Needed: Leaders for the Church

I continue to plod through Wells' diagnosis of what ails the church and his prescription for her restoration and health. As I read him, I find myself "strangely warmed" by his vision of what the future leaders of the church will be called upon to be. Note: I said "be" and not "do", mainly because what I think is mostly wrong in the church is that we know all to well how to "do" and have lost what it means to "be" what God called us to be. From God in the Wasteland,

I believe the vision of the evangelical church is now clouded, its internal life greatly weakened, its future very uncertain, and I want something better for it. I want the evangelical church to be the church. I want it to embody a vibrant spirituality. I want the church to be an alternative to post-modern culture, not a mere echo of it. I want a church that is bold to be different and unafraid to be faithful, a church that is interested in something better than using slick marketing techniques to swell the numbers of warm bodies occupying sanctuaries, a church that reflects an integral and undiminished confidence in the power of God's Word, a church that can find in the midst of our present cultural breakdown the opportunity to be God's people in a world that has abandoned God.

To be the church in this way, it is also going to have to find in the coming generation leaders who exemplify this hope for its future and who will devote themselves to seeing it realized. To succeed, they will have to be people of large vision, people of courage, people who have learned again what it means to live by the Word of God, and, most importantly, what it means to live before the holy God of that Word.

First, the church is going to have to learn how to detect worldiness and make a clear decision to be weaned from it. ...unless we recognize the ways in which the world has insinuated its tentacles into the life of the church, unless we unmask its deceits, the church will continue to wander in the wasteland, weakened and bewildered.

Second, the church is going to have to get much more serious about itself, cease trying to be a supermarket serving the needs of religious consumers, and become instead a force of countercultural spirituality that draws from the interconnected lives of its members and is expressed through their love, service, worship, understanding, and proclamation. That is a tall order, for the tempo and organization of the modern world, which exact a heavy toll on all who attempt to keep pace with it, clearly mitigate against this happening. But it can happen. (214-15)

We must begin to see the ways in which we are already too much indebted to modernity's esteem and methods and ask what it is that the world needs and what the gospel provides: to believe that all is not as it appears in this present age of naturalistic, segmented, and discordant living. We are not homeless in the cosmos but are very much under the watchful eye and hand of God, and thus are in need of coming to terms with his reality. But the nature of his reality is precisely the question today, and that is why the biblical revelation is so valuable. In it, "God is there and he is not silent".

All the world will not embrace such a God proclaimed, but it cannot ignore him.

BHT

Intersection: Urban African-American Youth, Mathematics, & Religion

Once in a while, something comes up in class that just begs for questions, discussion, and dialogue. Recently, the name Pascal came up (not unnaturally, since it’s a senior math class). This time, however, I mentioned the fact that he was not merely a mathematician, but a mathematician turned theologian and philosopher, whose departure from academia was greatly lamented and even resented by many of his 17th century contemporaries. They were particularly interested to hear me say that I thought his thoughts are more substantial and helpful than many of those published today.

This last claim piqued my students’ curiosity such that they demanded proof. So I went home that night and put a page and a half of my favorite quotes of his from his work, Pensees. The one that caught the greatest attention was the following:

Man’s greatness and wretchedness are so evident that the true religion must necessarily teach us that there is in man some great principle of greatness and some great principle of wretchedness.

It must also account for such amazing contradiction.

Of the many observations that could be made after reading such a statement, I chose to note that Pascal is not making any explicit claim about God or religion, or even why those who disagree with him are wrong; rather, he’s making a claim about what the truth will do for people existentially. The truth, he says, will give an adequate explanation for why we see so much glory and so much blight, not on the world itself, but within man himself. The “true religion” will make sense of this paradox called man, and anything that doesn’t isn’t true.

Questions of how we determine truth are so unpopular in academia today (and are growing more and more out of favor even in pop culture) that criteria for truth are rarely discussed. But here I am, in a public institution filled with young black students, many of whom think that dead people know less than they do simply because the dead people came before them, who are intrigued, even captivated, by the truth-criteria of a 17th century European Catholic mathematician-turned-theologian. It’s enough to take my breath away. They are beginning to think existentially and reflectively about themselves as human beings.

We went through several other quotes over the next half hour, gaining their meaning before trying to decide whether or not Pascal had anything to say worth hearing, and in every case someone found what he said to be insightful, true, helpful, or corroborating their own experience. By the end of our time, they were wistfully lamenting that our school doesn’t offer a philosophy class.

Of course, I’m not so naïve as to think that if they took such a class that every moment would be so rewarding for them or their instructor; these kinds of discussions happen only infrequently, and usually only gain momentum on days when they’d rather find some reason not to do “work” (a pep-rally was scheduled for this particular day and had lightened the mood enough to make “work” optional and philosophy tolerable). However, it affirms again my convictions about them, as unlike myself as they are: if we are all, in fact, made in God’s image, then we ought to expect that such images wonder, even if only from time to time, who (or what) the Original is that they can’t help reflecting, and what's its all about.

Why Providence Has Fallen On Hard Times

In communicating the truths of Christianity, few efforts are more greatly rewarded than understanding why and how those truths may be difficult to believe or make little to no sense to one's hearers. In this regard, David Wells comments on why the traditional Christian understanding of Providence has become downright unintelligible to many today. The following quotations come from God in the Wasteland: The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams.

The question he asks is, “What is it in the modern consciousness that so militates against the historic Christian understanding of God’s sovereign, ‘inside’ relationship to creation, history, and our own personal narratives? The answer,” he says, “is complex because our social world is complex, but I believe it involves three main factors.”

Factor #1, from page 154:

First, there is little doubt that alongside the revelry that modern plenty and modern opportunity have provided [i.e. science, industry, capitalism, liberal democracy, innovative technology], a deep foreboding has also been churned up, an apprehension that our world has gone dreadfully awry, morally, socially, and spiritually. Our experience of the modern world produces the sense that there is no sure and steady purpose pervading life, that purpose, like life itself, has broken apart into small, unrelated fragments, that our daily routine is severed from the meaning that God once provided to it.

Factor #2, from page 158:

Second, the suffering and brutality arising out of man’s inhumanity to man [ironically, through his misuse of the plenty and opportunity that modernity has secured for us] have, as Wendy Farley says, "assaulted us in this century with terrible intensity. …" We gawk at more catastrophe than any previous generation has ever observed – perhaps more mayhem than the fragile human constitution can bear. Is it not the case that the sheer weight of all of this calamity also extinguishes our hope that somehow there must be some meaning that can be retrieved from these ashes?

Factor #3, from page 160:

Finally, divine providence was much easier to assert [it was not, however, necessarily easier to believe] when Western culture still believed in progress. Belief in progress [post-Enlightenment] was really a secularized version of belief in divine providence, … but it is now clear that it was never more than the opiate of Western intellectuals and had little basis in reality. … the death of the idea of progress has led many people to abandon all rationality, all purpose, all meaning. In this new context of general bleakness, talk about divine providence has a hollow ring to it for many people.

Knowing that these (and probably other) factors are influencing people's thoughts these days (including our own) is part of how we can become good listeners in order to be good helpers: we need to know how what we say is being heard if we are to say it in a way that can be helpful. And this won’t come by keeping people at arms length; it will require that we befriend and embrace all kinds of people that are (probably) already in our spheres of influence and who are just as in need of friendship, encouragement, help, and direction as we ourselves are.