire to change it.

Later we will notice that this is precisely what Hunter advises us not to do, that is, we need to stop desiring to change the world. But first, how do we think we can change the world and how has that shaped our action?

Essentially Christians have accepted the very popular understanding of culture that has been widely adopted by politicians and by educators. Hunter says:

"The substance of this view can be summarized something like this: The essence of culture is found in the hearts and minds of individuals—in what are typically called “values.” Values are, simply, moral preferences; inclinations toward or conscious attachment to what is good and right and true. Culture is manifested in the ways these values guide actual decisions we individuals make about how to live.He says: . . . . By this view, a culture is made up of the accumulation of values held by the majority of people and the choices made on the basis of those values.” P. 6

Thus, in this view, the culture changes when individuals change their values. Change the values, change the culture. In the past one hundred years Christians have approached this project of changing the values of individuals in three ways, choosing one method exclusively, or working a combination.

First Christians have approached the project through Evangelism. The impact on values that is made when a person is truly transformed by the regenerating power of the Holy Spirit and discipled can be profound. Thus, through evangelism Christians have sought to change the culture by seeing one person at a time become a Christian, one person at a time re-orienting their personal values to the values of Scripture. In so doing they have hoped that somewhere they would reach critical mass, that is, if enough people in Canada would be truly converted, become true and devoted followers of Jesus Christ, then the culture of Canada would shift back to a Christian culture. The success of the past sixty years of evangelism (post World War II with the rise of Youth for Christ and Billy Graham through the campus ministries and the Jesus People movement until today) is obvious. Around the turn of the century I recall reading an article in the New York Times that spoke of the Christian resurgence as being a third Great Awakening. However pollster George Barna gave Christians of all denominations a rude awakening when he noted in several books that Christians display values that mirror those of the surrounding culture. So "change individuals -- change culture" is not working.

The whole project of evangelism has come under withering attack in recent years by certain voices in the evangelical left (Brian McLaren to mention one) and the Anabaptists. In the name of the Creation Mandate they call for us to notch evangelism down on the priority list and to ratchet up the renewal of cultural forms. That is, if evangelism is the pathway to changing the culture of North America, it has failed, so these voices say, so let’s try something else.

The call to substitute, or downplay, evangelism for the Creation Mandate is worthy of a lengthy critique. But here, a few words. First we should remember that C. S. Lewis stood against this morphing of evangelism into renewal of culture when he pointed out that cultural forms do not exist but that individual people exist, that is, individual people have ontological status. So, “the laboring class” or what have you cannot be saved and will not live in eternity, but individual laboring people can be saved and live in eternity. Later Hunter argues that when Jesus told us to “obey” all that he had said that this would include the Creation Mandate. I am a fan of the Creation Mandate, and certainly it is part of the Christian’s obedience. But, evangelism, that is the evangelism of individual people who can be immersed into the waters of baptism, is the heart of the Great Commission.

Hunter does not call us to abandon evangelism – he is totally in favor of evangelism. What Hunter says is that by itself bringing people to Christ will not change the culture. The focus on the conversion of people which we find in the book of Acts is absolutely critical, but I personally have learned the hard way how resistant the overall culture is to change and agree that evangelism by itself will not bring such change about.

Second, Political Action. After evangelism, political action is the strategy of choice to change the world for Christians.

The logic is simple. Values are shaped by law, and law is shaped by the values of law-makers, i.e., legislators, judges and heads of state. So, when Christians sit in those positions with Christian values they will make good laws which in turn will create a Christian culture.

While Hunter affirms politics as a legitimate sphere of human activity and one in which Christians are properly to be involved he sees the current situation where “politics is the tactic of choice for many Christians as they think about changing the world” (p.12) However, he says, politics by itself does not shape culture. I would point out that politics, as part of the on-going stream of human activity, does play a role in shaping culture, and for this reason the hard work of political leaders should not be minimized as being either unimportant or ineffective. However, while I agree with Hunter that politics by itself does not shape culture, in Canadian culture politics is the focal point for power, perhaps even more so that in the United States because the Canadian people look to government to solve many of life’s problems.

A second issue in regards to the Christian involvement in politics is the question of Christians and power. Politics and power walk hand in hand, so many Christians (again—not only evangelicals) in America have faced the question: “does the cultural mandate call for us to brazenly seek power-- to have a “will to power?” and many have answered “yes.” The ironic implications of that decision are playing out before our eyes.

Third, Social Reform.
In every society there are various institutions which mediate between “citizens and the state and market.” (p.14) These are voluntary institutions and they have been used to bring about moral reform by “addressing particular problems with the family, schools, neighborhoods and civic associations.“ Illustrations of these voluntary social movements include, among others, “the fatherhood movement, the marriage movement, the character movement, the teen-abstinence movement.” (p.14) Hunter points out that these movements have contributed to culture but again have not created the desired cultural change sought by Christians.

Thus these three activities: evangelism, politics and social reform are the three projects of choice for Christians to change the culture to a Christian culture, to change the world if you please, by changing the values of individuals one person at a time with a goal of reaching a critical mass at which point the whole culture will shift. Hunter says:

"At the end of the day, the message is clear…. If you have the courage and hold to the right values and if you think Christianly with an adequate Christian worldview, you too can change the world. This account is almost wholly mistaken.” (p. 17)(emphasis mine)

Let’s Discuss – Can We Change The World?

For my money James Davidson Hunter has been putting out the keen analysis of evangelicalism for the past thirty years. Now his life’s work is finding a focus in calling Christians of every confession, that is Baptists to Roman Catholics, to change the way the stand in relation to the surrounding culture. To Change The World: The Irony, Tragedy and Possibility of Christianity in a Late Modern World, Oxford University Press, 2010 calls us to abandon the enterprises that have been foisted on us by: The Christian Right (including the Roman Catholic Right), the Christian Left, and the neo-Anabaptists, and in their place to re-formulate what living as Christians in the world might mean. Hunter admits that this is a mammoth undertaking and that all he can provide is a sketch. But the sketch he provides is one of health and significance with a realism that can be followed. As well, his proposal actually could provide substance for the word “missional” without falling into the vagaries of what has rapidly became a cliché.

In a series of blogs I wish to explore and comment on Hunter’s book. I do not pretend to expound it completely for it is a dense book and deserves the careful attention of thinkers who are much more gifted than I. But I would like to add my affirmations, some caveats, and also begin to think about what the implications might be for local churches, and in particular local Alliance churches in Canada. To do that I will also present some autobiographical material so that the reader might know a bit of the context of my thinking.

Steps Toward Being a Missional Church

How does “missional” become something other than a buzz word? How can the Alliance, as well as churches from other traditions, carry out the mission of God? Here are some thoughts, which I humbly offer as simply food for much needed further and deeper discussion for those churches that have crossed the bridge to being missional, not in word, but in deed.

Being missional requires intentional strategy, and this strategy must be more sophisticated than simply saying that we will have "need-based" evangelism. The problem with “need-based" evangelism is that it may shape up to be simply a response to a neighborhood problem that is staring a local church in the face. It’s good to respond to what is staring us in the face, but that alone is not enough to be truly missional. For example, we learn that there are lots of divorces in our city, so we respond with a divorce recovery program. To be missional is much more than this. It is to figure out how to speak the gospel to the multi-layers of life in the community in a way that brings, however slowly but surely, what I would call kingdom transformation of individuals and their way of life together.

I propose a multilayered look at the community around us in order to develop, under the Spirit’s direction, approaches to bring the presence of Christ to every person. What am I talking about? As an illustration, if you were to open up the liberal arts catalog for a nearby university you might find departments like geography, sociology, perhaps anthropology and business. Each of these departments looks at and analyzes the world from a particular perspective which, theoretically, contributes to a wholistic understanding of humanity. My proposal is not to master all of that knowledge, but simply to look around us and see these various layers of life and of life-interaction --as represented in this simple illustration by university departments -- as they are occurring in real time with real people in our city.

For example, I can look at the city where I live geographically. What is its climate, and what is the impact of its climate on people’s lives? One snap of the finger answer is that my area has a four-season climate and thus people do a lot with recreation. More deeply I might ask: how does geography affect how people earn their living. And another quick answer would be that the city’s centrality has made it a transportation hub, which allows for industry. Sociologically what do I see? I see immigrants who are here because they can be connected to transportation and industry. Further questions can follow: what is their economic status and what businesses and jobs are they involved in? The list of these questions can go on and on.

Here is what I am wrestling with. This geographic/sociological analysis is probably step one in developing an in-depth strategy, but it is fraught with hazards. For the rest of this blog entry I will deal with the hazards.

This kind of strategic work was commonly understood in missiology, but was presented to pastors by Rick Warren in The Purpose Driven Church when he talked about doing evangelism strategy by creating a composite of the kind of person who lives in the area around a church and about shaping the church's programing to reach those people. Some pastors thought that this meant that if the church was surrounding by a young family demographic then the church should ignore ministries to seniors, or whatever. Pastors who think like that have failed Junior High School Strategic Planning for that of course in not what Warren meant. What he did mean was that an attractional model required an understanding of who the local church primarily wished to attract, which for him was young families, so the church offered programming to young families. Warren never meant that people who did not match the area’s aggregate demographic should be ignored.

However, even with this disclaimer it seems to me that building a program focused on attracting a single slice of the surrounding demographic is hazardous for the following reasons.

First, single demographic strategy ignores the complex fabric of society that I am alluding to, the subtle but real dynamic of day to day interaction that people have in their homes and in their work places. Thus the church, in seeking to “reflect” its community can end up doing the opposite, that is, it end up being an exclusive club that screens out all who don’t fit in.

Second, and here I am spinning off from the above fundamental problem, while seeking to address the felt needs of the community the church may end up missing the felt needs that are experienced by people around them. This is because the deepest felt need in any community is simply to be a community, to find a way of coming together, and in that coming together to address the micro-community of the family, to be a village that raises its children, to provide love for the very elderly who are nearing the end of their journey. This cannot be done when everyone who is “alike” huddles together.

Third, the church, in trying to focus on a particular group to the exclusion of others runs counter to strong biblical mandates and examples. Every picture that we have of the early church shows people who are slaves and slave owners, craftsmen, farmers, Jewish heritage and gentile, the gentiles being sub-divided into many language backgrounds, as well as male and female. This demographic mess was responded to by the Holy Spirit who inspired the greatest writings in history on love and unity. The church today is called into the same mess, and the same struggle.

Please allow me to place one more disclaimer here. I am not speaking against first generation immigrant churches that worship in their language of origin. Many reasons can be given as to why this is not only necessary, but good. However, down the road, if they are true to the gospel, these language churches are called to establish a ministry that reaches out beyond their own group. I am so thankful to say that this is happening.

If a church considers itself to be exploring new models and thinks of itself and being beyond the attractional paradigm, my challenge is that it consider if this is truly so, or is it simply re-painting the old mono-demographic church with new colors.

Allan Hirsch and the Attractional Church Model

Allan Hirsch is credited with coining the word “attractional” to describe the way evangelical cutting edge church has been done from the 1980’s until now. The Alliance in Canada has been into this model in a fairly big time way since the mid-eighties and only recently is beginning to experiment with other possibilities. The pure attractional model seeks to draw people into the church building so that they will have a specialized need met, and in the process of having a need met enter into meaningful human relationships, and then hopefully they will be pointed to Christ, enter into a saving relationship with him, and finally be integrated into the life of the congregation. Doing church like this is certainly superior to the forties through seventies model, which was to hold church services of various kinds, such as Sunday AM and PM services and Wednesday night prayer service, and assume that now and then someone would walk in with a need for God. The attractional model was a brave departure and is based on the words of Jesus who tells us to go out into the highways and by-ways and to compel people to come in, “come in” meaning “come into” the church building and then into the church’s life.

The attractional model began by capitalizing on what in business is called good-will, that is, a good reputation in the community as a place of peace and a place where help could be found. So, parents were willing to allow their teens to attend the youth meeting at the local Alliance Church, and they might even drop in and attend the Christmas musical.

Several problems have, however, emerged from the use of this model. First, its usage seems to relentlessly pull the church to shape its message so that those whom it wishes to attract are not pushed away too soon, that is, before they become Christians. I personally have felt this pressure, and I have defended Bill Hybels against the accusation that his message is watered down, but few anymore deny that the attractional model tempts church and preacher to conform to the world, at least a bit. Currently in my office we are taking a look at statistics regarding baptisms in various churches in the Alliance in Canada as one way of trying to take a snapshot of the relationship between people hearing enough biblical instruction to actually follow Christ in baptism and the style of outreach.

Another difficulty is that the washing away of good-will for the church in Canada has made the attractional model much less functional. The rise of militant atheism, the demise of the United Church, the tiresomeness of the religious right in the States, and probably most notably, the residential school scandal, have all contributed to high levels of distrust for churches resulting in ever higher levels of resistance to anything done by any brand of church resulting in fewer and fewer people being attracted to significant encounters with people or God within the four walls of the church. Its just gotten really hard to coax people to come to church for any reason whatsoever. Really hard.

Which leads to the last and saddest difficulty which has been present from the beginning of the rise of the attractional model, the fact that most of the attraction was to other Christians because it pandered to the baby boomer's predilection to shop church. The demand for choice is part and parcel of sociological post-modernism, and the lack of commitment to truth is part of philosophical post-modernism, and both of these created a climate where people who were raised as Baptists would leave the church of their heritage in a heartbeat once they figured out that the Pentecostal church had a better nursery. Thus we have the scene of large evangelical churches being large because their programs attracted Christians from smaller, not quite as up to the minute, evangelical churches in town.

So, when people like Allan Hirsch turn withering, sarcastic criticism on this model, we should not be surprised, but should be humbled, and we should be asking the Holy Spirit what needs to be done.

Having said all of that I will now say that I personally do not find the solutions that Allan Hirsch puts forward to be particularly compelling. For example, Allan promotes the house church movement as it occurred in China. From time to time house church movements are promoted for use in North America, and, from time to time some of them meet with modest success. However, it is my opinion (note – opinion, not fact based judgment) that societal conditions are radically different here than in China and that while house churches may be planted and continue to live, a movement of house churches is not likely to flourish in North America.

Yet more to come.

Listening to Allan Hirsch

I have at last returned from a long journey back and forth across the country visiting our pastors in conference and I will comment a bit on the input that was given by guest speakers.

Allan Hirsch was the guest speaker in an April conference. Hirsch writes from a background that includes a Jewish heritage and also a denominational heritage from the Restoration Movement as it finds itself in Australia.

In one of his blogs David Fitch includes Hirsch in what he calls a “neo-Anabaptist” movement. Calling Hirsch a neo-Anabaptist may be stretching things a bit but there is certainly some crossover between the Restorationists and the Anabaptists in their claims that it is possible to discover and to present pure New Testament Christianity, or what is sometimes known as primitive Christianity. Thomas Campbell, one of the founders of the Restoration Movement, went from being a Presbyterian to a Baptist, and from there became even more radical in claiming that it was possible to “restore” the church to its New Testament simplicity in governance and in practice. From this effort some of the points restoration churches are noted for emerged such as a denial of creeds, self-government of the local church, and not being regenerated until baptised by immersion (for which the baptism of the Ethiopian eunuch is seen as the defining model), and in the Church of Christ, no musical instruments in the church. www.mun.ca/rels/restmov/restmov.html

In The Forgotten Ways Allan Hirsch relies on the restorationist meta-narrative that the New Testament church was pure in all things but at one point in history, identified by him as the conversion of Constantine, everything went wrong, and has continued wrong. This meta-narrative has been challenged since the origin of the Restoration Movement in the very early 19th century and I will not discuss it further at this point. One should note that Hirsch sees a recent exception in the house church movement in China.

So much for background. Personally I find that when I peel back the restorationist meta-narrative that Allan Hirsch has many powerful insights and I think these should be listened to. At the same time, all of his work should be subjected to strong critical thinking. And finally I have this recurring question: is either “neo-Reformed” or “neo-Anabaptist” the place where we want to go?

More to come.

Some Hope at Last!

Sometimes when I really like a book I might say: “This book makes me swoon.” But in this case “swoon” might obliquely link, even through a pun, to the “swoon theory” of the resurrection. None of that for N.T. Wright’s masterful and magisterial Surprised by Hope, Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church. So, could I say that I want to jump up and down for joy or some other really happy thing as a response—I’m sure you get the idea.

First, of apologetic interest is Wright’s very up to date defense of the resurrection. Considered to be one of the foremost New Testament scholars of our day, Wright not only speaks of what we might call the standard defenses for the resurrection of Jesus, but also shows how the Greeks did not view resurrection as life after death, but as something that referred to “life after whatever sort of life after death there might be” (p.36). The Greeks rejected this possibility, as did the Sadducees. Wright goes on to show how the early Christian view of resurrection was distinct from the Jewish view in six ways. And then he discusses the credibility of the resurrection narratives, pointing out that the gospel narratives should sound quite different if they were made up somehow by post-Pauline writers, for if they are post-Pauline we would expect them to try to prove what they were saying from the Old Testament, but Old Testament references are not prominent in the resurrection narratives of the four gospel writers. Other points that one would not expect from a made up story, but which are there, are the presence of women as the witnesses, and to me quite interesting, the portrait of the risen Jesus as not being luminous, which one might expect if one were casting the story based on Daniel, but as having a body that is in some ways “quite normal.”

Certainly if anyone needs to deal with current Gnostic-revivalism such as “The Gospel of Judas” or the da Vinci Code industry, this and other works by N.T. Wright is the place to go for solid rather than haphazard answers.

But all this is the infrastructure Wright’s wonderful exposition of the hope of the resurrection of the body. Someone told me that this book is controversial. Certainly I do not agree with everything in his a-millennial panorama, but that is not the part I want to praise. What came to me was for the first time hearing an echo of my own decades long frustration at the view of heaven and the afterlife that is virtually a zeitgeist in churches, both evangelical and otherwise, a view that when we die we go to heaven and that’s it, wonderful stuff ever after, streets of gold and all that. The vivid teaching of 1 Corinthians 15 and I Thessalonians 4 seems to elude, or confuse, not only people, but pastors.

And here I will say something personal, which I seldom do in this blog, but as someone who has lost people whom he loved more than life itself, the comfort of heaven is only comfort if there is a resurrection, for if it is only heaven, then death has won. The comforting words that Paul encourages us to seize are that “the dead in Christ shall rise” and then “we shall forever be with the Lord (1 Thessalonians 4: 16,17).

Wright masterfully integrates all of this with an a-millennial view (never tagged as such) of the impact of the resurrection on the new heaven and the new earth. The tie in for this blog is that A. B. Simpson’s pre-millennial eschatology was not a dispensational pre-millennialism, partly because that view while being developed during his career, had not gained the kind of force that it did in ensuing decades. Instead, Simpson saw the power of the resurrection of Jesus Christ as the explanatory feature for the millennium, the presence of Jesus the resurrected Lord would in the millennial age be the power by which all that was dreamed of by the prophets for a better world will come to pass. Wright calls his own eschatology “inaugural” which brings us within shouting distance of Simpson’s view that even now we can experience the power of the resurrection in our holy walk – sanctification – and in experiences of signs and wonders, most notably, the healing of the body.

I can’t think of a better book to read as we approach Easter, the day of hope and joy.

A Tipping Point for Christianity?

In The Tipping Point, which continues to be on The New York Times best seller list, Malcolm Gladwell poses the question: why do some things, whether they are consumer preferences for a particular brand of shoes, or epidemics such as AIDS, suddenly jump from minor status to the thing that huge numbers of people are buying or being infected with? This is a pop sociology/marketing book that has some pointed (pun intended) insights for the Christian apologists who desires the news about God’s Kingdom to spread. But, this is also a discussion that should cause reflection in both Christian apologetics and Kingdom communication.

First Gladwell sets forth “the law of the few”, the few being people whom he calls connectors, people who have formed brief but solid relationships with other people, lots of other people. From this I learned that, contrary to conventional wisdom, if you want to be a person who has influence, having many acquaintances is more important that having a few close relationships. That is not to say, of course, that a person should not have close relationships. It is to say that connectors reach way out beyond that circle so that scores, perhaps hundreds of people are acquainted with them and operate with them at a level of trust. Think of connectors as people sitting in the middle of a large web of acquaintances and when they shake the web everyone, even those on the edge, gets the message.

Perhaps one of the problems with Christians is they have become more and more isolated from everyone in common life. The program church has many advantages, but one of its disadvantages is that it totally absorbs the life of its key workers leaving little time or energy for them to coach or play kids sports, to sit on school councils, or to join in meaningful community activities. Thus, those who could be connectors are unplugged from the wider populace. It’s not much good to have an apologetic if we don’t know anyone to speak it to.

Gladwell also brings up the “stickiness factor” as to why some ideas or things take hold in the general populous, that is, some ideas seem to capture the imagination, they become part of common speech and are uncritically accepted as true. This concept is a bit harder for the apologist to apply, for even though we all know that an idea needs to stick there is no way to know ahead of time what will and what won’t stick, and the apologist may or may not ever figure out why one idea stuck and another fell onto the road just at the moment it was needed.

An example (you may love or hate this) is the phrase “purpose driven life.” Rick Warren, author of The Purpose Driven Life gave the invocation at the inauguration of Barack Obama. Back in the autumn of 2008 Rick Warren invited the then candidate, along with others, to Saddleback Church for a forum, and they all came. Why? Because “purpose driven life” had stuck, not only as a bestselling book, but as a phrase that has imbeded itself in our culture. While there is no way to know ahead of time what will and what won’t stick, we need to realize that as communicators – whether it be by writing, verbal, film, or whatever, stickiness needs to be part of the goal in the crafting of the communication. And, it needs to be part of the prayer of preparation, for while we can never know ahead of time, God does know what will stick, and what won’t.

The last thing I wish to comment on is Gladwell's discussion of “the power of context”. This is really worth study because it applies very much to the apologetic situation and is related to what Newbigin discusses as plausibility structures. Gladwell uses as an example the problem that the New York subway system had with shrinking ridership.People began to stop using the subways because it had become commonly believed that they were unsafe. Think of Gladwell taking Newbigin’s discussion on plausibility structures and applying it to this problem. The people who ran the New York subway system saw that they had to change the reality and also the perception of safety in a way that people understood the change. So, they demonstrated that they were restoring law and order by getting rid of graffiti and by stopping people from cheating on fares (fare jumping). When people saw that trains were clean and that young hoods weren’t jumping over the turn styles the message that it was once again safe to ride the subway began to take hold, and ridership increased.

Likewise, we are living in a time where a great deal of effort is being spent by proponents of secularism to create the perception that, in accordance with the plausibility structure of the western world in 2009, Christianity is in fact implausible. Christianity is an unsafe place, don’t take any rides there -- that is the message. Certainly it is important to deal with this on a logical basis, but that might be like the subway people trotting out bar graphs in news conferences and using them to convince commuters that it is just as safe on the subway as it is walking down the street. Logic has its place, but perception is powerful, and so facts and logic are not enough of a context to establish plausibility. As part of our effort at communication we must lend a hand at seeking to show that Christianity is plausible in ways that are perceptible, for social context is a major influence on the conclusions that people draw.

What steps would help us to re-establish a plausibility context? To do this we need to move beyond the obvious generalities such as show compassion and love. I think these are the key, but we really have to figure out how that should work out and how to offer a cup of water in the name of Jesus.

I recommend that church leaders read Gladwell’s book in order to glean insight into communication of the message of

APOLOGETICS AS SPIRITUAL WARFARE

2 Corinthians 10:4-5 4

The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. 5 We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.

An aspect of apologetics that is sometimes overlooked is its role in spiritual warfare. For some time thinking and discussion about spiritual warfare has been limited to exorcism and praying against the influence of the devil on a person’s life or on particular events. All of that is proper and worthy of careful spiritual consideration. But there is more.

1 Timothy 4:1

The Spirit clearly says that in later times some will abandon the faith and follow deceiving spirits and things taught by demons( Peneumasin planois kai didaskaliais daimonion)

Perhaps it is part of our enlightenment mindset, so deeply bred in us all, that we want to appear gracious and loving in our defense of Christianity, and to do so we wish at all times to show respect and honor to those who oppose us. This is proper. However,we must be careful lest we simultaneously be lead to discount the reality that the teaching we are up against is not respectful, but has been viciously constructed for the sole purpose of entrapping people in Satan’s web.

The truly great apologists understood this and taught it. Again I will refer to C.S. Lewis as an example. Spiritual warfare runs through his writings, from works of imagination to the great teaching works.

Lewis’ teaching works are carefully constructed arguments addressed to the skeptic, or at least to the inquiring mind. He, gracious apologist that he was, always assumes that his readers mind is open. However, in Miracles we learn that he believed that reason is in itself a miracle, that reason is not part of nature, but part of supernature. Thus, when the apologist reasons with people, she is addressing that part of the listener which is from beyond this natural world.

In a truly bold stroke Lewis ups the stakes by inserting many of his arguments into his works of imagination as intellectual encounters between a diabolical presence and a soul. In Perelandra Ransom battles with the Un-man for days as Weston carries on a protracted temptation of the Lady. Ransom then realizes that spiritual warfare must, in this case, be more than spiritual, and begins to fight physically. But then, the persona of Weston is allowed to appear, and the dialogue morphs into a moan about the horrors of the afterlife, and ends with Ransom telling him to “Say a child’s prayer if you can’t say a man’s. Repent your sins…”

After almost drowning, Ransom finds that : “Suddenly and irresistibly, like an attack by tanks, that whole view of the universe which Weston (if it were Weston) had so lately preached to him took all but complete possession of his mind. He seemed to see that he had been living all his life in a world of illusion.”

Here Lewis suddenly speaks of that part of apologetics as spiritual warfare that we would rather not discuss, the warfare of Satan for the soul of the apologist. In an essay he once confessed that after presenting the case for Christianity in an open forum, it was not infrequent that he would himself have doubts. But, he knew the source of those doubts. Ransom hears a noise coming up through the hole in the floor of the cave. “He fixed his eyes upon the dark opening from which he had himself just emerged. And then—‘I thought as much,’ said Ransom. And sure enough, out from the hole crawled the Un-man, and the battle, begun already in Ransom’s mind, begins again and continues until Ransom conquers.

I could go on and talk about the encounters in Narnia, especially between the Witch – arguing that what is present is the only reality and that everything else is mere fancy -- and Jill, Scrubb (Eustace), the Prince and the sturdy Puddleglum whose words “had a rousing affect” and brought the children out of their daze. (The Silver Chair)

But the greatest presentation of spiritual warfare is of course The Screwtape Letters. What is tempting (pun intended) about Screwtape is to think of it only as an imaginative portrayal of our inner moral dialogue. But Lewis makes clear in his introduction that he does believe in a real devil. Thus, this moral discourse truly does make us aware of the devil’s devices. And these devices are not only moral, but are aimed to keep the soul from faith.

The point here is Lewis’ conviction that apologetics does not occur in some sort of intellectual vacuum. Theoretically, the on-going dialogue of science should occur in such a vacuum, that is, devoid of prejudice, self-interest, prejudice, or emotion. Apologetics in an enlightenment framework may mistakenly be framed this way, as simply an exchange, carried on by gentle people. In reality however apologetics is anything but, for in every apologetic encounter the eternal destiny of people is at stake, and because of that four parties are present: the apologist, the one with whom the apologist is in dialogue with, the Holy Spirit, and Satan. The arguments that the apologist is seeking to counter are not simply arguments of well intentioned people, they are diabolical arguments, designed for eternal harm.

Thus, for us to do apologetics in this time requires us to again learn the discipline of spiritual warfare. To learn prayer, to learn discernment, and to learn the power of holiness. This is our calling.

Response on Atonement

Thanks to NewWord and Jonathan for their responses to the blog on cruciform apologetics. I remember how positively I responded when I first read Gustav Aulen’s Christus Victor and his defense of what had been known as “the ransom theory” of the atonement which Aulen dubbed “the classic theory.” I believe there are real strengths in this theory and that there is New Testament grounding for the assertion of ransom, victory and liberation being results of the cross.

However, to see the ransom theory as the key to understanding the cross leaves several questions/issues unanswered. First, Anselm’s question “Why the God-Man” in my opinion is not adequately answered. The original iteration of the ransom theory perhaps answers this better than later modifications. Adam’s sin gave Satan ownership of the human race. Out of love Christ appeared as a man and was offered to the Devil as a ransom. However, the Devil did not realize that this was the eternal Son who would overcome death. So, the ransom was paid by Christ dying, but the victory was won as Christ rose from the dead. Those who have read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe immediately recognize this scenario. In this form we can see that it took the God-Man to win the victory. Only he could be perfect and it is his perfection that allows him to rise from the dead.

But, the idea of “tricking” the Devil has not found a lot of acceptance in the past few hundred years. And if the deception is eliminated the encompassing power of the ransom motif is weakened, for why would the Devil accept a payment that would have such catastrophic results for his nefarious kingdom?

If “paying the Devil” is left behind, then the second question is simply this. What is it about the cross that brings about victory or liberation? It is simply not enough to say that liberation happened, there has to be some kind of grounding in cause and effect. If a ransom was not paid to the Devil, and if the wrath of God was not satisfied (as in substitutionary atonement), then what happened? What, precisely was it that occurred at the cross that set us free?

The third question builds on the previous two. What are we set free from? Does the cross set us free from sin? From guilt? From feeling crummy about ourselves? From capitalism? From … what? Can this question be answered without a really solid answer to the first two questions?

This brings us back to substitutionary atonement. I agree with Jonathan, that each theory of the atonement provides a window through which the atonement may be viewed. Thus, the New Testament does speak of the defeat of the Devil and the destruction of his works. Very powerfully we are told that we are ransomed and set free. And this kind of affirmation can be said of all the other theories. However, the work of theology is to find the central truths which bring all else together in haromony. This harmony of the other viewpoints of the atonement is the truth captured in the Greek word uper – “for, on behalf of." The concept of substitution rests on this word. So Paul simply states in Romans 5:8 "Christ died for us."

Finally, I would like to comment on the thought that talking about the cross creates the impression that Christ is absent to the unchurched. To me this is not true at all. It is the cross alone that enables me to understand that God is neither silent nor absent. How can we talk of a God who is “present” but who is not present in the horrors of the twentieth century and of the opening decade of this century? Of what relevance is a God who is not present to the private pain that each individual feels?

This is the good news of the cross. Christ is the Man of Sorrows. In Christ God has come and taken all our suffering on himself at Calvary and overcome it at the empty grave. How much more present to the people of the world could he possibly be? This is why Paul said: "For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.” 1 Corinthians 2:2. Truly there is nothing else to know or proclaim.

Healing

A large section of A.B.Simpson's vision was "Christ for the body," which means that Jesus Christ brings healing to his people. At our General Assembly we close with a Lord's Supper/healing service. Recently I received this testimony about healing at our July 2008 General Assembly. As part of "rebirthing Simpson's Vision I share it here.

To Dr. Pyles:
I need to tell you something amazing that happened to me at General Assembly during the communion healing service. I have been a migraine sufferer for 10 years. As you were asking people to stand who had on going or long term physical problems I was to timid to stand. I knew deep down inside that this was my moment to be totally healed from this ailment. As people were praying all over the room God touched me. I have been headache and migraine free since GA. No more medication. No more trips to emergency for IV treatment. No more long, extended isolation in bed. I have been totally free! Praise God.

LeeAnne Lloyd
Immanuel Alliance Church
Peterborough, Ontario

Cruciform Apologetics

I believe that, along with a powerful understanding and presentation of the resurrection, we must have a firm grip on the doctrine of substitutionary atonement. Some current evangelical writers find this teaching to be out of sync with post-modern times. The concept of God needing sacrifice is abhorrent to them as it was to the fathers of liberalism in the 19th century. However, for the apologist, substitutionary atonement speaks to the following objections to the Christian message.

First, substitutionary atonement speaks to the objection that it is a logical contradiction that a loving God who is infinite would create a world in which there is suffering.

The doctrine of substitutionary atonement teaches us that evil is not an inherent trait in creation. God did create a world that is good. Evil arises within creation by free choice.

The presence of evil is abhorrent to God. However,the elimination of evil requires a very deep response from God. Here the depth and complexity of Christianity must be grasped, for it is so easy to retreat into what Lewis, in his drinking analogy, called “Christianity and water”. No, Lewis is saying, you must take your Christianity straight.

Evil produces actions that violate God’s holiness, righteousness and justice, that is, God’s core nature. Evil actions harm people, the creation and the evil person himself. To overcome evil God himself had to become involved in the fullness of his Trinitarian life. This involvement went to the length of joining with humanity in the Incarnation, and satisfying the justice of God in death.

Second, substitutionary atonement speaks to the objection that we suffer and God could help but doesn’t. Substitutionary atonement removes the god who somehow is distant from our suffering, unable or unwilling to intervene to stop it. I believe God is grieved, that when Jesus wept he showed the sorrow and suffering of God for all our suffering. But God the Father did not stand by somewhere out there and watch disease and famine spread and wars be waged.

The LORD said, I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt. I have heard them crying out because of their slave drivers, and I am concerned about their suffering. So I have come down to rescue them…” Exodus 3:7, 8

Christ came to rescue us. Christ took on himself our grief and our sin so that it might in the end be swallowed up in his victory. I would propose that the concept of Christus Victor is totally empty, simply a metaphor (for what?) without substitutionary atonement. But,Christus Victor is a powerful reality as we see Jesus our Pascal Lamb, who was on the cross in my place, who overcame the grave so that I also might participate in his life, and be given everlasting life. Truly, Christ meets me in my suffering and overcomes it.

Finally, substitutionary atonement speaks to the re-definition of evil and guilt. The sacrifice of Christ Jesus is the reason our guilt is removed. This culture has listened to Freud and believed him when he taught that there is no real guilt. If there is no God, then it does follow that there is no guilt. And, if there is no guilt there is also no evil. But people know better. The category of evil inserts itself into every morning newspaper, and sociopaths are the only ones who do not groan under the weight of wrongs done to others. The forgiveness of God does not come simply because “that is his job.” No,to overcome evil sin must be dealt with, and sin can only be dealt with by God himself taking sin on himself, which he has done in the sacrificial death of Christ at the cross. Because this sacrifice is final and complete we can truly come to the throne of grace for help in time of need.

This is why many, and I think rightly so, consider John 3:16 to be the key verse of the Bible: for God so loved the world that he gave his only son that whosoever believes on him might not perish but have everlasting life.

God responded to our plight because he loves us, and he did not respond with a metaphor. He responded by entering our pain, taking the guilt of our sin upon himself, and by washing our guilt away with his blood in a sea of mercy, forever. Because of the cross we can understand and experience, as Malcome Muggeridge somewhere said, that the universe is awash in love.

Ultimately then, we must not think for one moment that an effective 21st century apology to Canada will hide the cross, or come to the cross later, after many warm things are said. Rather, we must understand that a 21st century apology to Canada must be cruciform, shaped by the cross and cross centered.