Church

So John Piper has asked Rick Warren to speak at this year’s Desiring God National Conference, Think: The Life of the Mind and the Love of God. You may have heard about this, either through buzz in the blogosphere or even from Piper himself in his recent Ask Pastor John session. I have known this for some time now as Warren told me himself when I visited Saddleback last September. So I have had a long time to reflect on it. And having done so, I am persuaded that it is not a good idea.

Before I explain myself, let me provide a bit of background on my relationship with Rick Warren and John Piper. I think people who read this site sometimes imagine that I am more connected with the big-name preachers or authors than is really the case. It’s only fair to point out that I do not have much of a personal relationship with either man. I have met both of them but have spent meaningful time with each of them just once, which means I know them best through their public ministries. I have read three books by Warren and perhaps a dozen by Piper. I have seen both of them preach and have met some of the people who minister alongside them. Perhaps mostly significantly, I have been a member of churches heavily influenced by each of them; the last church I attended was very much built around the Saddleback model while Grace Fellowship Church is very much in debt to Piper. Thus I have seen their churches, their ministries and the effects of their ministries on others.

Those of us who are Western Christians continue to hear reports that the church is migrating to the south and to the east—that as our nations increasingly turn their collective backs on God, God begins fresh work in other parts of the world. Says Mark Noll in his new book The New Shape of World Christianity, “It is as if the globe had been turned upside down and sideways. A few short decades ago, Christian believers were concentrated in the global north and west, but now a rapidly swelling majority lives in the global south and east. [If a Christian] Rip Van Winkle wiped a half-century of sleep from his eyes … and tried to locate his fellow Christian believers, he would find them in surprising places, expressing their faith in surprising ways, under surprising conditions, with surprising relationships to culture and politics, and raising surprising theological questions that would not have seemed possible when he fell asleep.”

Here are a few remarkable facts Noll provides:

• This past Sunday it is possible that more Christian believers attended church in China than in all of so-called “Christian Europe.” Yet in 1970 there were no legally functioning churches in all of China; only in 1971 did the communist regime allow for one Protestant and one Roman Catholic Church to hold public worship services, and this was mostly a concession to visiting Europeans and African students from Tanzania and Zambia.
• This past Sunday more Anglicans attended church in each of Kenya, South Africa, Tanzania and Uganda than did Anglicans in Britain and Canada and Episcopalians in the United States combined—and the number of Anglicans in church in Nigeria was several times the umber in those other African countries.
• This past Sunday more Presbyterians were at church in Ghana than in Scotland, and more were in congregations of the Uniting Presbyterian Church of Southern Africa than in the United States.
• The past Sunday more people attended the Yoido Full Gospel Church pastored by Yongi Cho is Seoul, Korea, than attended all the churches in significant American denominations like the Christian Reformed Church, the Evangelical Covenant Church or the Presbyterian Church in America.
• This past Sunday the churches with the largest attendance in England and France had mostly black congregations. About half of the churchgoers in London were African or African-Caribbean. Today, the largest Christian congregation in Europe is in Kiev, and it is pastored by a Nigerian of Pentecostal background.
• This past week in Great Britain, at least fifteen thousand Christian foreign missionaries were hard at work evangelizing the locals. most of these missionaries are from Africa and Asia.
• For several years the world’s largest chapter of the Jesuit order has been found in India, not in the United States, as it had been for much of the late twentieth century.

I have several books on my shelf that explore this phenomenon, showing how the center of the church is, indeed, migrating away from the West. Noll’s book, though, takes a fresh approach. Because the world is coming more and more to look like America, American Christianity is important to the world. “The point of this book,” he says, “is not primarily to shed light on the history of Christianity in North America. It is, rather, to address the question of what American Christianity means for the worldwide Christian community. … The book’s major argument is that Christianity in its American form has indeed become very important for the world. But it has become important, not primarily because of direct influence. Rather, the key is how American Christianity was itself transformed when Europeans carried their faith across the Atlantic. The American model rather than American manipulation is key.” So in this book Noll looks to the American pattern and seeks to understand how that may shed light on how the faith will spread in this new areas of the world.

What Noll does not do is blame America for the woes of the church in the south and in the east. He does not charge America with recklessness in exporting religion as she has exported culture and conflict and so much else. Instead he stresses “the advantage of seeing the new regions of recent Christian growth as following a historical path that Americans pioneered before much of the rest of the Christian world embarked on the same path.” It is an intriguing thesis and one that bears examination. Noll has to admit, though, that this book can be little more than an interim report since the situation is changing so rapidly. Yet even as an interim report there is much to glean from it.

Here is how Noll goes about this task. In the first three chapters, the first part of the book, he provides a short sketch of the Christian world today, outlines some of the challenges posed by this new reality and then describes a few developments among evangelicals of the nineteenth century that pointed toward what would happen in the world in the twentieth century. Chapters four through seven are the heart of the book and here he provides his argument that American form rather than American influence has been the foremost contribution of America to the recent world history of Christianity. In the third and final section he tests his argument against specific case studies. And, of course, he pulls everything together in a concluding chapter.

While his argument is compelling and while the book shares a great deal of interesting facts, both historical and contemporary, it is not without what I consider quite a considerable weakness. In defining what it means to be a Christian or an evangelical, terms Noll uses repeatedly, an author may face two extremes: death by a thousand qualifications or the opposite error of a lack of qualification. And in Noll’s case I think he tends toward the latter. His definition of Christian is wider than it ought to be, I think, and the same is true of evangelical. In both cases the definition could include Roman Catholics and potentially even Mormons or other groups who have no great love for the true gospel. While we cannot deny that these groups are also exporting religion to the far corners of the world, grouping them under the same banner as Protestant evangelicals obscures rather than clarifies. When we look at a church like Yongi Cho’s Full Gospel Church we are right to ask whether what is being taught there is even the gospel and, hence, whether it is truly a church at all. Rarely does Noll pause to consider if the churches he writes about are faithful to the gospel. It is as if any body calling itself a church (or perhaps calling itself evangelical) is equal. And then we wonder, is much of the new shape of world Christianity really even Christian?

The New Shape of World Christianity is an interesting read and an important one, even. As an interim report, I think it succeeds in its task of drawing attention to a reality that is only now unfolding around us. And on that basis I am glad to recommend it to those who are interested in the subject matter.

Buy it at Monergism Books

Church is out, spirituality is in. This is true outside Christians circles but, shockingly, it is true within as well. Recent years have seen a long succession of books talking of the revolution to come (or the revolution underway) which will see Christians abandon the institutional church in favor of expressions of the faith that are supposedly more pure. Christians meeting together in Starbucks in twos or threes, Christians meeting on park benches or around a backyard swimming pool. This, say some, is a true, pure, biblical expression of Christian community. It is in reaction to this kind of misinterpretation of Scripture that Kevin DeYoung and Ted Kluck have written, Why We Love the Church.

You may recognize DeYoung and Kluck as the men behind Why We’re Not Emergent, a book that won Christianity Today’s 2009 Book Award in the The Church/Pastoral Leadership category. In that first book they showed why they, though apparently prime candidates to follow along within the Emerging Church movement, had eschewed it in favor of a more traditional expression of the faith. This book is a follow-up, of sorts, offering the positive expression of what they declared negatively in the first book. We know that they are not Emergent and here we learn why they love the church. They follow the same pattern, writing completely separate chapters. DeYoung’s chapters are the more academic ones—providing the theological foundation. Kluck’s chapters, on the other hand, are less formal and more reflective. Both men are excellent writers who are adept at turning a phrase, making this a book that is just plain enjoyable to read.

The question will be asked: Is this as good, as enjoyable a book as Why We’re Not Emergent. I don’t think so; I don’t know that they quite recaptured the voice, the perspective they spoke from in the first book. Somehow it seems they were not able to duplicate the magic, the interplay between the two authors, that marked Why We’re Not Emergent. Yet Why We Love the Church is still plenty good in its own right.

The book, they say, is written for four kinds of people: the committed, the disgruntled, the waffling and the disconnected. For each of these people there will be value in reading the book and reflecting on the message it shares. When it comes to the disgruntled, the waffling and the disconnected, they offer four reasons, or perhaps four groups of reasons that people are disillusioned with the church: the missiological (the church is simply not fulfilling her God-given mission); the personal (the church is anti-women, anti-gay, hypocritical, etc); the historical (the church as we know it is a product of paganism, not Scripture); the theological (the church as an organization, institution, hierarchy, etc is foreign to the Bible). Throughout the book, DeYoung and Kluck respond to these people and respond to these reasons, always looking to Scripture, always seeking to provide a biblical understanding of who and what and why the church is.

There are two great strengths in this book. The first is in offering the biblical perspective on what God is doing through the church. The authors show how the church is central to all that God is doing in the world and prove well that without the church there is no Christianity. They take the historic view that participating in the church is normative for the Christian life—that under ordinary circumstances we should not expect a person who deliberately remains outside the visible church to be a true believer.

The second great strength is in responding to the tired but all-too-common arguments against organized religion or institutionalized church or whatever else people may wish to call it. They offer lines like this—ones well worth pondering: “It’s more than a little ironic that the same folks who want the church to ditch the phoney, plastic persona and become a haven for broken, imperfect sinners are ready to leave the church when she is broken, imperfect and sinful.” They do not allow such people to glamorize the early church, the New Testament church, as if she was a perfect, sinless expression of the Christian faith (haven’t these people read 1 Corinthians or the early chapters of Revelation?). They offer valuable responses to disillusionment based on historical hubris, church buildings and institutions and even the role of Christians in the Crusades—all of those arguments that tend to be passed along but without much thought and without ever verifying the claims. Just the response to these arguments is worth the price of the book.

If there is a weak point in Why We Love the Church, it has to be Chapter 6, titled “Snapshots.” Here Kluck offers brief interviews with various churched people. Not only does the chapter feel a little bit out of place, but it also focuses a lot of attention on Chuck Colson who, through his efforts with Evangelicals and Catholics Together, seeks to undermine much of what the church is. It is a strange diversion in an otherwise excellent book.

I had expected this book to be written from a fully positive perspective, which is to say it would be more proactive than reactive—that it would explain why these men love the church without reference to all of those who seem not to love her. Yet much of the book is a response to Leonard Sweet and William Young and George Barna and the other naysayers. In this way it did cement itself in my mind as a true sequel to Why We’re Not Emergent; where the first book reacted to the leaders of the emerging church, this one responds equally to those who would lead the charge away from the church altogether. Not surprisingly, some of the antagonists in the first book make appearances here as well. And so, if you are eager to read a response to this kind of reaction against the church or if you are looking for an apologetic as to why you ought to love and value and treasure the church, this is a book you will enjoy and a book that will benefit you. Read this book and I am confident that you will come to a deeper love, a deeper appreciation, of both Christ and his church.

Buy it at Monergism Books

The following quote comes from Iain Murray’s book Evangelicalism Divided (on page 291 if you must know). I think it offers good food for thought (even on a Saturday morning).

The ecumenical call [in the mid-20th century] was not for truth and salt; it was supremely for oneness: the greater the unity of ‘the Church’, it was confidently asserted, the stronger would be the impression made upon the world; and to attain that end churches should be inclusive and tolerant. But it has never been by putting unity first that the church has changed the world. At no point in church history has the mere unity of numbers ever made a transforming spiritual impression upon others. On the contrary, it was the very period known as ‘the dark ages’ that the Papacy could claim her greatest unity in western Europe.

So if we would have true unity, we must have theology. We are to share, profess and enjoy unity with other believers, even those who do not share certain “lesser” doctrines. This is not to imply that any doctrine is unimportant, but simply that some are more important than others. J.C. Ryle wisely observed that believers should “keep the walls of separation as low as possible, and shake hands over them as often as you can.” But there are times when we must reject supposed unity because of the higher importance of truth and sound doctrine. To repeat Murray’s words, “it has never been by putting unity first that the church has changed the world.” Nor will it ever be.

It seems that life is filled, at almost every turn, with trials and difficulties. Some of these times of trail are light while others are terrible and weighty. Strangely, some of these trials are caused by times of great joy while others are caused by great pain. The birth of a child can prove to be almost as great a trial, despite being brought about by such joy, as the loss of a job or another occasion of pain. It is during times like this that I am particularly grateful to be a part of the church. In these times we see and feel God’s wisdom in bringing His people into this type of community.

I am one of those people that loves to help (most of the time, anyways). While I am a shamefully selfish person in many ways, I do derive joy from helping others, even if that help is expressed in something as simple as lending my back to help a family move, lending my van for hauling a crowd of people from place to place, or lending my time to help out at some occasion or another. Whether I always do this from a pure heart, deriving my joy from obedience to God in helping these people, is debatable. It is a strange and unique fact of the Christian faith that, as far as God is concerned, motives matter more than actions. God values a pure heart and one that seeks His honor above all. Far too often I know that I do things from the desire to be seen, known and praised. It’s pathetic really. Shameful. Yet it is all too human.

But while I love to help, sometimes from pure motives and sometimes from impure, I am not the type who likes to be helped. I assume that this is primarily an outworking of pride in my life. I am convinced that it is also a product of my upbringing. Despite not having any recent Dutch heritage, I was, in large part, raised among second generation Dutch-Canadians. I went to Dutch schools and churches and no doubt absorbed much of their culture and many of their values. The Dutch are, in so many ways, a noble group and, when saved, make some of the strongest, most committed Christians I’ve known. There are few groups I have seen that do a better job of taking care of and ministering to their own. While these Dutch Christians value hard work, they also take very good care of those who are unable to work because of age, infirmity or circumstance. These Dutch churches put to shame many congregations I have come across since where those who fall upon hard times are considered burdensome and are shunned rather than honored, left to their own rather than ministered to.

Yet while the Dutch people I knew took very good care of those who were unable to care for themselves, they still placed great value on self-sufficiency. Charity was something to be extended only to those who had a genuine need for it. While it was not generally considered shameful to need or accept charity, it was considered most shameful to request it when it was not absolutely necessary. Embedded deep in the Dutch culture is the value of a person pulling himself up by his own bootstraps, being strong, and showing no weakness. Those who were considered weak, especially when young, were often trampled underfoot. The Dutch schools I knew were full of weak, frightened people who feigned strength simply to survive. The churches were probably not much different.

It is a strange dichotomy, I suppose, but this desire to be self-sufficient was as much part of the culture as was the desire to help those who had genuine needs. Charity was valued as highly as self-sufficiency. This was the culture I absorbed as a child and teenager. It was the culture that, in some ways, I carry with me today. I am usually glad to extend charity, but am rarely as eager to express need or to accept help from others. I hate to feel weak.

It is only over the past few years that I have come to see the value of expressing weakness when I am weak. I have seen the value in asking people to come in to my life and to minister to me when I have needs. But then in my honest moments I see that I still hide in my pride too much of the time, not wishing to be a burden on others even in my weakness.

I have come up with a list of three reasons that Christians need to be honest about expressing weakness and need.

First, expressing weakness is an expression of humility. Conversely, it is only pride that keeps me from making my needs known and asking others to minister to me. When I am filled with pride, a strong and ever-present foe, I would rather suffer silently than humble myself and allow others to extend help to me. Far too often I have feigned strength when I am filled only with weakness. Far too often I have allowed pride to overwhelm humility and have suffered in my sinful silence.

Second, expressing weakness allows others to plead for me before God. There are times when my prayers are weak and filled with doubt. There are times when I don’t even know what to pray or how to pray for myself. In these times it is comforting to know that others are praying for me and holding me up before the throne of grace. What a blessing it is to be part of a body where we can express the needs of others and bring these before God.

Finally, when I refuse to express my weakness I refuse to give other people the opportunity to minister to me. I withhold a blessing from them. It is a strange fact that, while I am always eager and willing to help those who reach out to me, I am far less eager to reach out to others. I cannot count the number of times that I have been blessed by having the opportunity to help others. While I attempt to see extending help and charity as a selfless act, an act primarily for my own benefit, it is sometimes difficult not to! I have had my faith challenged and strengthened and have been greatly blessed in helping others. When I have heard expressions of gratitude by those I’ve been able to help I have often had to say, with honesty and humility I think, that it was surely a greater blessing to be able to help than it was to receive assistance. Why is it, then, that I am so hesitant to allow others the opportunity to be blessed by helping me? It seems to me that I must be as sinful in refusing to help those in need as I am in refusing to allow them to bless and minister to me when I have need.

We are in the midst of difficult economic times. While my country of Canada has been insulated against the downturn (at least when compared to our neighbors to the south), as 2009 dawns we are beginning to see greater evidence that we will not emerge from these times unscathed. In the past few weeks we’ve begun to see friends and neighbors lose their jobs and are beginning to hear of needs within our community. The stories from Canada are beginning to sound an awful lot like the stories I’ve heard from the United States and elsewhere.

None of us know how long these times will last and none of us know just how bad things will get. There are those who would argue that the worst is behind us; others argue that the pain has only just begun. I think we can be certain that before this is over churches will see an large numbers of brothers and sisters in Christ face financial crisis. And this will be a prime opportunity for the church to be the church. It will be a time for those people who are affected by the times to express need; it will be a time for those Christians who have weathered the storm to be a blessing to others. This is not a time or occasion for pride and bravado. It is not a time to withhold a blessing from another Christian by refusing to express need, to express weakness. As these times unfold, let’s let the church be the church, functioning just as God intends it.

The Call by Os Guinness is a book that was on my list of things to do for a long, long time before I actually settled down to read it. But once I got into it, I was amazed at just how much wisdom it contains. At one point Guinness discusses the importance of living life for an audience of One. He begins the chapter by reflecting on Andrew Carnegie and his lifelong desire to be able to parade through the streets of the city of his birth to prove to them that he had been able to become fantastically wealthy. He desired to be seen and known by a human audience.

Guinness talks about other examples of people who have been obsessed with the praise of men. He mentions Marlene Dietrich who would record the applause given at the end of her performances and would then play the recordings for visitors to her home. She would gather friends such as Judy Garland and Noel Coward and play them both sides of a record filled with applause, telling them solemnly what city each round of applause was from. Guinness quotes Mozart who wrote to his father, “I am never in a good humor when I am in a town where I am quite unknown.” He quotes an old French story which tells of a revolutionary who, when sitting in a Paris cafe, hears a disturbance outside. Jumping to his feet he cries, “There goes the mob. I am their leader. I must follow them!”

Such narcissism is shocking, yet is all too common. Some time ago a reader forwarded me a link to a copy of Sharon Stone’s rider, the document that describes her requirements when she accepts a role in a film. Reading the document is almost nauseating, yet is no doubt not uncommon for Hollywood standards. She demands, among other things, $3500 per week in unaccountable “per diem” funds, three nannies, two assistants, presidential suites, first-class travel, a deluxe motorhome, and the rights to keep all of the jewelery and wardrobe items she uses in the film. Even more shocking, to myself anyways, were the requirements dealing with publicity of the film. The rider insists that her name is given first position in the credits for the film and that her name be at least as big as the movie’s title. Her picture, if it appears in advertising, must be at least as big as, if not bigger, than any other person’s likeness. It goes on and on. As I read this I thought of a friend who used to work in the special events industry. She tells of a particular musician who insisted that no one turn their back on him. People serving him had to, quite literally, walk backwards when they left the room lest they turn their back on him. Reading this is enough to turn one’s stomach.

In The Call, Guinness discusses narcissim in the context of audience. Christians are to be motivated to serve and to please an audience of One. We are to called to seek the pleasure of God. Guinness finds it odd that in a century which began with some of the strongest leaders the world has known—Churchill, Roosevelt, Lenin and Stalin—has ended with a “weak style of leadership codependent on followership: the leader as panderer.” He quotes Winston Churchill, a man who had an amazing way of cutting to the heart of issues. “I hear it said that leaders should keep their ears to the ground. All I can say is that the British nation will find it very hard to look up to the leaders who are detected in that somewhat ungainly posture.” At another time he said, “Nothing is more dangerous…than to live in the temperamental atmosphere of a Gallup Poll—always feeling one’s pulse and taking one’s temperature.” Violet Bonham Carter once said of Churchill that he was “as impervious to atmosphere as a diver in his bell.” Why was this? Because Churchill knew his mandate and sought to fill it to the best of his abilities. He was far from perfect. In many ways he was a troubled, rude, unkind individual. Yet he led the British nation through a dark hour and his name lives in history as an example of a great leader.

The application to the church is obvious. In our day we have leader after leader, teacher after teacher, telling us that the leaders of the church must take their cues from the people. Leadership is seen ever more as leading the people where they want to go, not necessarily where they need to go. Leadership is shaped by fleeting public opinion more than objective standards.

Yet what the church needs is leaders who serve the audience of One—leaders who, like Churchill, are sure of their calling and their mandate. They care nothing for the whims of their followers or potential followers, but only for pleasing the one who has called them to be leaders. These words from Spurgeon, sent to me by a friend, seem particularly pointed:

Never think of the Church of God as if she were in danger. If you do, you will be like Uzza; you will put forth your hand to steady the ark, and provoke the Lord to anger against you. If it were in danger, I tell you, you could not deliver it. If Christ cannot take care of his Church without you, you cannot do it. Be still, and know that he is God… When you begin to say, “The Church is in danger! The Church is in danger!” what is that to thee? It stood before thou wert born; it will stand when thou hast become worm’s meat. Do thou thy duty. Keep in the path of obedience, and fear not. He who made the Church knew through what trials she would have to pass, and he made her so that she can endure the trials and become the richer for it. The enemy is but grass, the word of the Lord endureth for ever.

It is a strange gig, being a book reviewer. There are times when I spend weeks or months in anticipation of a new book only to find it a great disappointment. And then there are times when a book just shows up—a book I didn’t even know existed—and it takes my breath away. Such was the case with Love or Die by Alexander Strauch. While the book is large in dimensions (8.8 x 5.9, so slightly larger than an average paperback) it is short in length, coming in at just 112 pages (which includes a study guide, indexes and a couple of appendices). But despite its length, it packs quite a punch. I can think of few books I’ve read recently that have had so immediate an impact on me and have given me so much to think about. I trust, that with God’s help, the implications of this book will be with me always.

Love or Die is subtitled Christ’s Wake-Up Call to the Church and is an exposition of sorts of Revelation 2:2-6. In these verses, Christ praises the church at Ephesus for their works, their toil, their endurance and their discernment. But he also rebukes this church, saying “I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first.” He calls them to repent, lest He is forced to “remove your lampstand from its place.” This church, it seems, had once been marked by love; but somehow, in the intervening years, the love had been lost. The sound doctrine remained but the love had waned. Christ gave them this simple admonition: love or die.

Strauch divides his exposition into two parts. In the first, he reminds the Christian that it is possible to have sound doctrine, to be faithful to the gospel, to remain morally upright and to have the appearance of godliness, even while lacking in love. To lack in love is to ignore some of Christ’s clearest, most urgent admonitions. And yet many Christians are marked more by an appearance of sound doctrine than by a true love for God and love for one another. When Christ saw this in the church at Ephesus, He reminded the church to “Remember therefore from where you have fallen.” In Christ’s assessment, the only assessment that truly matters, this church had fallen, and this despite Christ’s commendations of them. “Remember, there is always one who walks among the churches, unseen but seeing all. How do you imagine Christ might evaluate your local church body?” Love is to be the distinguishing mark of the Christian.

No ancient or modern philosopher—Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Russell—ever taught such far-reaching ideas about love. No political figure, from Julius Caesar to Winston Churchill, has made such demands upon his followers to love. And no religious teacher, whether Buddha, Confucius, or Mohammed, ever commanded his followers to love one another as he loved them and gave his life for them. No other system of theology or philosophy says so much about the divine motivation of love (and holiness), or expresses love to the degree of Christ’s death on the cross, or makes the demands of love like the teaching of Jesus Christ and his apostles.

Christ offers a three-fold remedy to the lack of love in this church at Ephesus. He commands them to remember the love that had once marked their church; he tells them to recall “past joys, deeds, attitudes, and experiences in the life of the church in order to repeat them and act upon them.” He commands them to repent, by restoring the love they once possessed. And He commands them to do the works they did at first. They are to “reengage in the deeds of love they had once done but had abandoned.”

In the second part of this book, Strauch teaches how we can cultivate love. “Although God ultimately is the one who keeps us in his love and motivates us to love, there is also a human side of the equation. Scriptures directs all believers to pursue love, keep ourselves in the love of God, abide in Christ’s love, walk in love as Christ loved, and consider how to stir up one another to love and good deeds. Thus it is vital to our church communities and to the spiritual health of individual believers that we know how to cultivate love and protect love.” He dedicates a chapter to each of these topics: study love, pray for love, teach love, model love, guard love, practice love.

Following the Bible’s model, Strauch grounds love in the local church.

Love requires both a subject and an object, thus love is a corporate learning experience. We grow in love by engagement with other people, not in isolation from them.

Christians cannot develop love by sitting at home alone on the couch watching TV preachers or by attending a weekly, one-hour church service. It is only through participation in “the household of God,” the local church (1 Tim, 3:15), with all of its weaknesses and faults, that love is taught, modeled, learned, tested, practiced, and matured. By dealing with difficult people, facing painful conflicts, forgiving hurts and injustices, reconciling estranged relationships, and helping needy members, our love is tested and matures.

One simply cannot grow in love without the stresses and strains of life together in the household of God, the local church. The local church truly is “a spiritual workshop for the development of agape love” and “one of the very best laboratories in which individual believers may discover their real spiritual emptiness and begin to grow in agape love.” If you are not a participating member of a local church, then you are not in God’s school of love.

We know how the church at Ephesus responded to Christ’s rebuke. Some time around the beginning of the second century, Ignatius, one of the Apostolic Fathers, wrote a letter to this church at Ephesus. He had been arrested for his faith and was being taken to Rome to be executed. As he and his guards passed near Ephesus, a delegation of Christian brothers was sent to encourage him as he faced a martyr’s death. After this visit, Ignatius sent them a letter thanking them for their care. And in this letter he specifically praises their love, commending them as a church “characterized by faith in and love of Christ Jesus our Savior.” He rejoices that they “love nothing in human life, only God” and he comments on their church’s overseer saying he is “a man of inexpressible love.” He says that in the love shown to him by the delegation he could see the love of the entire church at Ephesus. These Christians heard and heeded the loving rebuke of Jesus Christ.

I know beyond any shadow of doubt that many of our churches—and perhaps your church, and perhaps mine—would hear this same rebuke from the lips of the one who walks among us unseen, but seeing all. This passage from Scripture is a gift from God that we might “hear what the Spirit says to the churches.” Though Love or Die is but a short book, it is an excellent one and I commend it to you. It would not be out of place in any church library or personal collection.

(It looks like the book has not yet been widely distributed, even though it was published last month. I can find it only at Amazon. They have only a couple of copies available but have more on the way.)

Jake Colsen is the author of So You Don’t Want to Go to Church Anymore. Jake Colsen does not exist. Rather, he is a pseudonym for the combined work of Dave Coleman and Wayne Jacobsen. You may recognize Wayne Jacobsen as one of the founders of Windblown Media, the company that published a little book called The Shack—a little book that has gone on to sell well over a million copies. As The Shack has found international renown, it has pulled in its wake Windblown Media’s two other titles, both of which are written or co-written by Jacobsen. At the moment I write this review, So You Don’t Want to Go to Church Anymore is ranked #259 in Books at Amazon and #4 in Religious & Spirituality Fiction (placing behind three editions of The Shack). Its success is very clearly related to that of The Shack (where it has an advertisement on the back page).

While So You Don’t Want to Go to Church Anymore must be evaluated on its own merits, comparisons to The Shack are inevitable. Both are works of fiction but fiction designed to teach theology; both involve an ignorant Christian who meets a wiser person who explains to him the truth about Christianity (in The Shack this person is God while in this book it is a man named John); both books focus primarily on dialog and are in no way Ted Dekker-like thrillers where the theology is veiled in the story; both are successes for their publisher and, in their own way, most unlikely successes.

So You Don’t Want to Go to Church Anymore is a story about a man named Jake (the book is meant to be fictitiously autobiographical where the author, Jake Colsen, writes about his own experiences). Jake is an associate pastor at a fast-growing mega-church. In the book’s early pages he encounters a man named John whom he comes to believe may just be the Apostle John (though this question is never actually resolved). While he does not have much of an opportunity to interact with John at first, he hears words which set his heart and mind reeling. He realizes quickly that his Christian faith is almost hopelessly rote and anemic. “Although I had been a Christian for more than two decades, I had no concept of who Jesus was as a person and no idea how I could change that.” This book covers a span of months or years which sees him grow from a pastor of immature faith to a man of wisdom and mature faith.

The book is framed around continued encounters with this character John. In fact, almost every chapter begins with Jake thinking or worrying about a particular issue, only to have John quickly and mysteriously materialize. John helps Jake overcome his fears and his questions and then disappears to leave him to think about and to implement the things he now knows.

The predominant theme of the book is issues surrounding the local church (and because I would like to keep this review reasonably short, I will deal only with this issue in the review). The overall teaching is that the church as most Christians understand it is a human institution and one designed primarily to gain and to protect power. The Bible, according to the authors, does not teach that Christians should be part of any kind of institutional church. This is not to say that we should leave mega-churches to join smaller house churches; rather, we should abandon this kind of church model altogether. While the authors do not clearly or precisely share what Christians should or can do in its place, it seems that it would look something like this: “Instead of trying to build a house church, learn to love one another and share one another’s journey. Who is he asking you to walk alongside right now and how can you encourage them? I love it when brothers and sisters choose to be intentional in sharing God’s life together in a particular season. So, yes, experiment with community together. You’ll learn a lot. Just avoid the desire to make it contrived, exclusive, or permanent. Relationships don’t work that way.” The book’s appendix is a pamphlet written by Jacobsen which addresses his view of church life. Here he says, “Fellowship happens where people share the journey of knowing Jesus together. It consists of open, honest sharing, genuine concern about one another’s spiritual well being and encouragement for people to follow Jesus however he leads them.” By the book’s closing pages, Jake has left the church and now meets irregularly with an irregular group of people from his community. This is presented as being a form of authentic spirituality that is closer to the biblical model than that which is practiced by the vast majority of Christians today. It is the better alternative to church as most Christians know and experience it.

Of course I would be drawn to this model, too, if my church was anything like the one Jake comes from. His congregation is much like a drunken fraternity. The pastor is an angry man who holds tightly to his power, who expects people to lie to protect his reputation and who is having an abusive affair with a vulnerable congregation member. The members of the church are petty and divisive, heartlessly shunning those who disagree with them, demanding immediate restitution for any perceived wrong, persecuting children who do not properly memorize their verses, and fighting for positions of prominence within the local church. Overall, the authors give an exceedingly negative portrayal of the local church. It is a portrayal that includes all the stereotypes so treasured by those who hate Christianity. The church members are hopelessly ignorant, able to recite chapter and verse but knowing nothing of the “heart” of Scripture. Hence even two lifelong pastors react with apparent shock when they learn that “church” in the Bible primarily refers not to an institution but to a people (as if no Protestant has ever bothered to distinguish between the visible and the invisible church). Against this brutal portrayal of Christian community, the authors present their alternative. And needless to say, it looks awfully good in comparison.

But what if Jacobsen, instead of fabricating a ridiculous parody of a church, had looked to the New Testament church? While So You Don’t Want to Go to Church Anymore is theological fiction, the reader may well note that there is little reference to the Bible. Because it is fiction we might not expect to see direct references to particular passages (and, indeed, we do not) but there is little by way even of indirect references. John assumes a certain knowledge of Jesus and common sense spirituality and uses this as his bridge to the hearts and minds of the reader. Rather than saying, “The Bible says this…” he tends to say, “This is what the church is like… Doesn’t my version look better?” And of course, with such a dysfunctional church in mind, it really does look better. He looks to the New Testament church on occasion, but is awfully selective, taking only those elements that further his case. He eschews any kind of church hierarchy or office (such as elder and deacon) and in its place leaves only peer-to-peer relationships. If it is in any way formal or organized, it is wrong, it would seem.

Though Jacobsen does occasionally affirm that institutional churches may do some good, the theme of the book comes through loud and clear. In the appendix Jacobsen says, without any apparent trace of hyperbole, “I can tell you absolutely that my worst days outside organized religion are still better than my best days inside it.” And from cover-to-cover, the book is heartlessly negative towards the local church. Christians should, and perhaps even must, withdraw. But the case is made through emotion and through false comparison. Those who hold closely to Scripture may affirm some of what Jacobsen teaches in this book, but they must reject its overall message.

Here are a few interesting quotes from the book:

“Most of what we call ‘church’ today are nothing more than well-planned performances with little actual connection between believers. Believers are encouraged toward a growing dependency on the system or its leadership rather than on Jesus himself. We spend more energy conforming behavior to what the institution needs rather than helping people be transformed at the foot of the cross!”

“Jesus indicated that whenever two or three people get together focused on him, they would experience the vitality of church life.”

“My favorite expression of body life is where a local group of people chooses to walk together for a bit of the journey by cultivating close friendships and learning how to listen to God together.”

“By providing services to keep people coming, [an institution] unwittingly becomes a distraction to real spiritual life. It offers an illusion of spirituality in highly orchestrated experiences, but it cannot show people how to live each day in him through the real struggles of life.”

“The more organization you bring to church life, the less life it will contain.”

“As long as we see church life as a meeting we’ll miss its reality and its depth. If the truth were told, the Scriptures tell us very little about how the early church met. It tells us volumes about how they shared life together. They didn’t see the church as a meeting or an institution, but as a family living under Father.”

“Any human system will eventually dehumanize the very people it seeks to serve and those it dehumanizes the most are those who think they lead it.”

“[God’s wrath at the cross] wasn’t an expression of the punishment sin deserves; it was the antidote for sin and shame.”

“Religious systems prey on people’s insecurity. They haven’t learned how to live in Father’s love, to follow his voice and depend on him.”

There are many books available today that address the needs, the responsibilities and the health of the local church. While The Purpose Driven Church is probably the best-known of these, there are plenty of others as well, many of which were written in the aftermath of that book’s unparalleled success. To this point the books have been largely focused at pastors and church leaders.

Where many books have been written describing a healthy church (among the most useful of which are Mark Dever’s Nine Marks of a Healthy Church and The Deliberate Church), I cannot think of any that describe the state of a healthy church member. But that has changed with Thabiti Anyabwile’s new book What is a Healthy Church Member? In this small 120-page book, Anyabwile one-ups Mark Dever’s nine marks of a healthy church by providing ten marks of a healthy church member. The goals for this volume are made plain early-on. “This little book is written,” he says in the Introduction, “in the hope that you might discover or rediscover what it means to be a healthy member of a local church, and what it means to contribute to the overall health of the church. … While Nine Marks of a Healthy Church primarily addressed pastors in the task of church reform, this book seeks to address the people that pastors lead and to encourage those people to play their part in helping the local church to increasingly reflect the glory of God.”

Here are the ten marks Anyabwile focuses on:

1. A healthy church member is an expositional listener
2. A healthy church member is a biblical theologian
3. A healthy church member is gospel Saturated
4. A healthy church member is genuinely converted
5. A healthy church member is a biblical evangelist
6. A healthy church member is a committed member
7. A healthy church member seeks discipline
8. A healthy church member is a growing disciple
9. A healthy church member is a humble follower
10. A healthy church member is a prayer warrior

Each of these ten marks receives a chapter-length treatment that concludes with questions for reflection and application. I do not think Anyabwile will be offended to read that I found little that is truly original in this book. There is little that has not been said elsewhere—Anyabwile offers nothing shockingly novel or original. Instead he turns to the basic requirements and responsibilities of those who seek to honor God through their commitment to the local church. He writes clearly and winsomely about these ten marks, encouraging Christians to be committed and to remain committed to their local churches. He gives them a list of marks, a list of characteristics, that they can use to gauge their effectiveness in serving Christ through His church.

While the book is valuable to individual readers, it is also ideally suited for small group study. In my church we often read books together and I am sure this is the kind of book the leadership is likely to consider for future study.

What Is A Healthy Church Member? is a valuable little volume and one I commend to you. Those who read it are sure to benefit from it.

A short time ago I was trying to help a friend redesign the bulletin for our church. In need of inspiration, I took to the web and began looking for examples of bulletins. I was rather surprised to see that there was really not a whole lot available out there. The majority of sample bulletins I dug up were the Christian equivalent of Microsoft Word’s clip art collections—covered with awful art that someone thought would appeal to Christians. Most of them were unsightly. Few offered anything interesting in terms of the layout of the information within; it is the text layout that interests me more than the “bells and whistles.”

I thought it would be interesting and perhaps helpful to piece together a small collection of church bulletins. Perhaps this can help inspire others as they attempt to create the perfect bulletin for their church.

So I am asking if you will do me a favor. Will you keep the bulletin from your church this weekend and send it to me? You can scan it, photograph it (assuming it’s a photo of reasonable quality) or mail it to me. Once I build up a collection, I will post them for all of us to see.

Thanks in advance!