This year my son Josh will be playing football. Every day last year he arrived at school at 6 AM to lift weights. Every week this summer he meets with teammates for workouts. This is his last year to play organized sports for a school, so he wants to make it his best.
About 30 years ago (gulp) I was at the same place. I remember my coach telling us a real football player had to be agile, mobile, and hostile! Now, after two knee operations and a complete hip replacement (a little too hostile I suppose) I find myself fragile, senile, docile, and in denial. I can talk about football a lot, but I don’t play it too well.
Seems to me the American church has learned to talk well and play poorly. We love to focus on the issues at the edge, to debate our differences, and to point out inconsistencies. Some do that remarkably well. And of course we should intelligently, courteously debate vital issues. I have read many letters between men of God in the Great Awakening of differing theological persuasions: Whitefield to Wesley and Wesley back to Whitefield; Whitefield to Zinzendorf, Whitefield to Howell Harris, Edwards to his detractors. The courtesy shown by these men even when disagreeing vehemently is instructive.
Many are the issues that divide us: alcohol and Calvinism are a couple of current examples. But what are the issues that unite us? What are those issues that we can agree on which could provoke us to good works?
I confess that I am more of a Barnabas than a Paul. I would rather encourage than argue, although both matter (well encouragement and debate). I long to see a movement of God that would be evidently just that: a “surprising work of God,” to use Edwards’ term. What might such a movement look like?
–Perhaps we would all be broken and repentant when we hear Dr. Rainer tell us that in a recent survey of pastors 53% had shared Christ with no one in the previous 6 months. My reading of the Puritan Baxter, the Methodist Wesley, and the Baptist Spurgeon makes me conclude each would be provoked by such idleness.
–Perhaps we would all agree that preachers alone will never reach America, nor was that God’s intention, but that like the Acts we could see a movement where regular folks cannot help but preach the good news (not from a pulpit) like the men of Cyrene and Cyprus in Acts 11. But preachers can set the example.
–Perhaps we would see that our institutionalism causes us to change the window dressing regularly while the house is falling down (like changing worship style without recognizing that we need to get out of the building and into the culture).
–Perhaps we could ask ourselves probing questions like just how many unchurched people do we know well enough to invite to lunch, or how many have been in our home over the last year? Maybe we would realize being like Jesus is determined far more by the opinion of lost people we know than saved people we impress.
–Maybe we would see genuine repentance over the gross godlessness in the lives of ministers. We have moved from preachers running off with secretaries (as if that were not bad enough) to ministers going to jail for being sexual predators. The sins of the priests are the sins of the people.
–Could we hear the thundering preaching of the Word of God that actually brought such conviction that people would be visibly, noticeably, eternally transformed? Perhaps we would be broken that people are leaving our churches to find God.
Whew. I have quizzes to write and syllabi to prepare. But one last thought: Jim Elliott, who 50 years ago this past January died in Ecuador,wrote in his journal:
“We are still utterly ordinary, so commonplace, while we profess to know a power the 20th-century does not reckon with. But we are harmless, and therefore unharmed. We are spiritual passivists, non-militants, conscientious objectors in this battle to the death with principalities and powers in high places. Meekness must be had for contact with men, but brass, outspoken boldness is required to take part in the comradeship of the cross. The world cannot hate us, we’re too much like its own. Oh that God would make us dangerous.”
I want to join that movement.