Intimate Theology
Pursuing God: studying, believing, obeying, observing, absorbing, proving and resembling Jesus Christ through God's manifest, living, active Word. In other words, intimately practice before publicly preaching - Matthew 5:13-16; 22:37; Col 3:14-17; 2 Tim 2:10-13, 15; 1 John 2
Tuesday, December 31, 2024
Rejoice in The New Life and Years Ahead!
Friday, November 29, 2024
How to Get Through the Next Four Years
“The nonstop news cycle will be crazy. You don’t have to be.”
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Wednesday, October 16, 2024
Church Disappointment Is Multilayered
Church Disappointment Is Multilayered
October 11, 2024
Interview by Harvest Prude
Like many in America I’ve reached my own pivot point in my
walk with Christ and membership with His body the Church. There are so many
layers to the glacial disappointments I’ve experienced in the church, outside
the church, and in myself so a serious in-depth examination is worth the time,
as apologist Lisa Fields demonstrates for us. Here goes:
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"Why are people leaving the church or their faith behind? Some
answers boil down to platitudes, like a supposed desire to pursue a sinful
lifestyle. But apologist Lisa Fields has found the reasons to be much more
complex.
Fields, founder of the Jude 3 Project, which equips Black
Christians to know what they believe and why, has sat across from many people
leaving the church. During these “exit interviews,” she’s discovered that
somewhere in nearly every story lurks the specter of personal disappointment
with God or Christianity. She addresses this thorny issue in a new book, When
Faith Disappoints: The Gap Between What We Believe and What We Experience.
CT national political correspondent Harvest Prude spoke with
Fields about walking with God in the midst of a broken world and our own
disappointments.
Something from your book that really struck me is
when you talk about unanswered prayers. How do we navigate times in our faith
when we’ve sought out God for something and we feel overlooked because he
doesn’t seem to answer?
For me, when God doesn’t answer my prayers, I have to have a
real conversation with him about what he has not answered. My relationship with
God is very open. There are times where I’m angry, and I have to get those
feelings out of my mouth and out of my heart—because when I don’t voice my
frustrations, I end up filled with bitterness and resentment.
There’s a quote from Tim Keller where he says—and
I’m paraphrasing—that if we knew what God knows, we would want our prayers
answered the way he answers them. I’ve had this experience in my own life. I
remember a time when I wanted to connect with a particular person, a major donor
who could help my ministry. But I didn’t have enough extra income to get to New
York City, where he was based. I remember being frustrated, feeling like there
were all these obstacles to networking and getting ahead. Only later did I
learn that this person had just gotten arrested for embezzlement.
Sometimes, in your disappointment, you realize that God is
letting you see things that you wouldn’t see otherwise or protecting you from
dangers that you didn’t know about. In the book, I talk about a man I had been
dating for almost four years. In the middle of our relationship, he got married
to a woman he had been involved with behind the scenes for most of the time.
This other woman had been married herself during most of the affair.
That whole time, I had been praying that God would make this
man my husband. But I didn’t realize that he was actually protecting me from
someone who had poor character, despite being a preacher. In the middle of my
disappointment, I voiced my frustration. Then I gave myself time to ask what
God might be trying to protect me from. What different direction was he trying
to push me in?
In the book you talk about doing exit interviews
with people who are leaving the church. As a reporter, I cover the intersection
of faith and politics. How do you think political conversations have impacted
people’s relationship with faith?
I think the political climate in America has really impacted
how people there think about faith. Christians often go to rhetorical and
ideological extremes in the name of faith. Recently, I noticed a group of faith
leaders on social media saying that
if you’re voting for Kamala Harris, you can’t be a Christian. Rhetoric like
that, I think, creates this confusion gap for many in our culture, where they
don’t understand what we’re talking about. Because the Bible doesn’t tell you
which political candidates to vote for. In fact, it doesn’t even speak about
voting in any conventional way, because the world of the biblical writers was a
world ruled by kings and emperors.
When there’s a gap between what the Bible says and what some
believers claim it says, for political reasons, it makes a lot of people want
nothing to do with the church, especially when political leaders hijack the
church for their own gain. And it makes believers look like hypocrites, which
creates a problem for those who want to be part of something genuine.
In your conversations, how often do you find that
people leaving the church are struggling with its failures and flaws? And how
often, by contrast, do they seem motivated more by a desire to live without
moral restrictions or guilt?
I think both answers can be correct, sometimes at the same
time. Church disappointment can have so many layers. Perhaps we’re disappointed
with God. Or we’re disappointed with God’s people, or people in general. And
then there are certain things we just desire and want to do in our flesh.
There’s always a multiplicity of factors. When I’ve done exit
interviews with people leaving the church, I’ve seen that it’s never just one
thing. It’s layers of things that rock them.
If you could design a toolkit of practices for
being a faithful witness to those who are struggling with the church or their
faith, what would you include?
The first thing I’d encourage is to live out what you believe
as best you can. And that doesn’t mean perfection, but it does mean
progression. If I hold to the Bible being the Word of God, then I obey the Word
to the best of my ability.
Because we all fall short, though, we have to be honest about
when this happens. If I portray myself as living a sinless life, I’m actually
undermining the authority of Scripture, because Scripture tells us we’re born
and shaped in iniquity. Living out our faith means acknowledging our sins and
committing to repent of them.
Another essential habit is loving people well. In The Message
Bible paraphrase, there’s a passage in Philippians that I post every
Valentine’s Day, where Paul is saying, don’t just “love much” but “[love] well”
(1:9–11). That really struck me when I read it years ago, because there’s a
difference between loving somebody much and loving somebody well. I want to be
someone who tries to love people well. That means listening attentively and
holding space for their doubts and frustrations.
Third, I think we need to practice being merciful. Like Jude
says, “Be merciful to those who doubt” (v. 22). Remember what it’s like to have
doubts of your own, and treat others who doubt accordingly.
And finally, remember to pray with people. With my own
friends, I’ve been enjoying a beautiful season of us praying together. I can’t
give any prescription on how to do it right. It’s not like we’re doing anything
grand. We simply share our frustrations; I pray, they pray, and healing has
taken place. And it’s not like my friends are well-known spiritual leaders. But
that’s just a reminder that you don’t need somebody to be a spiritual leader
for their prayers to make a difference in your life.
You write about the importance of forgiveness to
any process of healing from faith disappointment. How do we respond well when a
fellow believer has hurt us or broken our trust?
In my own life, I was having trouble trusting someone who had
sinned against me and claimed to have repented. My therapist said, “I’m not
asking you to trust them. I’m asking you to trust God.” And that has helped me
a lot.
I enter into relationships that have been broken, knowing that
the person, being human, could break that trust again. But I’m aware that I’ve
probably caused hurts myself and I could do it again. And because I want grace,
I know I need to give it as well.
That doesn’t mean it’s easy. I spoke earlier about the man who
cheated on me during our relationship. It took me years to get to this point,
but by now I’ve seen him many times since he got married. By the time he
apologized, I was able to accept his apology. I was able to trust that it was
sincere because I had done a work in my heart to forgive him.
Sometimes, you have to give yourself time. Years ago, I read a
book on forgiveness. It said there are occasions when we tell people we’ve
forgiven them too abruptly because we don’t know the full impact of their
actions. If we announce forgiveness too soon, we’re only forgiving the initial
impact when we don’t yet know all the layers. How will these actions affect me
a year from now? I might have to forgive again, but at least I’m choosing
forgiveness. I’m choosing not to treat you like you owe me because you hurt me.
When Christians face disappointment, you argue, a
sort of syncretism can creep in. They might seek out New Age practices, for
instance, if they feel that God has failed them. How should we approach
apologetics in a culture marked by intense interest in alternative modes of
spirituality?
Before criticizing the what in these
alternative approaches, try to find out the why. Perhaps you know
someone who uses crystals or consults horoscopes. Well, what’s behind that?
Figuring out the why will help you get to the root of the
issue.
Maybe this person was going through a difficult time and heard
from a friend about something that could help manage the stress. And so, okay,
so that’s how you got into that. Maybe this person had tried prayer and
Christian faith but, for whatever reason, didn’t find them adequate. You can
help someone walk through these deeper issues. For me, this is a far better
approach than simply saying, “Don’t use crystals—they’re demonic.”
Love is a better draw than fear. As a pastor’s kid, I used to
go to youth conferences around the country, and there was always an element of
fear in the way we were encouraged to give our lives to Christ. And so
everybody gave their life to Christ at every event—the same people every year.
I “became” a Christian probably a million times as a teenager because I was
scared.
But when life disappointed me, that fear wasn’t what was
holding me. It was God’s love. I believe" in a real hell, and I believe that
Jesus is the only way to eternal life, but we can communicate that with love,
rather than fear, as the motivator. Because the fear will always wear off. Fear
will never be your keeper.
Source: https://www.christianitytoday.com/2024/10/lisa-fields-when-faith-disappoints-church-hurt/
Monday, July 8, 2024
The Mature Way
I laugh now, but a few days ago I felt needlessly angry after reading a differing translation of 1 Corinthians 16:13, a passage that always encourages me. The Apostle Paul’s conclusion to his tremendous first letter to the early church in Corinth is inspirational. In the NASB (New American Standard Bible), the passage is rendered “…act like men…” In the NIV, the verse goes like this: “…be men of courage…”
In the age of scrutinized and deconstructed masculinity there
is no better time to take a better look at this passage. But like always,
context is king so remember to read the entire letter as it provides fabulous
context to Paul’s conclusion.
With a little help from New Testament Greek scholar Dr. Bill
Mounce, let’s pick this one apart and put it back together.
“ἀνδρίζομαι
(andrizomai) occurs in the New Testament only here. Its etymology is clearly
from the root ανδρ, from which we get ἀνήρ,
“man,” predominantly (if not exclusively) used of males. Other cognates listed
by BDAG include ἀνδρεῖος (“pert. to being manly”,
ἀνδρείως (“in a manly i.e.
brave way”), and ἀνδροφόνος
(“murderer, lit. ‘man-slayer’”) do not occur in the New Testament. BDAG is
quick to emphasize that words formed with the root ἀνδρ “show[s] erosion of emphasis on maleness.”
And so, for example, in their definition of ἀνδρεῖος, they include “heroic deeds
worthy of a brave person,” and “ do many heroic deeds, of famous women.”
Of course, it is in these areas of interpretation that one
must be careful of how you use BDAG. A quick perusal of BDAG’s entry on ἀνήρ meaning “equiv. to τὶς someone, a person” easily
illustrates this. A quick perusal of the cited verses — Lk 9:38; 19:2; J
1:30; Ro 4:8 (Ps 32:2); Lk 5:18; Ac 6:11 — shows an interpretive position that
I do not feel is appropriate for a dictionary. For example, Lk 9:38 is, “And
behold, a man from the crowd cried out, “Teacher, I beg you to look at my
son, for he is my only child.” What in the text requires the “man” not to be
the father, hence, male?
ἀνδρίζομαι
occurs in the LXX 24 times, almost always in what must have been a common
phrase, ἀνδρίζου καὶ ἴσχυε,
translated by the ESV almost uniformly as “Be strong and courageous.”
Unfortunately, I do not have the resources here to look into all the
secular usage of the term.
But I want to get back to the point. Etymologically, it is
clear that the word originally meant, “act manly” (TDNT), “be a man,” hence the
ESV and other translations (“act like men,” NASB; “act like a man,” HCBS; “quit
you like men,” KJV). Obviously, it doesn’t mean that the person should be
a male — that is not something that can be exhorted. Rather, the person should
strive to the qualities that historically have been connected with maleness,
which in this context is courage and strength. And hence most modern
translations: “be courageous” (NRSV, NIV, NLT); “show courage” (NET); “be
brave” (NKJV, NJB).
In his commentary in the NIGTC, Thiselton comments that “the
translation of ἀνδρίζομαι
has probably become unnecessarily sensitive,” and points out that ἀνδρίζομαι has two semantic
oppositions. In this context, it is not male vs female but rather “stands
in contrast with childish ways, citing conceptual parallels
such as 1 Cor 13:11 and translates, ”show mature courage” (page 1336). Garland,
in his BECNT commentary, prefers the Old Testament background cited above,
that Paul is calling all the Corinthians to be “strong and courageous” (page
766).
This is one of those situations where, from a translation
standpoint, the question is whether the word still contains its etymological
emphasis, or whether in this case BDAG is right and the word “show[s] erosion
of emphasis on maleness”; in other words, the meaning of ἀνδρίζομαι has moved beyond it
etymological beginnings.
It also is one of those translation issues where the
committee’s policies come into play. Does your translation philosophy tend
toward the words or toward the meaning?
Personally, I do not see anything in the biblical context or
the usage of the word that requires a male orientation. Either Thiselton's or
Garland's position is feasible; I tend toward Garlands because ἀνδρίζομαι was part of such a
stock phrase in the LXX. But whatever it nuances may be, it is certainly a call
for a mature courage, and that is always a good word.”
As I get older, it makes more sense that being a man of
courage requires acute alertness, firmness, maturity, strength, and love. I
have learned that anything done apart from love is the greatest way to lose
influence and a bad reputation. I think part of the problem, personally and
culturally, is possessing a skewed understanding of love (I’d dare admit
childish even). The Apostle does close out the sentence with urging them to “do
everything in love.” So brothers AND sisters, let us commit to growing up.
Source: https://www.billmounce.com/monday-with-mounce/“act-men”-1-cor-16-13
Friday, July 5, 2024
Is Sin an Active or Passive Agent in Our Body?
About a month ago I got intensely curious about sin. There’s a lot of it going around, lol. Holy Spirit took me to Romans 7:7-25
With great help from the Holy Spirit and Greek scholar Bill
Mounce, it has been brought to my attention that sin is an active agent in the
body. Mounce talks about a time his nephew preached an excellent sermon on
James 4:1 which says (according to the translation you have), “What accounts
for the quarrels and disputes among you? Is it not this—your desires that are
at war in your members?” The translation I prefer to go with says, “What causes
fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle
within you?” (NIV)
To me, this is a major revelation which deserves some
technical attention with translation, so here’s Mounce:
“I know that the word “members” doesn't refer to members of
the church, but the Greek is plural. ἐν
τοῖς μέλεσιν ὑμῶν.
These constructions are always interesting because they can refer to things
among the group, and one of the uses of μέλος can refer to people who make up a
group. “We who are many are one body in Christ, and individually members (μέλη)
who belong to one another” (Rom 12:54; cf. 1 Cor 12:27; 2 Cor 12:5, 26; Eph
4:25). This is the second definition in BDAG.
And yet, many of the uses of μέλος in the New Testament
refer to individual parts of our body. “So also is the tongue a small member,
yet it boasts of great things” (James 3:5). “For just as the physical body is
one yet has many members (μέλη), and all the members (μέλη) of the body, though
many, are one body, so also is the body of Christ” (1 Cor 12:12). BDAG’s first
definition is, “a part of the human body, member, part, limb literally,
of parts of the human body.”
I had always assumed James was saying that the source of
quarrels and disputes among a group of Christians was that people’s desires
were at war with other people, but my nephew saw μέλεσιν as the individual
members of each individual body. Most translations agree with him. “What causes
fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle
within you?” (NIV) “What is the source of wars and fights among you? Don’t they
come from your passions that wage war within you?” (CSB)
This creates a helpful picture of the battles we all face
with sin. Sin is an active agent in our body, affecting every part of who we
are. It creates such dissension within us that our internal battles produce
Paul’s quandary: what he wants to do, he doesn't, and he doesn't want to do, he
does. Sin’s battle plan is to affect every individual part of who I am, turning
one part against another.
I think I shared this in an earlier blog, but one of the
most helpful discussions I had along these lines was with Tom Schreiner. I had
been thinking of sin as a passive agent, sitting around looking for
opportunities to lead us down the wrong path. But Tom helped me see that sin is
very active, very deliberate, a foreign agent that is alive inside each one of
us and is aggressively working to accomplish it's purposes. As Paul writes, “It
is no longer I myself who do it (i.e., sin), but it is sin living in me” (Rom
7:17). This reminds me of those Science Fiction movies where the alien goes
into the human body, is nurtured by the body, and ultimately controls the body.”
Wow!
This should all lead us to go easy on ourselves and others
and pray daily (minute by minute even) for God’s protection and healing. Sin is
so much bigger than what I understand or attribute, but thanks be to God so
also is His grace in the blood of Jesus Christ, and the ministry of Holy Spirit.
I’m starting to agree with and relate to how Paul concluded Romans 7, “What a
wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God
through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Rom. 7:24–25).
Source: https://www.billmounce.com/blogs/mondaywithmounce/sin-active-and-foreign-agent-your-body-james-4-1
Wednesday, April 24, 2024
The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill
“Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in
the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you
use, it will be measured to you. Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in
your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?” ~ Matthew
7:1-3
If you bite and devour each
other, watch out or you will be destroyed by each other. ~ Galatians 5:15
These words of Jesus Christ and the Apostle Paul
from 2,000 years ago hit so hard right now. The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill
is a post-mortem on the fall and destruction of one of the most prolific
churches in the 21st century. This was a tough one to listen to but
I’m grateful I finally listened to it. It took me three years to consider
listening and I’m glad I waited, because the lessons here sank deep. Chaulk
full of 25 episodes with interviews and helpful and prescriptive contemplations,
The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill explored the death of one of the most influential
and successful churches in America. It is also a convicting examination into my
own heart and mind: the intentions, compromises, misunderstandings, and impulses.
These are lessons for doing better in every space I operate in, with very real and
well-intentioned people who operate in ways that are great examples of the very
good, very bad, and very ugly. After listening to this helpful investigation, I
had to find out who else was talking about it and how others were feeling about
it. Carey Nieuwhof had one of the best takeaways I found, writing from a
leadership perspective. I value good leaders, and being a good leader, so Niewhof’s
lessons are prescriptive to me:
Originally published by Carey Nieuwhof
“Like so many leaders in the church space, I
listened to The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill podcast…To say
it was hard to listen to is an understatement.
It took me a month or two to even decide whether
I would listen to it or not.
For those who may not know, The Rise and
Fall of Mars Hill is a podcast produced by Christianity Today that
chronicles the humble beginnings, explosive growth, and very public dissolution
of Mars Hill, a megachurch that once had multiple campuses in Seattle,
Washington (one of the most unchurched cities in the U.S.).
Filled with interviews with former staff and
church members, the focal point of the series is the leadership style of lead
pastor Mark Driscoll.
Like many people I know, when I started listening,
there were times when I shut an episode off, thinking I couldn’t go any
further, only to resume it a day or a week later. The story is so painful for
the multiple layers of hurt involved and yet crucial for what we can learn
moving forward.
Eventually, I finished the series, but the
ambivalence never really disappeared.
So, why this post?
Mainly because this is a leadership blog, and the
patterns described around Mars Hill are not unique to Mars Hill. They’re not
even unique to churches.
The patterns can happen—and do happen—in varying
degrees in many different churches and businesses.
While The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill podcast
isn’t a definitive account of what happened in Seattle (for example, despite
attempts, former Mars Hill Lead Pastor Mark Driscoll didn’t agree to be
interviewed for the show), it provided enough of a picture of the unhealthy
happenings in churches and the dysfunctional happenings within leaders to
convict me of my own sin (again).
For me, the most disturbing part of listening to
the Rise and Fall of Mars Hill is that I saw some of myself in
the story.
I recognized some of the same impulses in me.
There’s a shadow side of leadership, pride, and
power lurking in most of us. Perhaps in all of us. At least, it definitely
lurks in me.
And if you identify the unhealthy patterns in your
own life, maybe you can catch it early enough to prevent it from harming
others.
So, let me go first to say that everything I’m
describing below is things I’ve had to wrestle down in my own heart and my own
leadership. I hope and pray for progress and victory for all of us who lead,
including the leaders and people who were part of Mars Hill.
Exposing the darkness in ourselves is one of the
greatest ways to find more light.
Here are five reflections I’m processing after
finishing the podcast.
There's a shadow side of leadership, pride, and
power that lurks in most of us. Perhaps in all of us.
1. The Ends Actually Don’t Justify the Means
I’ve worked in a few places over the years: a law
firm, at radio and tv stations, at a church, and for the last few years as an
author, speaker, and a podcaster myself, running a small communications
company.
You’d think it was easier to lead like the ends
justified the means in a law firm or private company.
Nope.
It was easiest as a pastor.
For exactly the reasons described in the podcast,
you end up saying things like:
- Well,
more people are coming to faith than are leaving.
- I
can’t be responsible for the consequences…that’s up to God.
- If
it means more people come to faith, then let’s do it.
The church I led was not even close to the size of
Mars Hill, nor did it have the influence of Mars Hill. But in the first decade
of ministry, we became one of the fastest growing and one of
the largest congregations in our denomination.
In the midst of all of that, some people got hurt.
Often I moved fast and broke things. Sometimes I broke people.
Eventually, I realized that the ends don’t justify
the means—that often different means produce much better ends.
I also realized that health and growth don’t have
to compete with each other. You can have both. And if you can’t have both,
choose health.
Listening to the podcast, I realized that what
made those first few years of leadership so confusing was that great things
were happening, and we were doing all of this ‘for God.’
In my heart of hearts, I believed that whatever we
did that resulted in more people coming to Christ was a good thing.
Over time though, I realized that how you
do what you do is just as (if not more) important as what you
do.
In the church, more people is a good thing. But
more love is even better.
As you have probably figured out, more love often
leads to more people. But if it doesn’t, you’re still left with more love.
2. The Body Count Matters
I won’t go into the details outlined in the
podcast, but one of the recurring themes was the body count at Mars Hill—the
people who ‘fell off the bus’ or got pushed off the bus as it moved to new
places and new heights.
For a season in my earlier years of ministry, we
were growing quickly. But the underbelly of that season of growth was that we
were simply growing faster than we were losing people.
It got so bad in some rapid growth years that I
have a distinct memory of telling my team not to use pictures older than six
months since there were too many people in the photo who had left.
I wince when I think about that now.
I don’t know why everyone who left ended up
leaving (high growth and high churn seasons can be like that), and not everyone
who left was mad or hurt—many tried it for a while and realized what we were
doing wasn’t for them—but I do know that in all the churn, I started to form
callouses around my heart.
When people leave or criticize you, it hurts.
The natural thing to do is to grow cynical, to
stop listening to the disappointments and the complaints. And for a season, I
did just that.
Had I let that go further, it’s likely I was only
a few steps away from allowing the churn to be a badge of honor. Ugh.
Fortunately, I burned out after a few years of
very rapid growth. I say ‘fortunately’ because, even though my burnout was the deepest pain I’ve ever gone through personally, I
realize now that God was re-forming me in the midst of it.
I now think of my burnout as a divine intervention
of sorts.
On the other side of burnout, I became much more
sensitive to the pain and hurt I was causing, especially unintentionally. Often
as leaders, we don’t mean to hurt people or even realize we’re doing it. Or we
harden our hearts because we can’t stand the pain of people rejecting us.
I realized (and am still learning) how much of a
mistake it is to close your heart to people or act like their leaving doesn’t
matter. It does.
And while caring is hard, the ultimate damage of
not caring is far greater.
Caring carries risk. So, leaders, please hear me.
Your heart will get mangled, and you’ll be tempted to stop
caring and trusting people altogether. Don’t.
So, you might ask, does opening your heart and
caring about people stop people from leaving?
Nope. People still leave. Maybe not as many, but
still, people leave. And it still hurts. (Toxic people are a different category, but most people
aren’t toxic people. They just see things differently than you do).
People who disagree with you should be treated
well and loved regardless of whether they are ‘with you’ or not. It’s not about
you or me. It’s just not.
After I burned out and started to recover, we
launched Connexus Church.
I look back on some of those launch photos a
decade and a half later and smile. To my surprise and delight, most of the
people who helped us launch are still with us.
And for those who left…well, if people were
valuable to you when they came to your church, treat them as though they are
just as valuable when they leave.
3. Charisma is a Double-Edged Sword
Culturally, we use the term ‘charismatic’ to
describe leaders who have a magnetic pull to their personalities.
Leadership tends to attract and reward charismatic
people. In the case of preachers, I imagine the concentration of charismatic
leaders is even higher than in the marketplace as a whole.
Why? Many preachers are excellent communicators,
and the ability to communicate is a significant factor in charisma.
So, what’s the challenge?
The good thing about being a charismatic leader is
that people follow you. The bad side of being a charismatic leader is that
people follow you.
As a charismatic leader, you have the potential to
lead thousands of people to a much better future and the potential to lead
thousands of people right off a cliff.
From the time I was young, people told me I had
charisma. Honestly, I didn’t know what that meant at that point, but having led
for decades now, I realize charisma is a double-edged sword.
The temptation to use your charisma to consolidate
power and use it to your benefit is real. Another temptation is to form an
inner circle of fans, sycophants, and enablers who won’t challenge you or pose
a threat to your viewpoint.
I got to a point early in my leadership where I
was so sensitive to criticism that I felt the impulse to create an inner circle
like that.
Fortunately, prayer, counseling, and people who
knew me and loved me enough to help me see the truth helped me realize that
ultimately that’s a path that leads to death, not life.
This brings us back to the original meaning of
‘charisma’ for all of us who at some point have been called charismatic leaders.
Charisma is a Greek transliteration into English;
it means both ‘gift’ or ‘favor’ and carries a sense of having a grace given to
you by God.
In other words, to the extent you possess any,
your charisma is a gift and a favor from God to be used and stewarded not for
your glory but God’s.
Of all the character traits we can cultivate,
humility might be the greatest when it comes to stewarding charisma. As I’ve
learned, again and again, only humility can get you out of what pride got you
into.
If you find yourself surfing off your own
giftedness, humble yourself.
This takes quite a bit of intentionality. But I’ve
learned you can get to humility through two paths:
- Voluntarily
- Involuntary
How does involuntary humility happen? Simple: When
you’re humiliated by others or a situation.
Humiliation is simply involuntary humility. When
you won’t humble yourself, others are happy to do it for you.
I’m trying to take the voluntary path moving
forward. I don’t always get it right, but I’m trying.
4. Your Character Needs to Grow Faster Than Your
Platform
As I listened to story after story during the
podcast, I realized that the real issue is character. It was at Mars Hill and
it is in all of our lives.
The challenge is that in an age of instant
celebrity, your platform can grow faster than your character.
I think that’s one of the reasons so many
megachurch pastors fail (here’s a post with some thoughts on why it keeps
happening).
As we’ve seen too often in the church (so
painfully), all the competency in the world can’t compensate for a lack of
character.
Character is the great leveler. You may be smart,
but if people don’t trust you, they won’t want to work with you. You may be the
best preacher in your city, but if you treat others as less than, people will
stop listening.
Lack of character kills careers, shatters
families, ruins friendships, and destroys influence. And even if you never get
fired or divorced over the compromises you make, your lack of character will
limit the intimacy, joy, and depth you experience with God and with people.
Competency gets you in the room. Character keeps
you in the room. As a result, it’s character—not competency—that determines
your capacity.
Although I hear the argument all the time, I
personally don’t believe there is anything inherently bad about a large church
or organization.
But there is something inherently difficult in
it. And to some extent, the larger something is, the harder it is.
Please know, this doesn’t mean leading a small
church or venture is easy. I have led small churches. I get it. Few things in
leadership are easy.
But I’ve also led some larger ministries and
organizations, and the larger it is, the greater the pressure and the more
there’s at stake.
I remember when our church grew past 300; my mind
was blown. Now, it’s five times the size.
Or look at this blog or my podcast. Honestly,
100,000 readers or listeners was inconceivable a decade ago.
Then millions showed up.
Nothing gets you ready for that.
It’s way too easy for your platform to outgrow
your character. And that’s where all the danger lies.
Add to it one more fact: You and I are not naturally made
to lead thousands or millions.
It doesn’t mean you can’t do it. It just means
you’ll have to grow your character faster. Much faster.
5. Many Leaders Want to Be Celebrities—And The
Internet is the Bullet Train
The podcast focused a lot on pride, narcissism,
and the desire for celebrity.
It’s super easy to point the finger at a leader
like Mark Driscoll, but that still leaves us with four fingers pointing back at
ourselves.
And even if you don’t have a platform of your own,
it’s easy to get a platform (a big one) by criticizing and destroying other
people.
Before you deny that this applies to you, do a
little gut check. Ask yourself, How good would you be with complete
obscurity, with an irrelevance so deep nobody notices you or cares?
Yep…very few of us are good with that. After all,
God designed us to be social creatures and to live lives of meaning and
purpose.
Interaction and making some kind of a difference
are core to a meaningful life.
The challenge becomes, of course, that the
internet is the bullet train to celebrity. Just ask any 12-year-old YouTuber.
There’s more than a little irony that The Rise and
Fall of Mars Hills podcast criticized Mark Driscoll and Mars Hill for using the
internet and social media to rapidly grow their ministry, while The Rise and
Fall of Mars Hill podcast itself was using exactly the same platforms as it
became the most listened-to podcast in the Christian space.
And before you or I claim innocence or protest too
loudly, well, you’re reading this blog post and perhaps you listen to my
podcast or follow me on social and you’ll leave your comments online and…
You see?
Yeah.
It’s easy to criticize people with bigger
platforms than yours, and in doing so let yourself off the hook.
A better approach is to dig deep and probe your
own motives.
After listening to the podcast, I found myself
asking questions like Why do I like the fact that my podcast gets
downloaded so much, or how many people read my blog/buy my book/come to my
talks?
There’s something ugly under that.
Alternatively, you can be so allergic (and
self-righteous) about remaining obscure that your option becomes what…do
nothing? Say nothing? Attempt nothing? That’s not faithfulness either.
Once again, humility and character are the keys
here.
So what do you do?
Work twice as hard on your character as you do on
your platform.
If we all did that, our posts would be more kind, our comments more grateful, our content more purely motivated.”
Source: https://careynieuwhof.com/some-reflections-on-the-rise-and-fall-of-mars-hill/
Tuesday, April 23, 2024
The Cross and The Machine
It’s become a new and enlightening practice of mine to hear and read about the lives and faith journey of others. Life is big and profound, especially when the Lord is summoning people into His kingdom through lavish means. Paul Kingsnorth is such a life and I learned about him on Bari Weiss’s podcast, Honestly. The episode is called “The Story of Someone Who Changed His Mind.” To me it’s a modern, refreshing and honest exegesis on Romans 1:23 and its examination of our modern, ultra-industrialized, so-called post-Christian era. Paul's transparency about his experience with the stuffiness and clash of the ancient ways of Christianity and modernity's opportunistic opulence leaves you saying, 'wow, I thought I was the only one struggling...well said.'
But
Kingsnorth’s story is also a hopeful and living example of Romans
2:4 which reads, “Or do you show contempt for the riches of his kindness,
forbearance, and patience, not realizing that God’s kindness is intended to
lead you to repentance?” Kingsnorth’s testimony, which he mentions in the
episode and published below, is a beautiful tapestry of man’s waywardness and
God’s patience and kindness. Kingsnorth, a professional writer, meticulously
captures the details of his life and faith journey leading him to faith in
Christ and community in the church – somewhere he consciously never intended to
be. Well, as the saying goes, if you ever want to make God laugh tell Him your
plans:
First published by
the Paul Kingsnorth on June 2021 on https://www.firstthings.com
“Europeans
didn’t only disinherit Aztecs and Incas. Continuously, since the sixteenth
century, we have been disinheriting ourselves.”
—John Moriarty
“There
is no bloodless myth will hold.”
—Geoffrey Hill
"We
must have been fifteen or sixteen when we discovered the church visitor’s book.
It was an old church, maybe medieval, and I would pass it with my school
friends on our way to the town center. I’m not sure what possessed us to go in;
it might have been my idea. I’ve always loved old churches. For a long time, I
would tell myself that I liked the sense of history or the architecture, which
was true as far as it went. Like the narrator in Philip Larkin’s poem “Church
Going,” I would venture into any church I found, standing “in awkward reverence
. . . wondering what to look for,” drawn by some sense that this was “a serious
house on serious earth.” Obviously, there was no God, but still: The silence
of a small church in England had a quality that couldn’t be found anywhere
else.
This
visit was less serious. A fifteen-year-old boy with his schoolmates can’t be
admitting an interest in rood lofts. I’d like to say it was someone else’s idea
to write in the visitor’s book, where other people had inscribed things like
“what a beautiful building” and “I feel a tremendous sense of peace here,” but
a man should never lie about matters of the soul. It was I who took up the biro
and scrawled, “I WILL DESTROY YOU AND ALL OF YOUR WORKS! HA HA HA!” then signed
it “SATAN.” A few days later, we came back and did it again. “DIE, NAZARENE!
VICTORY IS MINE!” I think we’d been watching the Omen films.
We kept going for weeks, wondering when we’d be caught. We never were, but one
day we came in to find that all of our entries had been tippexed out and the
pen removed. The fun was over. We went to the video shop instead.
More than thirty
years later, in the early spring of 2020, I was reading the autobiography of
the Irish philosopher John Moriarty and following the news about some new virus
that was apparently spreading in China. Moriarty’s book is called Nostos—homecoming—and like all his
work, it is impossible to summarize because it is less a narrative than a myth.
One of its threads, though, is how Moriarty gave up on the simple,
unconvincing Christianity of his Irish rural youth and left for Canada to
become an academic, only to become equally disillusioned with the empty-can
rationalism that characterizes postmodern intellectual culture. Something was
missing. Was it Ireland? Moriarty threw in his academic career and moved back
to the mountains of Connacht. He had lost faith in science, in the mind alone
of itself, in an age that had disinherited its people. But even at home, some
part of the jigsaw was missing.
Seeking it, whatever
it was, Moriarty crashed into a devastating personal crisis. One day, walking
in the mountains, he suddenly had a mystical vision that broke his world apart.
“In an instant,” he wrote, “I was ruined.” He seemed to see into a great abyss
in which all of his stories were dust: “I had been let through not to a heaven
but to a void that was starless and fatherless.” For years, he wrote, he had
been engaged in “a genuine search for the truth, not merely a speakable truth,
but a truth I would surrender to.” Now he realized, with a terrible
inevitability, that there was only one story that could hold what he had seen,
only “one prayer that was big enough.” He had, he wrote, been “shattered into
seeing.” Whether he liked it or not, he had become a Christian.
A
truth I would surrender to. I
put the book down. I didn’t know quite why, but Moriarty’s story had shaken me.
I realized that I had been searching for years for a truth like that. “How
strange!” he had written. “Christianity making sense to me!” Somehow, the way
he was telling the story—interweaving the Gospels with the Book of Job, the Mahabharata,
the Pali Canon of the Buddha, the folk tales of Ireland, the poems of Wallace
Stevens—was making sense to me too. What was going on?
“The story of
Christianity,” wrote Moriarty, “is the story of humanity’s rebellion against
God.” I had never thought of that ancient, tired religion in this way before,
never had reason to, but as I did now I could feel something happening—some
inner shift, some coming together of previously scattered parts designed to
fit, though I had never known it, into a quiet, unbreakable whole.
A
truth I would surrender to. What
was this abyss inside me, this space that had been empty for years, that I had
tried to fill with everything from sex to fame to politics to kenshō,
and why was something chiming in it now like a distant Angelus across the
western sea?
For
the thing which I greatly feared is come upon me,
And that which I was afraid of is come unto me.
Something was
happening to me, and I didn’t like it at all.
Urban England in the
eighties was not, shall we say, a spiritually rich environment. My family never
set foot in a church when I was growing up, which suited me fine. The nearest I
came to serious religion was probably through my best friend, who was from a
Pakistani family. He’d been on the hajj to Mecca and fasted for Ramadan and did
all the other things that Muslims did, which I knew very little about. This was
before Islam became a political lightning rod and everyone felt they had to
develop strong opinions about it. All I knew was that my friend thought
religion was real, which seemed quaint and very un-English. We in the modern
world had long grown out of superstition.
Still, at least my
friend’s religion seemed to pulse with some sort of living energy. The same
could not be said of the Christianity which, when I was a child, was still at
least nominally the national faith. I grew up singing hymns, listening to
parables recited by teachers at morning assembly, and performing in Christmas
nativity plays with a tea towel tied around my head. I knew the Lord’s Prayer
by heart. Whether I liked it or not, I was taught as a child the outline of the
Christian story—the story that had shaped my nation for more than a thousand
years. I didn’t realize that my nation was surviving on spiritual credit, and
that it was coming close to running out.
Back then, there
were two distinct flavors of Christianity, both of which I tried to avoid. One
was the fusty old Church of England variety. You would see this if you had to
go to a wedding or a funeral, or when a vicar was invited to give a sermon at
school. The vicar would be a slightly Victorian figure, an older man almost
dainty in his manners, trying his best to speak in a dying tongue to a
generation of kids more interested in their ZX Spectrums. The Victorian vicar
would hand out morality lessons from a man who had lived two thousand years ago
and whose core imagery might as well have been from Mars: wine presses, fishing
boats, vineyards, masters and servants, virgins. The basic pitch seemed best
summed up by Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which
I’d rather have been reading than listening to a vicar: “One man had been
nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a
change.”
The second flavor
was the trendy vicar. Unlike his predecessor, the trendy vicar was plugged into
the spirit of the age. He knew that instead of bicycling to Holy Communion
through the morning mist, we were watching The Young Ones and
playing Manic Miner, and he was on our side. The trendy vicar had a clipped
beard and wore jeans and sang folk songs about how Jesus was our friend, and
gave awkward, vernacular sermons in which biblical stories were interspersed
with references to EastEnders or Dallas or
Michael Jackson songs. Despite his good intentions, the trendy vicar was much
worse than the stuffy vicar. At least the Victorian sermons were in some way
otherworldly, as religion should be. If it was pop culture we wanted, and we
did, we were better off sticking with the real thing, which was to say the
thing without any Jesus in it.
So, I had no reason
to take any notice of religion in general or Christianity in particular. My
Muslim friend had a faith that was passed to him by his family and was clearly
a central part of their worldview. Nothing similar was offered to me, and even if
it were, it would have been undercut by the wider cultural narrative. The
school may have had mandatory religious education classes, but the age taught
another faith: Religion was irrelevant. It was authoritarian, it was
superstitious, it was feeble proto-science. It was the theft of our precious
free will by authorities who wanted to control us by telling us fairy tales. It
repressed women, gay people, atheists, anyone who disobeyed its irrational
edicts. It hated science, denied reason, burned witches and heretics by the
million. Post-Enlightenment liberal societies had thrown off its shackles, and
however hard both species of vicar tried to prevent it, religion was dying a
much-needed death at the hands of progress and reason.
Et cetera.
Still, there was
enough truth in this story to fuel the intellectual anger of the Dawkins-esque
teenage atheist that I later became. People had walked away from the church by
choice, after all, and not just because they all wanted to have premarital sex.
The message seemed irrelevant. Across Europe, the exodus was happening.
Corrupted, tired, suddenly powerless, Christianity was dying in the West. And
why not? I hadn’t seen anything relevant in it. Where was the mystery? Where
was the promised connection with God? Who was this God anyway? A man in the sky
with a book of rules? It was long past time to move on.
I didn’t know back
then that the Christian story is the story of our rebellion against God. I
didn’t know that by taking part in that rebellion I had become part of the
story, whether I liked it or not. I didn’t know, either, why Christians see
pride as the greatest sin. I only knew that I could argue a good case for the
injustice of the world made by this “God,” and the silliness of miracles,
resurrections, and virgin births. I knew I was cleverer than all the people who
believed this sort of rubbish, and I was happy to tell them so.
I kept visiting
empty churches. I just didn’t tell anyone.
Up on the mountains
of England and Wales, I had my own visions. Walking and camping on the hills
for weeks with my dad, I felt something settle within me that was more real
than any theology. I might have been a teenage atheist, but my atheism
amounted mainly to arguing with Christians. The religions of the book were
obviously nonsense, but I knew there was something going on that humans
couldn’t grasp. Trudging across moors, camping by mountain lakes as the June
sun set, I could feel some deep, old power rolling through it all, welding it
together, flowing from the land into me and back again. With Wordsworth, I was
dragged under by “A motion and a spirit, that impels / All thinking things, all
objects of all thought / And rolls through all things.” Nothing humans could
build could come close to the intense wonder and mystery of the natural world;
I still believe that to be self-evidently true. This was my religion. Animism,
pantheism, call it what you will: This was my pagan grace.
Years of
environmental activism followed. Working for NGOs, writing for magazines,
chaining myself to things, marching, occupying: Whatever you did, you had to do
something, for the state of the Earth was dire. Nobody with eyes to see can
deny what humanity has done to the living tissue of the planet, though plenty
still try. There were big, systemic reasons for it, I discovered: capitalism, industrialism,
maybe civilization itself. Whatever had got us here, it was clear where we were
going: into a world in which industrial humanity has ravaged much of the wild
earth, tamed the rest, and shaped all nature to its ends. The rebellion against
God manifested itself in a rebellion against creation, against all nature,
human and wild. We would remake Earth, down to the last nanoparticle, to suit
our desires, which we now called “needs.” Our new world would be globalized,
uniform, interconnected, digitized, hyper-real, monitored, always-on. We were
building a machine to replace God.
Activism is a
staging post on the road to realization. Dig in for long enough and you see
that something like climate change or mass extinction is not a “problem” to be
“solved” through politics or technology or science, but the manifestation of a
deep spiritual malaise. Even an atheist could see that our attempts to play God
would end in disaster. Wasn’t that a warning that echoed through the myths and
stories of every culture on Earth?
Early Green
thinkers, people like Leopold Kohr or E. F. Schumacher, who were themselves
inspired by the likes of Gandhi and Tolstoy, had taught us that the ecological
crisis was above all a crisis of limits, or lack of them. Modern economies
thrive by encouraging ever-increasing consumption of harmful junk, and our
hyper-liberal culture encourages us to satiate any and all of our appetites in
our pursuit of happiness. If that pursuit turns out to make us unhappy
instead—well, that’s probably just because some limits remain un-busted.
Following the rabbit
hole down, I realized that a crisis of limits is a crisis of culture, and a
crisis of culture is a crisis of spirit. Every living culture in history, from
the smallest tribe to the largest civilization, has been built around a spiritual
core: a central claim about the relationship between human culture, nonhuman
nature, and divinity. Every culture that lasts, I suspect, understands that
living within limits—limits set by natural law, by cultural tradition, by
ecological boundaries—is a cultural necessity and a spiritual imperative. There
seems to be only one culture in history that has held none of this to be true,
and it happens to be the one we’re living in.
Now I started to
dimly see something I ought to have seen years before: that the great spiritual
pathways, the teachings of the saints and gurus and mystics, and the vessels
built to hold them—vessels we call “religions”—might have been there for a
reason. They might even have been telling us something urgent about human
nature, and what happens when our reach exceeds our grasp. G. K. Chesterton
once declared, contra Marx, that it was irreligion that was the opium of the
people. “Wherever the people do not believe in something beyond the world,” he
explained, “they will worship the world. But above all, they will worship the
strongest thing in the world.” Here we were.
I went
searching, then, for the truth. But where to find it? Elders, saints, and
mystics are notable these days for their absence. In their place we are offered
a pick’n’mix spirituality, on sale in every market stall and pastel-shaded
hippy web portal. A dreamcatcher, a Celtic cross, a book about tantra, a
weekend drum workshop, and a pack of tarot cards with cats on them, and hey,
presto: You’re ready for your personalized “spiritual” journey. On the other
side, you will find no exhortation to sacrifice or denial of self, and
certainly no battered and bleeding god-man calling you to pick up your cross
and follow him. No, you will find instead the perfect manifestation of
everything you wanted in the first place: the magnification of your will, not
its dissolution. Expressive individualism disguised as epiphany, the reaching
prayer of a culture that doesn’t know how lost it is.
I wanted something
more serious, something with structure, rules, a tradition. It didn’t even
occur to me to go and ask the vicars. I knew that Christianity, with its
instructions to man to “dominate and subdue” the Earth, was part of the
problem. And so, I looked east. On my fortieth birthday I treated myself to a
weeklong Zen retreat in the Welsh mountains. The effect of seven days of
disciplined meditation in a farmhouse with no electricity was astonishing.
Something in me flipped open. For the next five or six years, I practiced Zazen and
studied the teachings of the Buddha. It is clear enough why Buddhism is taking
off in the West as Christianity declines: Its metaphysical claims seem
convincing, its practices, when taught properly, yield results, and as a
tradition it is even older than Christianity. It is, in short, a serious
spiritual path, but with none of the cultural baggage of the church.
And yet. As the
years went on, Zen was not enough. It was full of compassion, but it lacked
love. It lacked something else too, and it took me a long time to admit to
myself what it was: I wanted to worship. My teenage atheist self would have
been horrified. Something was happening to me, slowly, steadily, that I didn’t
understand but could clearly sense. I felt like I was being filed gently into a
new shape.
Something was
calling me. But what?
Obviously, it wasn’t
Christ. I had read the New Testament a few times, and I mostly liked what I
saw. Who couldn’t admire this man or see that, at root, he was teaching the
truth? Still, he obviously didn’t die and return to life, this being
impossible, and without that, the faith built around him was nonsense. I was a
pagan, anyway. I found God in nature, so I needed a nature religion.
This was how I ended
up a priest of the witch gods.
The short version of
the story is that I joined my local Wiccan coven. Wicca is a relatively new
occult tradition, founded in the 1950s by the eccentric Englishman Gerald
Gardner, who claimed he had discovered the ancient remnant of a pre-Christian
goddess cult. He was fibbing, but the practice he sewed together out of older,
disparate parts is strangely cohesive, complete with secret initiatory
rituals, a law book that can be copied only by hand by initiates, magical
teachings, spell work, protective circles, and, at the heart of it all, the
worship of two deities: the great goddess and the horned god. All initiated
Wiccans are priests or priestesses of these gods; there are no laity. My coven
used to do its rituals in the woods under the full moon. It was fun, and it
made things happen. I discovered that magic is real. It works. Who it works for
is another question.
At last I was home,
where I belonged: in the woods, worshipping a nature goddess under the stars. I
even got to wear a cloak. Everything seemed to have fallen into place. Until I
started having dreams.
I had known, I
suppose, that the abyss was still there inside me—that what I was doing in the
woods, though affecting, was at some level still play-acting. Then, one night,
I dreamed of Jesus. The dream was vivid, and when I woke up I wrote down what
I had heard him say, and I drew what he had looked like. The crux of the matter
was that he was to be the next step on my spiritual path. I didn’t believe that
or want it to be true. But the image and the message reminded me of something
strange that had happened a few months before. My wife and I were out to
dinner, celebrating our wedding anniversary, when suddenly she said to me,
“You’re going to become a Christian.” When I asked her what on earth she was
talking about, she said she didn’t know; she had just had a feeling and needed
to tell me. My wife has a preternatural sensitivity that she always denies, and
it wasn’t the first time she had done something like this. It shook me. A
Christian? Me? What could be weirder?
After the dream, it
began to make sense. Suddenly, I started meeting Christians everywhere. They
were coming out of the woodwork: strangers emailing me out of the blue, priests
coming to me for help with their writing. I found myself having conversations
with friends I’d never known were Christian, who suddenly seemed to want to
talk about it. An African man contacted me on Facebook to tell me he had had a
dream in which God had told him to convert me. “If you want to know God,” he
told me, “you need to read the book He wrote. You know it already: It’s called
nature.”
It kept happening,
for months. Christ to the left of me, Christ to the right. It was unnerving. I
turned away again and again, but every time I looked back, he was still there.
I began to feel I was being . . . hunted? I wanted it to stop; at least, I thought
I did. I had no interest in Christianity. I was a witch! A Zen witch, in fact,
which I thought sounded pretty damned edgy. But I knew who was after me, and I
knew it wasn’t over.
One evening, I was
sitting in the kitchen of the house in which our coven had its temple. We were
about to go in and conduct an important ritual. As we got up to leave, I felt
violently ill. I was dizzy, I was sick, I was lightheaded. Everyone noticed and
fussed over me as I sat down, my face pale. I had an overpowering feeling that
I should not go into the temple. I felt I was being physically prevented from
doing it. Someone had staged an intervention.
After that, there
was no escape. Like C. S. Lewis, I could not ignore “the steady, unrelenting
approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet.” How much later was it
that I was finally pinned down? I don’t remember. I was at a concert at my
son’s music school. We were in a hotel function room, full of children ready to
play their instruments and proud parents ready to film them doing it. I was
just walking to my chair when I was overcome entirely. Suddenly, I could see
how everyone in the room was connected to everyone else, and I could see what
was going on inside them and inside myself. I was overcome with a huge and
inexplicable love, a great wave of empathy, for everyone and everything. It
kept coming and coming until I had to stagger out of the room and sit down in
the corridor outside. Everything was unchanged, and everything was new, and I
knew what had happened and who had done it, and I knew that it was too late. I
had just become a Christian.
None of this is
rationally explicable, and there is no point in arguing with me about it. There
is no point in my arguing with myself about it: I gave up after a while. This
is not to say that my faith is irrational. In fact, the more I learned, the
more Christianity’s story about the world and human nature chimed better with
my experience than did the increasingly shaky claims of secular materialism. In
the end, though, I didn’t become a Christian because I could argue myself into
it. I became a Christian because I knew, suddenly, that it was true. The
Angelus that was chiming in the abyss is silent now, for the abyss is gone.
Someone else inhabits me.
I am not a joiner,
but I accepted, eventually, that I would need a church. I went looking, and I
found one, as usual, in the last place I expected. This January, on the feast
of Theophany, I was baptized in the freezing waters of the River Shannon, on a
day of frost and sun, into the Romanian Orthodox Church. In Orthodoxy I had
found the answers I had sought, in the one place I never thought to look. I found
a Christianity that had retained its ancient heart—a faith with living saints
and a central ritual of deep and inexplicable power. I found a faith that,
unlike the one I had seen as a boy, was not a dusty moral template but a
mystical path, an ancient and rooted thing, pointing to a world in which the
divine is not absent but everywhere present, moving in the mountains and the
waters. The story I had heard a thousand times turned out to be a story I had
never heard at all.
Out in the world,
the rebellion against God has become a rebellion against everything: roots,
culture, community, families, biology itself. Machine progress—the triumph of
the Nietzschean will—dissolves the glue that once held us. Fires are set
around the supporting pillars of the culture by those charged with guarding it,
urged on by an ascendant faction determined to erase the past, abuse their
ancestors, and dynamite their cultural inheritance, the better to build their
earthly paradise on terra nullius. Massing against them are the
new Defenders of the West, some calling for a return to the atomized
liberalism that got us here in the first place, others defending a remnant
Christendom that seems to have precious little to do with Christ and forgets
Christopher Lasch’s warning that “God, not culture, is the only appropriate
object of unconditional reverence and wonder.” Two profane visions going
head-to-head, when what we are surely crying out for is the only thing that can
heal us: a return to the sacred center around which any real culture is built.
Up on the mountain
like Moriarty, in the Maumturk ranges in the autumn rain, I had my own vision,
terrible and joyful and impossible. I saw that if we were to follow the
teachings we were given at such great cost—the radical humility, the blessings
upon the meek, the love of neighbor and enemy, the woe unto those who are rich,
the last who will be first—above all, if we were to stumble toward the Creator
with love and awe, then creation itself would not now be groaning under our
weight. I saw that the teachings of Christ were the most radical in history,
and that no empire could be built by those who truly lived them. I saw that we
had arrived here because we do not live them; because, as Auden had it:
We would rather be
ruined than changed.
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.
It turns out that
both the stuffy vicars and the trendy vicars were onto something: The Cross
holds the key to everything. The sacrifice is all the teaching. I am a new and
green pupil. I can talk for hours, but ideas will become idols in the blink of
an eye. I have to pick up my cross and start walking.
How can I feel I
have arrived home in something that is in many ways so foreign to me? And yet
beneath the surface it is not foreign at all, but a reversion to the sacred
order of things. I sit in a monastery chapel before dawn. There is snow on the
ground outside. The priest murmurs the liturgy by the light of the lampadas,
the dark silhouettes of two nuns chant the antiphon. There is incense in the
air. The icons glow in the half light. This could be a thousand years in the
past or the future, for in here, there is no time. Home is beyond time, I think
now. I can’t explain any of it, and it is best that I do not try.
I grew up believing
what all modern people are taught: that freedom meant lack of constraint.
Orthodoxy taught me that this freedom was no freedom at all, but enslavement to
the passions: a neat description of the first thirty years of my life. True
freedom, it turns out, is to give up your will and follow God’s. To deny
yourself. To let it come. I am terrible at this, but at least now I understand
the path.
In the Kingdom of
Man, the seas are ribboned with plastic, the forests are burning, the cities
bulge with billionaires and tented camps, and still we kneel before the idol of
the great god Economy as it grows and grows like a cancer cell. And what if this
ancient faith is not an obstacle after all, but a way through? As we see the
consequences of eating the forbidden fruit, of choosing power over humility,
separation over communion, the stakes become clearer each day. Surrender or
rebellion; sacrifice or conquest; death of the self or triumph of the will; the
Cross or the machine. We have always been offered the same choice. The gate is
strait and the way is narrow and maybe we will always fail to walk it. But is
there any other road that leads home?
Paul
Kingsnorth is
a novelist, essayist, and poet living in Ireland.
Source: https://www.firstthings.com/article/2021/06/the-cross-and-the-machine
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