religion

So . . . You're Spiritual but not Religious?

Caroline Ferdinandsen — Sun, 28 Aug 2011 10:58:00 -0700

So you’ve got problems with Church—the one with the capital C?

You grew up sitting in various pews, but after getting a dose of higher education, you’re not really into anything that smacks of organized religion. After studying the Crusades, learning what jihad really means, and reading ten bloggers rant about the Pope’s pedophile cover-up, you figure that all of these manmade institutions aren’t credible. The Church—any church—is just a nasty, manmade construct designed to give uneducated, needy people some scaffolding.

On the other hand, you also think that God probably exists, and Jesus and the Buddha and Mother Teresa were onto something good. You don’t want to adopt the atheist’s combative edge or the agnostic’s arrogant philosophizing, so you snuggle down into the cozy netherworld of Spiritual Living. It’s a one-size-fits-all accommodating worldview fed by books like Eat, Pray, Love and The Secret. Spiritual Living lets you pray for wisdom or wear cool T-shirts or even go to silent retreats where you can stare at the ocean for a long time. It’s tapas-style dining where you order tasty little samples of religion’s best ideas—without the prix fixe risk. Come to think of it, if you don’t trust the chef to choose for you, it might be better to pick a different restaurant altogether.

To the complete rejecters of the spiritual life, I applaud you, at the very least, for not being lukewarm on faith, a stance that Jesus couldn’t tolerate. You run your bathwater icy cold, and you bear the discomfort with a certain measure of pride. But to those who love constantly fiddling with the temperature, let me give you a few reasons why historical, orthodox Christianity is worth a second look.

Showing up at a local church is healthier than staying at home.

When you tell me you can pray, worship, serve, and grow nearer to God in your own way and on your own time, does it really happen? Do men and women, who are designed for fraternal loyalty and the fellowship of others, really have the self-discipline and encouragement to pursue faith in isolation?

The style of church, meeting times, and congregation may seem unorthodox, but that is not the point. You don’t have to attend a traditional, wear-a-dress, Sunday-morning congregation. But an authentic Christian believer doesn’t go for too long without craving the mutual encouragement and accountability of others in the faith. You are sure to tell me about an example or two—maybe even in your own life—when faith was sustained without community, but I will probably be skeptical. Tiny fringe groups who aren’t tethered to the historical faith are doomed to drift here and there, vulnerable both to error and narcissism.

As long as people are in charge, the Church will mess up. Get over it.

If you’re waiting for the Church’s track record to get better before you sign up, don’t bother. If you recognize that God uses the Church in spite of its members’ faults, you’ll step inside, thankful that your own jackass tendencies won’t disqualify you either. The Christian church throughout history has let everyone through its doors—the sick, lonely, rich, educated, ghetto-dwelling, insane, arrogant, beautiful, and homely. If you weren’t welcome at your last church, then try again. That particular congregation had it wrong and will figure out their mistake before long. Another congregation might be further along, so don’t give up so easily.

The Church is a hospital where you get to be both a doctor and a patient.

When you join with what the Bible calls “the Body of Christ,” you have access to a radically different kind of HMO (Hope Maintenance Organization). On your healthiest days, God calls you to restore and love; on your sickest days, you have others tending to your bedside. People who ditch the church have cancelled their spiritual healthcare plan.

The Bible is precise in its instruction to the Christian churches. Its members love and restore, offer correction and spiritual rehabilitation, care and are cared for—all in a tightly interconnected (and even mysterious) web of love. The Church becomes the hands and feet of Jesus Christ himself. Those who have made spirituality a one-man show can neither love or be loved by any person besides themselves.

Orthodox Christianity changes people from the inside out, not the other way around.

Every other major religion, including the Judaism from which Christianity was born, requires external obligations of perfection and discipline: be, do, obey, perform. The gospel of Jesus Christ offers us something entirely different: a supernatural grace that carries us from death to life. This transformation causes our spirit to crave obedience and good works in a way that makes little sense to the rest of the world.

Participating in random, spiritual acts like focused breathing, charitable acts, or positive thinking relies on either willpower or manipulating biology—precisely why people like it so much. It produces a veneer of good will and well being that we are likely to find among secular humanists and do-gooders. It’s the solution that takes us only half way, by giving us a semblance of peace in this life, but with little power to affect the human soul or eternity.

The Kingdom of God is bigger than your individual needs.

In the giant narrative that is God’s story, God is the main character. Our attraction to Spiritual Living is borne out of our fascination with having the leading role, writing our lines every morning depending on our mood and personal whims. In another essay, I wrote that we must let God write the script and cast his own play—that having seven billion screenwriters is a bad idea. (“If we had it our way, I can only imagine the freakish movies full of nothing but leads. Wedding scenes with a hundred brides and no guests, funerals with nothing but corpses.”)

Smart people like to be in control, and submitting to a God that Christians frequently call Lord might feel like ancient feudalism. At some point, however, you will be broken beyond belief, unable to fix yourself. It will eventually happen when your own desires lead you to spiritual desperation. And if you still don’t believe me, then you haven’t reached the end of your life yet when everyone succumbs to the universal fate we call death. Death cannot be fixed. It’s one plot line you can’t write out of your play.

So, these five reasons may seem paradoxically selfish. On one hand, becoming part of orthodox Christianity asks you to give it all away while, on the other hand, it gives you everything back. I suppose that’s one of the great mysteries of my Christian faith, where its doctrine includes crazy reversals like how King Jesus was actually a humble servant and when I die, I live.

If you decide to simply be spiritual—and you do reject orthodox Christianity—at least keep your eyes wide open while you’re wandering the roads. They lead to nowhere in particular toward nothing specific for reasons not too clear. But don’t panic: Jesus and his Church won’t be far if ever you should change your mind.

Joining the Dodos

Rick Bundschuh — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 11:35:52 -0700

Apparently I and those of my ilk are headed for extinction. At least that is what a group of mathematicians have determined for the “religious” folks of a number of European countries.

Frankly, this doesn’t really bother me. In fact I kind of wonder why it has taken so long?

The stiff and unimaginative way that we Christians have “done church” often makes me wonder why we have any market share at all. After all, boredom and church are many times found intertwined in the same bed.

But while we Christians have been dithering about and majoring on the minors, those who make a buck entertaining and amusing us have been getting better and better at their job.

Not that it is the job of the church to entertain or amuse (although I do think that we have hardly lifted the veil on the immensely entertaining and hilarious nature of God) we Christians have been mandated to offer something to the world that can’t be found anywhere else, something so authentic, so wondrous and so in cahoots with mankind’s deepest longings that it can’t be ignored.

And of course if we are reading the Scripture it is pretty obvious that we should expect to be a minority. We were told that the world would not be our friend (John 15:8) and Christ made it clear that faith would be a lonely journey along a narrow path. (Matthew 7:14) Poor Elijah lived in a culture that so abandoned God it made him think he was the last of the spiritual dodo birds.

It may not be such a bad thing for religion to go extinct. Maybe it has inoculated our culture in such a way that it has made people somewhat impervious to the real message of the Gospel.

Perhaps this is just what God needs to happen in order to break through, fresh, dynamic and wildly unique in a world that has medicated and amused itself into numbness.

I will give Pascal, that witty observer of all these kind of things the last word; “God alone is man's true good, and since man abandoned him it is a strange fact that nothing in nature has been found to take his place."

What I Didn't Learn About Manhood From Esquire

Nick Bogardus — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 13:08:20 -0700

[This originally appeared on the Mars Hill Church blog]

I was originally assigned the task of looking at advice on how to be a man from a men’s magazine. Problem is, there wasn't any.

Esquire's June/July 2010 issue was called How to Be a Man. Appropriate. With a title that declarative and a tagline of “Man at His Best,” I was anxious to comb through it to see what they had to say about manhood. With a base circulation of 700,000 and competition like GQ, Maxim, and Details, Esquire is arguably one of the largest and most influential men’s magazines in the world. They've got to know what they're talking about, right? Esquire’s website describes their audience as "the affluent and successful man." Should be exactly what I'm shooting for here.

With Irony As Our Guide

Here’s the twist – and I’m putting it up front because that’s where I found it in the magazine – according to Esquire, you can’t define manhood or what it means to be a man. Here’s what the Editor-In-Chief wrote in his introduction to the issue:

There are no guides to manhood. Not really. We try on selves – constantly. We see traits exhibited by other men and we emulate them. We learn by example and trial. We keep trying. Those of us who’ve had fathers who were engaged in our lives always measure ourselves by them…Those of us – like our cover subject – whose fathers were absent develop in reaction to that absence and either triumph or collapse, or both. [Manhood is] a huge topic, impossible to be definitive about, and not all our advice will work. But look, we men are always gonna do stupid stuff. It’s who we are, and how we learn.

So, 20 pages in, and we're already told that the thing this issue sets out to be, a guide for manhood, cannot exist. The trouble is, if you don't define something, you certainly can’t issue a guide of how to do it, and so we’re left with the orphans running the orphanage. More precisely, the magazine is left with manhood being defined by what you individually consume, from clothes to technology to women.

The Blind Leading the Blind

Nonetheless, they proceed (boldly or foolishly, I don't know) to fill the pages of the guide-that-isn't-a-guide on manhood with the following:

Pg. 50: An essay about making more money instead of saving it, based on this explanation: “When I’m on my deathbed, I want to look back on a life of struggle and jihad. And I want my kids to know what work is.”
Pg. 52: Threesome etiquette.
Pg. 54: An answer to the question, “I heard a rumor long ago that if you simultaneously flushed all the toilets in a large public building, like a school, the plumbing would fail or burst under the pressure. True?”
Pp. 57-72: "The qualities we appreciate most in the places where we drink.” Basically, a 15-page bar guide.
Pp. 77-78: The essential $2,000 blazer and suits.
Pp. 87-88: An essay about our culture’s current infatuation with the ’80s in entertainment that ends with a call for responsibility to ensure that the next decade doesn’t end up with the same greed and phoniness.
Pp. 90-92: Car of the Year nominees.
Pp. 94-102: A story about ex-Congressman Eric Massa, who, according to the story, was brought down by clumsily trying to manipulate the media for his own gain. He comes across as bumbling and shameless. (How does this fit into the original "How to be a Man" theme? Maybe "How Not to be a Man"?)
Pg. 107: Two good questions – greatest example of someone stepping up as a man and what you’d wish you’d known at 18 – followed by three mediocre, 100-word answers.
Pp. 109-115: The cover story on Tom Cruise. According to the story, Tom was raised by a single mother and the main lesson he learned from his father was formulated in a question Tom asked himself when his father was on his deathbed, How can I not be that guy? Most of the lessons Cruise shares come from that lesson/question and are generally nice, but nothing pointed.
Pp. 116-125: "The Vital Organs: A guide to keeping your brain, heart, and balls healthy."
Pp. 127-129: "How to Raise Men." I had some hope for this article but, again, it contains more reflections on raising sons, where the writer explains why certain male traits are either overrated or underrated: tribalism and insolence (underrated), drive and optimism (overrated), etc. Ultimately it’s an entertaining article and you can tell the writer loves his sons and wants to do his best, but it's hard to see how someone can leave the article and understand how to raise men better.
Pg. 130: An installment of Esquire's trademark series, "What I’ve Learned," this time, with Jon Favreau. Most of it was banal life lessons like “It's the struggle that makes you who you are” and “You have to create the quiet to be able to listen to the very faint voice of your intuition,” or random observations like “Kids don’t want to be guitar players anymore. They want to be DJs,” and “You tend to gravitate to the things you grew up with.”
Pp. 133-137: A story about Shaq. Shaq talks about himself in the third person and says this about his ex-wife producing a show for VH1 called Basketball Wives, “It's all marketing. All marketing for me. It keeps my name out there. I like it.”
Pp. 150-153: "How a Man Ages…Or Should." Again, hoping I’ll get some tips on being man, I’m left with information about what I should be consuming during different decades of my life: men should graduate from Grand Theft Auto to Call of Duty at 24, from ordering what everyone else is having to a gin martini at 26, from renting to owning a tux at 27, and from ogling much younger women to ogling slightly older but still incredibly hot women at 53.
Pg. 170: "15 Things Not To Do Before You Die." #3. Bunt in softball. #4. Start a fan club for yourself on Facebook. Noted.

One hundred and seventy pages later, I don’t know how to be a man. I learned some general life lessons and heard some nice stories about Tom Cruise and A.J. Jacobs' kids, but I haven’t left the How to be a Man issue with any tangible instruction as to how to be a better man, let alone a better husband or father.

Misguided Guys

The truth is, as Granger pointed out at the beginning the issue, culture has ceased being able to define manhood, which makes creating a guide for it, well, misguided.

But the thing is, the fact that they would nevertheless promote the issue as a guide is revealing. Beneath culture’s ambiguity, men’s questions still lie tangled in video game controllers, bar tabs, and browser tabs of porn. As Esquire knows, men are built to learn and share knowledge. The problem is - as this issue illustrates clearly - if men go to the culture for the answer to the question of manhood, the answer is geared around consumption. Moreover, if there is no instruction, and young men aren't learning from older men, there is no accumulated knowledge or collective wisdom, and each man is left to fend for himself, making the avoidable mistakes thousands of men have made before him, as he tries to define a hyper-relative sense of masculinity. The How to Be a Man issue is a harrowing example of that.

The rise of the Omega Male is the culmination of years, maybe decades, of unanswered questions. It only makes sense that if a question goes unanswered for long enough, people will stop asking or caring.

Go Boldly – with Wisdom – to Jesus

Mark Driscoll put it well when he said that men need to know who they’re to protect, who they’re to defend, what truth is, what righteousness is, and what justice is. These are questions that resonate with every man and that God answers from the beginning of the Bible to the end, from the Garden of Eden in Genesis to the wedding feast in Revelation.

It takes a certain boldness to want to ask and answer those questions because their answers are costly, and it's not just a desire for sentences in the imperative. A man isn't going to be able to base his life on what he can buy with a credit card. For those of you brave enough to be asking the question of what it means to be a man, and selfless enough to commit to pursuing that, let’s look at what one passage says about Jesus.

Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.
Philippians 2:5-8

Jesus was in authority as part of the Trinitarian God but submitted to the authority of the Father and was obedient in coming to earth to take responsibility for the sin of His bride, the Church. Those four verses are but a glimpse of what truth, righteousness, justice, defending, and protecting look like. While our culture remains largely silent on the topic, we need more men to look to Jesus (cf: 1:25) and the Bible for answers to the question of what it means to be a man. For more on masculinity, as based on identity in Christ and not Call of Duty, check out these sermon series from the Mars Hill media library:

Confessing The Sins of The Church and Why Church Is Boring

Nick Bogardus — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 15:07:25 -0700

Two more great quotes from Why We Love The Church. I wish I could post every line I've highlighted so far in this book but I think I'd probably drive you all crazy. Just do us both a favor and read this book. This first excerpt is from co-author Kevin DeYoung.

[In speaking of the current trend among many younger Christians of confessing the past sins of the church.]

""When a man over forty tries to repent of the sins of England and to love her enemies, " writes [C.S.] Lewis, "he is attempting something costly; for he was brought up to certain patriotic sentiments which cannot be moritified without a struggle. But an educated man who is now in his twenties usually has no such sentiment to mortify. In art, in literature, in politics, he has been, ever since he can remember, one of an angry and restless minority; he has drunk in almost with with his mother's milk a distrust of English statesmen and a contempt for the manners, pleasures, and enthusiasm of his less-educated fellow countrymen."

Younger generations today face these same dengers with regard to the church. In confessing all the sins of the church, we have everything to gainand nothing to mortify. This isn't to suggest that the church hasn't gotten things dreadfully wrong, but it is to suggest that slavery and the Crusades are no the things thirtysomething Americans are likely to get wrong today. We would do well to listen to Lewis from seven decades ago: "The communal sins which they should be told to repent are those of their own age and class - its contempt for the uneducated, its readiness to suspect evil, its self-righteous provocations of public obloquy, its breaches of the Fifth Commandment. Of these sins I have heard nothing among them. Till I do, I must think their candour towards the national enemy a rather inexpensive virtue.""

----

This excerpt is curteousy of co-author Ted Kluck.

'Church isn't boring because we're not showing enough film clips, or because we play an organ instead of guitar. It's boring because we neuter it of its importance. Too often we treat our spiritual lives like the round of golf used to open George Barna's Revolution. At the end of my life, I want my friends and family to remember me as someone who battled for the Gospel, who tried to mortify sin in my life, who found hard for life, and who contended earnestly for the faith. Not just a nice guy who occasionally noticed the splendor of the mountains God created, while otherwise just trying to enjoy myself, manage my schedule, and work on my short game."

HT: Team Pyro