National Parks and Tsunami

This week the new Ken Burns series on the National Parks is airing. It is very good, and as I have been watching it I am both reminded of the experiences I have had viewing the handiwork of God in Yellowstone, the Tetons, the Grand Canyon, the Smokies and also find myself anticipating the time when I will get to visit Yosemite for the first time. The National Parks are indeed a national treasure and I agree with Teddy Roosevelt that the Grand Canyon and the Yellowstone/Tetons are so unique in the world and so breathtaking that all Americans should endeavor to visit them.

Yet I am also struck with the tone of the series that presents nature and wilderness as an unqualified good with no dark side. Though they mention at times how the frontier was in the 1800's viewed as something to be conquered rather than preserved, that point of view is presented as something to be looked down upon. This strikes me as a very recent point of view, and one that would fit into what C. S. Lewis calls 'chronological snobbery'. We take our own modern opinion to be so vastly superior to what came before that we don't even try to understand why our viewpoint is different.

Today the news provided a good opportunity to recognize the dark side of nature and reflect on our chronological snobbery as tsunami hit the Samoan islands and an earthquake hit Indonesia on the same day. Meanwhile the typhoon that hit the Phillippines a couple of days ago has now passed over southeast Asia and the death toll is starting to emerge. Among all of these some 1000 or so folks are now dead with the count likely to rise further in the days to come. The economic damage is huge as well.

While these kinds of storms and quakes are not the same as simply undeveloped land in parks, they do illustrate that nature is both enemy and friend. To the Pilgrims and all those after them who lived on the frontier, cutting down the woods for shelter and fuel and to allow farming was necessary to avoid death due to winter cold and lack of food. Killing grizzly bears and mountain lions and rattle snakes was to necessary to keep your children and milk cow alive. While nature provided wood and meat, it was also menacing in its ability to kill you and your family. It was to be conquered to stay alive. While many took this very much too far, slaughtering animals for feathers or hides, the threat of wilderness was clear to everyone.

In our sanitized, urbanized world we romanticize the wilderness and overlook the real threat the natural world posed to frontier families. Many early pioneers went to the opposite extreme, demonizing it. The truth lies in between. We are stewards of the earth, to both utilize its bounty and also keep it sustainable for the future. Nature is both beautiful and threatening, as people also can be. And so the apostle Paul concluded that both man and nature are fallen, and both are created by God and reflect His handiwork. Those two sides remain in tension as long as this earth remains.

Yom Kippur, Passover and the Lord's Supper

The sermon at our church this past Sunday was about the marriage feast of the Lamb in the book of Revelation, chapter 19, which seems to occur immediately before Armageddon. Since the chronology of Revelation is rather hard to sort out, it may not actually be in that order in my opinion, and in the sermon the pastor discussed the various concepts of the second advent of Christ and whether it happens pre-tribulation, mid-tribulation or post-tribulation. I agree with him that the pre-trib point of view requires a very strained reading of Scripture and is rather in conflict with the rest of the teaching in the Bible about suffering. I tend to think that the church may have to endure the entire tribulation, not escaping even mid-tribulation, but the truth is that no one really knows. The excessive confidence of the pronouncements by Tim LaHaye, Hal Lindsey, and others are out of line in my opinion. We just don't know how all of that will unfold.



Anyway, after that discussion came the wedding feast of the Lamb and one of the points was that the Lord's supper anticipates that wedding feast. I commented here recently about how often the Bible compares Christianity to marriage, and this is another of those and this time the comparison has to do with when He is fully united with the Church, which is His betrothed until He returns. As we take the Lord's supper, we both look backward to the cross and forward to the marriage feast.



Since Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, happens in September the same week as this sermon, I was reminded of how that holiday relates to Passover, one looking back and the other more forward looking. The Passover lamb died to provide the blood for the doorpost in Egypt, protecting Israel from the death angel, causing him to pass over their homes. It is celebrated with a roasted lamb, bread, and wine as well as bitterherbs and salt water and looks back to that event in Egypt. Jesus became the Lamb who took away the need for more sacrificial lambs and took away our tears and bitterness, so the Lord's supper is celebrated with only the bread and wine. No other lamb will ever be needed. We look backward to His act of sacrifice in that way at the Lord's supper, and the absence of the lamb, bitter herbs, and salt water give testimony to what He did and it, as Paul said, 'proclaims the Lord's death until he comes' (I Cor 11:26).



And when He comes, we will do what Christ promised when He first celebrated the Lord's supper with the Disciples, saying about the bread and wine, ' I will not drink of the fruit of the vine again until that day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God' (Mark 14:25 but also Luke 22:18 and Matt 26:29). This could well be at the marriage feast of Revelation 19. I think of Yom Kippur as a fresh start, with the sins being carried off by the 'scape goat' and a chance to begin anew, and in that way the forward looking part of the Lord's supper, coming as it did in a sermon at the time of Yom Kippur, reminded me of that. Yom Kippur also comes at the start of the Jewish new year, which is a forward-looking time. Most often I only think about the backward looking part of the Lord's supper and omit the forward looking part. I appreciated, and needed the reminder about, the forward looking part.

Discipleship: Mentoring, Tutoring, or something else?

Our men's group just finished reading and discussing the book Transforming Discipleship and I have reached a few conclusions based on that discussion and the book. Things I like in the book include the description of a disciple as 'a self-initiating, reproducing, fully devoted follower of Christ' and the diagnosis of some of the reasons why there is so little discipleship within the church, which has mostly to do with both pastors and the congregation not seeing making disciples as a primary reason for the existence of the church. Most act as if the Great Commission in Matt 28:18-20 says 'go and do church' instead of 'go and make disciples of all nations'.

As the book reaches its recommended course of action, though, the recommendations seemed to me to be pretty much the same as what happens on a college campus: commit to a one year small group, commit something like 5 hours a week to the overall effort (that includes group time, preparation, going and doing ministry), commit to the relationships and the risk of being transparent in the group, and committing to at least seriously consider leading a group the next year. This is to me a key issue: most folks with careers, mortgages, kids and some other basic commitments at church already don't have that time even if they are interested.

I had commented before on how discipling ministries seem to be effective on college campuses but much less so in local churches, and so here are some conclusions about what I think it would take for discipling to work within the local church:

• First it needs integration within the church program. At least in evangelical churches there is already a lot of 'content' on offer through Sunday School classes, sermons, other bible studies, etc. Adding more content is not needed: making the current content more relevant would be much better than yet another, separate time of study.
• I have commented elsewhere that I see discipling as different from mentoring. Mentoring is more about offering advice and sponsorship, less about training and doing things jointly. Discipling is more a group activity, less of a leader:follower activity. In that regard, a blog I saw today titled 'Mentoring is Overrated:Try Tutoring Instead' by Michael Schrage at Harvardbusiness.org made me think: maybe tutoring is a good paradigm for discipling in a church. If sermons and sunday bible study is the 'classroom', then the small discipleship group is more like a peer tutoring session (working on the difficult areas, asking the questions you can't ask in class) and peer tutors are not nearly so intimidating as a professor or a pastor.
• The time commitment has to be manageable: integrating the content with sunday school can certainly help that. Integrating the 'peer tutoring' with other ministries would do even more. Why isn't the goal of discipling built into all the other church ministries? How does choir build disciples? How does the sports ministry build disciples? How does women's ministry build disciples? Integration will be a must for it to work. The current patchwork of programs that seem to be unrelated to each other and without a common theme should have a common theme of building disciples.
• The content has to have more flexibility than in the book. An effort that takes a canned program of weekly meetings, works through it in a year, then moves those people out to do the same content with others next year is not likely to work for people who are out of school in my opinion. There is such a wide range of backgrounds in a church, folks with totally different gaps regarding how they could become 'self-initiating, reproducing, fully devoted followers of Christ' that one canned program is going to fit only a few.
• To do all of this the pastoral staff will need to see building disciples as their key calling; not preaching, not worship, not pastoral care. Those others are important parts elements of being a disciple but are not ends in themselves.
• All of this re-confirmed to me what a great window of opportunity are the college years. If those years are missed it is much harder to build disciples in small groups later.

More on Marriage in the News

Continuing from last time, the current (October) issue of First Things has an interesting article titled 'What does Woman Want? The War between the Sexless" which discusses a number of recent articles by women in The Atlantic, Time, various blogs and books that have a common theme of middle aged women divorcing their husbands, claiming that their marriage is barren of sexual intimacy, and assigning blame mostly to things like extended life expectancy making marriage unsustainable, having been intended for a society where most people die much younger than now. The author of this article, Mary Eberstadt, effectively points out how bizarre this all is and makes some pointed observations, such as:

• Wharton economists have assembled surveys over the past 35 years showing steadily decreasing female happiness in general. This is despite large advances in education (more in college now than men), in job equality, sexual freedom, longer life expectancy,closing the wage gap, etc. Instead of improving their happiness, women's happiness is steadily declining, now less than men though historically it had been higher than men.


• Womens' and mens' narcissism is increasing. A study of 16,000 collegians personality tests showed a sharp increase in responses to such statements as 'I am an important person' (in 1950 12% agreed with this one; it was 80% by the 1980's)


• Women are becoming more the instigator of divorce. A recent Parade poll showed 70% of men said they would never leave their spouse, versus 50% of women say they have considered leaving.


• Men used to complain about sex-withholding wives and used it to justify affairs; now women do exactly that same thing. That is the whole gist of The Atlantic article 'Let's Call the Whole Thing Off'' by one Sandra Tsing Loh about her decision to seek a divorce.

Eberstadt could have done better in coming up with more clear conclusions from her survey of the angst this summer about marriage from female 'elites' in the media, but she does point out that much of this is the price of feminism, and part of the price of feminism has been its acceptance of pornography. As the article points out, pornography becomes an easy substitute for sexual intimacy in situations where that intimacy is strained by the pressures of life and marriage, and porn's easy availability now only makes it worse. Women have accepted porn in their quest for their own sexual license. Now it is helping destroy the intimacy they say they want, in addition to their own destructive work via promiscuity, abortion, narcissism, and career obsession.

I would add another point: competition. Loh paints a generality of the modern man as a sexless, sex-withholding 'competitor wife'. That is amazing since men historically have been blamed for being sex-obsessed and indeed that is why men are so vulnerable to porn. So what is going on? My opinion is that feminist women have been obsessed with competition with men to the point that they have made the home a place of competition instead of a place of acceptance. The word 'competitor' in 'competitor wife' is key. Men do not like to compete against women, especially their wives. Not in sports, not in school, not in a debate (see Hillary versus Barack for example), not anywhere. But now, men are competing with their wives to maintain their self respect as a provider, as a leader, and as a lover. In the home competition does not work. It shuts down intimacy and porn becomes an easy escape for many. I am not justifying porn: as I have said before, porn is a lie. But is an easy out for those tired of competing against their own wives. It is rather ironic that these feminists who have so strenuously insisted in competing against their husbands now find themselves in a no-win competition against the air-brushed, silicone-implanted, liposuctioned lie that is pornography.

Marriage in the News

Today's USA Today included an op/ed piece about how secularism is saving marriage. Since I commented recently that 'marriage is on shaky ground' in the post about grace and the radical idea that is marriage, I thought I should comment on that article. In addition, the current issue of First Things (the October issue: yes, the magazine gurus have decreed that it is now October even though it is only September 14) includes and article titled 'What does Woman Want', which goes well beyond Mel Gibson's take on that.

First of all let's look at the USA Today nonsense: either Oliver Thomas, who wrote the article, simply doesn't understand statistics or he is living in a land of make believe. Here is a broader view of the statistics: yes, the divorce rate did drop to the lowest rate as a % of marriages since 1970. Unfortunately, several other trends have been going on for a number of years as well including:

• The total % of unmarried women has moved steadily upward since 1960, from about 30% to over 40%. In 1960 the number of unmarried women was about half the number of married women; now the numbers are nearing equivalence and if the current trend continues, unmarried women will pass the number of married women in a decade or so.
• The average age of marriage is increasing (up to 27 for men, versus 22 back when I got married)
• The number of unmarried couple households has increased 10x since 1960

So how does this translate to secularism saving marriage? It doesn't. What it does imply is that fewer and fewer people are getting married, and those that do so marry later. This would more likely imply that those most committed to the idea of marriage are the ones getting married since the stigma of being unmarried, either alone or co-habiting, is now less. When the people most committed to marriage as a concept are the ones getting married, wouldn't you expect lower divorce rates? I would. And is there any evidence that the folks most committed to the idea of marriage are the more secular, non-religious folks? None.

To look at the long term trends in marriage statistics, visit www.biblenews1.com/marriage/marriags.htm . They have plotted the data from the U.S. Census Bureau, so this is not some survey skewed by the sampling plan. It is just census data, conveniently plotted. One thing you will note is that in 1982-83, during the last recession of similar severity to the current one, the divorce rate also dropped. There have also been several articles about how hard times force marriage partners to delay divorce and often to come together as a team.

So what is to be made of the drop in divorce rates? My opinion is that in light of the long term marriage statistics and the current recession combined, it was entirely predictable and has absolutely nothing to do with secularism. Quite the opposite.

However, there are some secular forces that are contributing to the long term negative trends in marriage, which the First Things article discusses. More on that next time.

Missions and Foreign Aid

In finishing up Philip Yancey's book Finding God in Unexpected Places there was an essay on fund raising for Christian causes, and in the current edition (Summer) of The City (this is a free quarterly from Houston Baptist University, and well worth reading) there was an article on foreign aid and why it has failed so miserably, especially in Africa. I was struck again by how foreign aid and church missions are two sides of the same coin: those who are 'haves' seeking to help the 'have nots', though the one is more secular and driven by governments and celebrities (or the crooks at the U.N.) and the other by churches. Neither one seems to be working very well from my point of view.

The article in The City reviews the book Dead Aid: Why Aid is not Working... by Dambisa Moyo who was born and grew up in Zambia and has worked for both the World Bank and Goldman Sachs. The author seems well qualified on the subject of grants and loans to Africa, whether from governments, the World Bank or folks like Bono and Live Aid. The book concludes succinctly that those who think well of handing cash to corrupt and incompetent regimes are not focused on the facts and are more interested in salving their own conscience than in making a difference. Her gripe is not with emergency disaster relief after an earthquake or that sort of thing: more with the ongoing handing over of billions to local programs that consistently fail to make a difference, and have been doing so for years.

These are in contrast to the 'micro loans' efforts, which are mostly private and to individuals to start a small business, not done through government. These do seem to make a difference, but do not address huge issues for the most part (like Aids, building schools, and so on).

I agree that most foreign aid programs are 'broken', and I wonder if many missions are, too. Again in Yancey's book he comments on his visits to Africa and how even the church pastors admit to multiple partners outside their marriage in many places (72% of pastors in South Africa, by a World Vision survey there, with an average of 3-4 partners). Yet 70% of South Africans attend church. Something is seriously wrong. As I look at the history of missions, especially the short term mission trips so popular at the moment, I wonder what they have accomplished for the 'have nots'. They seem to be more aimed at the 'haves', to stir up their interest and emotions. I wonder if we would not be better off to focus on buidling water purification plants and sewer systems, for instance. Certainly just sending money instead of going on short term trips is not the answer, as the Dead Aid book clearly shows. We would not be able to just send money to build these things: we would need to go do it. And yet there also needs to be some amount of personal touch, person to person. Infrastructure alone won't do it.

It seems to me that both official aid programs and missions may be out of balance: the governmental and quasi-governmental efforts all about money and the church programs all about people, when a balance of both people contact and infrastructure (instead of money) is needed.

Faith and Grace in Marriage

The Bible very often and very intentionally compares our relationship to God with marriage. Unfaithfulness to God is called 'adultery' in both the Old and New Testaments; the church in the New Testament is called the 'bride of Christ'; Revelation speaks of Christ's return as the beginning of the 'wedding feast'; and so on. In Corinthians we are told that marriage within the faith is the only permissible type of marriage since to marry someone who does not share the faith is to join Christ with Belial, uniting the concepts of marriage and our relationshi with God, not just comparing them.

With that in mind, Phillip Yancey in Finding God in Unexpected Places includes a few essays on what he calls 'the scandal of grace'. One of those scandalous parts of the faith is that grace is accepted 'in advance': that is, Christ ann0unces that our sins are forgiven once for all, and then provides the indwelling Spirit as a 'seal' to show it is permanent, before it is seen whether we will remain faithful. This is very much like announcing that marriage is 'until death do us part' in advance of seeing whether your partner remains faithful. So much of our culture is premised on performance: work, school, athletics all hinge on being accepted conditional on our performance. The 'scandal' of grace is that acceptance is offered in advance of performance, on the premise that if our heart is changed our actions will also change. Many religions remain performance based. So do many families.

For many this is a stumbling block for both marriage and Christianity. In his essay, Yancey points out that 'if a bridegroom on his wedding night sat down to negotiate terms of infidelity (saying) 'Ok, you have guaranteed the future, so just how far can I go with other women?" we would be shocked, and we would also know that this man does not understand what love involves. We know that in this marriage his approach of 'what can I get away with' will prevent him from knowing what love is really about and will prevent him from making the necessary commitment that allows marital love in the first place. We will question his heart. We accept the reasons for an up-front commitment in marriage but do not see how our relationship with God would be the same way: committing permanently at the front end while requiring ongoing grace and forgiveness in order to last.

Marriage in American culture, and western culture generally, is on shaky ground. I think that is in large part due to our approach to it with a consumer mentality, of getting what we want, rather than approaching it as a matter of faith and grace. Clearly the up-front commitment is an exercise of faith, not knowing what trials lie ahead but committing to do what it takes to remain faithful, just as Christ commits to keep and sanctify His Church. The ongoing grace to keep it alive seems to in short supply, however. We are hesitant to extend grace in everyday ways, to meet our spouses daily needs for respect or acceptance or affection, let alone in bigger things.

The idea of what we call 'the security of the believer' is indeed scandalous as Yancey says, but no more scandalous than the idea of marriage. Both ideas are losing traction in western culture, and that explains a lot of our problems.