One MIllion Arrows Encourages Christian Parents to Take Discipleship Seriously

Recently I was fortunate to receive a copy of the book One Million Arrows, by Julie Ferwerda, for review. It is well-written and surprisingly packed for 156 pages. She does an excellent job of combining illustrative narrative with relevant information, and manages to tell her stories with uncanny authenticity and passion. Her illustrations aren’t just overworked sentimental nods to the narrative-oriented reader; they’re personal experiences that comes across as compelling without being sappy. No small feat in the “Christian Living” category of publishing.

What I liked best was how Ferwerda cuts to the heart of the issue: are we as parents just walking our kids through life as usual, or are we raising them up to impact the world for the Kingdom? There’s an important quote on page 43 that punctuates the urgency of that question:

One concerned educator and youth ministry expert, Alvin Reid [...] shares his observation: “For the past three decades youth ministry…has exploded across America accompanied by a rise in the number of degrees in youth ministry granted by colleges and seminaries, and abundance of books and other resources, and a network of cottage industries devoted solely to youth ministry. Yet those same three decades have failed to produce a generation of young people who graduate from high school or leave youth groups ready to change the world for Christ.” Add to that Reid notes, that our churches are starting to show a startling decline of youth ministry effectiveness.”

Julie points out that when she was growing up it was the youth pastors job to educate Christian kids and lead them to have an impact on the world for the gospel. But now she realizes that this job is far bigger than local churches and fundamentally belongs to Christian parents.

I couldn’t agree more.

Christian parents must see themselves as their child’s spiritual teacher first and foremost, with the rest of the community of faith playing a supporting role (Deuteronomy 6:4-9). Perhaps the best part of the book is that Ferwerda doesn’t allow it to descend into a simplistic formula for raising Christian kids. It’s full of excellent tips and contextual examples, but mostly drives home the message that parenting is a task of discipleship, and leaves the reader to freely work out how that might look in their own home.

I only have one minor concern: the tone is highly triumphalistic. Throughout, Ferwerda’s emphasis is on immersing your children in scripture, prayer, and what I would call a vision for missions, all as a means of ensuring your child’s commitment to the Kingdom. It might seem strange that as a pastor I would find this concerning, so let me explain.

As a minister for more than 15 years (10 as a youth pastor) I’ve observed that those households who were the most spiritually fervent tended to produce two kinds of kids: equally spiritually fervent or religiously rebellious – and more often the latter. In my opinion the reason for this was that many Christian parents take the scriptural admonition to “raise up a child in the way they should go” as a mandate to indoctrinate their children rather than disciple them, and in my experience most youth will, sooner or later, resist the process of indoctrination.

Nowhere in this book does Ferwerda recommend the simple-minded indoctrination of kids. However, neither is there any dialogue with how the typically-simplistic approach to bible-teaching common in Sunday school often leads those kids to an adolescent rejection of those very answers on the grounds that they simply don’t match up neatly with the actual experiences of life. Most youth go through a fatalistic “Ecclesiastes” phase, and it’s tempting to combat that with biblical certainty. Yet, what is needed most is to heed Solomon’s own advice – to not be too religious (Ecc 7:16) – and instead offer youth the freedom to question, explore, and even to be skeptical and fatalistic at times. Teenagers especially must be brought into an open and safe dialogue with the mystery and skeptical self-critique found in scripture, particularly through the alternative wisdom writings, the prophets, and, of course, Christ himself. When we gloss over the biting critique of these writings in an effort to counter the moody skepticism of adolescence, we rob youth of the raw honesty adolescence craves and invalidate their natural and necessary doubts.

In my opinion, this is one of the biggest problems with the Evangelical Youth Ministry approach, and I worry that if parents read One Million Arrows that way, they’ll simply duplicate a kind of dishonest certainty in their home, and thereby suffer the same rate of failure as Modern Youth Ministry.

But to be fair, Ferwerda never denies any of this scriptural complexity, and addressing it isn’t her project. Her goal is to affirm the centrality of the home as the place of discipleship, and she does an excellent job with that task. She tends to express the faithful optimism characteristic of Evangelical faith, and those who aren’t Evangelical might find this a bit off-putting – which would be a shame because One Million Arrows brings an important perspective to a critical issue facing the American church at this very moment. I recommend it for any Christian parent looking to engage their kids intentionally with the gospel.

The Worker’s Wages Part 3: The Essence of Ministry

(This is the third part in a six-part series exploring the dynamics of clergy pay in missional churches. See previous installments: Prelude | Part 1 | Part 2)

In my last installment I tentatively proposed that the minister’s wage isn’t money, it’s community care. Now, practically speaking that care must manifest as money, or food, or housing (or perhaps other goods and services), but strictly speaking the wage itself isn’t any of these things.

What Kind of Work?
However, understanding the essence of the wage doesn’t get us all the way to understanding how to appropriately convert our care into food and shelter for ministry leaders, or how to appropriately frame our expectations of the kind of work they do (an equally important issue). For that, we’ll need an understanding of what kind of work a ministry leader does. To gain it, we’ll go back to our original passages.

1 Timothy Chapter 5:17-18
Again, we’ll use Paul’s words to Timothy as our starting point:

The elders who direct the affairs of the church well are worthy of double honor, especially those whose work is preaching and teaching. For the Scripture says, “Do not muzzle the ox while it is treading out the grain,” and “The worker deserves his wages.”

Paul is describing the gifts, and we have several passages concerning that topic (Rom 12, 1 Cor 12, 1 Pet 4:10). Indeed, the church is very comfortable talking about the roles of the people according to gifting, and there have been popular movements to identify the role of everyone in the church by gifting because, in a critically important sense, everyone is a minister according to their gifts.

However there is little exploration, that I’m aware of, regarding how the nature of “gift work” may or may not be different than other kinds of work. If it is different, wouldn’t that have some bearing on the “how, why, and what” of wages for those who require compensation? (We’ll have to hold off, for now, on why some ministers are worthy of a wage while others are not.)

Gifts Are Different Than Skills.
It’s my proposition that gifts are significantly different than skills (based largely on the ethnographic work of Marcel Mauss and the thoughts of Lewis Hyde). A skill is a kind of property. You earn it and you own it. Under normal conditions, the skill-worker has mastery over their skills, that is, they control them completely. Therefore, you can reckon compensation for your skills fairly easily. Skills serve best when they are accumulated like capital, and like capital, they affect a kind of return on investment for their owner. Hence, the skilled trades-person accumulates skills as a kind of wealth.

But a gift is not a property. It cannot be earned or purchased, only freely received. Nor can it be mastered because it doesn’t belong to the gift-worker. In fact, gifts, because they are given for the purpose of creating relational ties, must be given away again, and often fade (or rot i.e. Ex 16) when they’re not used-up or shared. They come and go, and are notoriously difficult to control. Because the gift-worker cannot master the gift, they can only be good stewards of what they have been given, while they happen to have it – and to be a good steward specifically means to give it away, leaving the gift-worker in a perpetual state of spiritual poverty.

Therefore, it is also notoriously difficult to reckon the compensation of gift-work, because it’s production cannot be controlled. Often long hours (or days, months, even years) go into waiting and supplicating for true gifts to arrive. Yet once they’re received by the gift-worker, they typically “work” in a frenzy of productivity, giving generously to all who benefit from it, and (in a way curiously distinct from skills) are multiplied in the giving.

(Of course, there is a very important sense in which skill-work and gift-work cooperate, but that is not the important point here. I think we must begin by understanding the prior distinctive essence of ministry as a gift-work, before we can understand how to appropriately re-integrate it with trade skills.)

Let’s return to our other central passage to illustrate gift-work among ministers:

Luke 10:5-7
Let’s start by revisiting Jesus’ instructions, to the 72 disciples:

¹After this the Lord appointed seventy-two others and sent them two by two ahead of him to every town and place where he was about to go. ²He told them, “The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field. ³Go! I am sending you out like lambs among wolves. ⁴Do not take a purse or bag or sandals; and do not greet anyone on the road.⁵“When you enter a house, first say, ‘Peace to this house.’ ⁶If a man of peace is there, your peace will rest on him; if not, it will return to you. ⁷Stay in that house, eating and drinking whatever they give you, for the worker deserves his wages. Do not move around from house to house.

⁸“When you enter a town and are welcomed, eat what is set before you. ⁹Heal the sick who are there and tell them, ‘The kingdom of God is near you.’

This is classic gift-work, with several prominent features of gift-exchange occurring:

1. The Gift Is Transient: The disciples can only give away what Christ has first given them, namely peace, power, and kingdom. Again, these gifts are not a property to be held as capital. They must be given in order to multiply, so the ministers, although they are givers, remain as dependent as those to whom they give.

2. The Gift Requires Personal “Poverty”: The disciples go with nothing, demonstrating the “poverty” of gift-work, because receiving the gift first requires the emptiness of poverty, prayer, and sacrifice. This is congruent with 1 Tim 5 and echoed in the Beatitudes.

3. The Gift Provides Community “Wealth”: The hosts are sustained by the gift and the ministers live off the reciprocity typical of gift-exchange. They give what they have and are, in return, given gifts of food, hospitality, shelter, etc. This kind of return, as distinct from payment, is a way of demonstrating the communal abundance of the gift-economy through the multiplication of the gift as it is passed from one empty hand to another.

4. The Gift is Fertile: Characteristic of other gift-cultures, we have an illustration of an agricultural motif (v2). The enthnographic data from such societies shows that the cycle of planting and harvesting becomes significant as an embodiment of the economic gift-cycle, with it’s dependence on the ultimate giver (God or the gods), its sowing and reaping reciprocity, its abundant multiplication via fertility, and its sustenance. All are images of “the gift” at work.

5. The Git is Consumed: The 72 ministers literally feed off of the abundance of the gift. In this way they are not only consuming the multiplied abundance of the gift, they are also literally consuming the return gift of sacrifice made by their hosts.

This last two observations, I think, connect this passage with the function of the priests of the Old Testament, who eat of the meat sacrifices brought to the temple and burn the grain sacrifices (Lev 6). By eating the gift/sacrifice the minister/priest is simultaneously included in the sacramental community and demonstrating the role of God in the gift-cycle by returning a portion of the sacrifice to God (burning accomplishes this same latter function, though with an emphasis on faith-dependence rather than sustenance). Ethnographic data depicts this same eating/burning practices in the religious rituals of other gift-cultures, for example in the Maori tribe (eating of sacrifice by the priest) and the North American Native practice of Potlatch (burning of excess wealth).

There are many other passages I could connect to this theme, but this is a blog not a book : )

I think there are also, obviously, very strong Paschal tones here as well, reaching backward toward passover and forward toward Eucharist. But that is not directly tied to the subject of leadership vocation and wage, so we’d better leave those explorations for another time, and perhaps for a better commenter (I’m looking at you Geoff).

So, what are your thoughts? Do you agree with the characterization of a minister’s work as essentially gift-work, rather than skill-work (or property-work)? If so, does it matter? Are there implications to be explored, particularly for post-Christendom missional leadership with regards to how we treat vocational leadership?

Church as Screen Time and Pastor as Parasocial Personality

Just a quick riff on a couple of news items coming out this week:

• First, the introduction of the hologram pastor.
• Second, research published in Pediatrics suggests that childhood obesity in pre-school age children is directly linked to dislocated familial attachments facilitated by too much time in front of the television and too few communal meals with the family.
• Third, a second unrelated research project coming out of New Zealand suggests much of the same conclusions with regard to teenagers. Teens with more “screen time” have significantly lower attachment to their parents and peers (HT: Kara Powell).

There’s a fascinating sentence in the last summary:

“However, it is also possible that adolescents with poor attachment relationships with immediate friends and family use screen-based activities to facilitate new attachment figures such as online friendships or parasocial relationships with television characters or personalities,” the authors write.

I’ve written about this before, calling it the “mediation of experience.” If “screen time” inhibits our social interactions and relational attachments by replacing the real thing with “parasocial relationships” with unreal characters can the same be said to be true of other instances where we replace real live relationships with unreal characters or personalities?

Obviously I think the answer is yes.

One of the problems with the prevailing mode of church in America is that it has turned the pastor into a celebrity personality, complete with a performance-oriented and technologically mediated relationship with an audience. Once the church reaches a certain size, the pastor’s interaction must occur as a performance by a character through media. Cultural expectations about church structure coupled with assumptions about the virtues of media nearly require this. The trouble is, the character that pastor portrays, in my experience, in never quite the real thing. Some pastors try very hard to “be themselves” on stage, but others intentionally slip into a very different persona. But even for the pastor trying to be genuine, it’s very difficult in my opinion – perhaps impossible – to avoid some level of acting when you’re a preacher on stage, largely because of the entertainment-based expectations we currently impose upon the notion of what it means to be a “good preacher.”

One of the bizarre side-effects of this mediated relationship between the pastor and congregation is that, because of the high level of mediated exposure to the preacher, many in the church (most, in the case of very large churches),  actually feel a personal connection to the pastor that doesn’t actually exist. They don’t really know the pastor, in much the same way they don’t really know Oprah or Dr. Phil. They only know your stage persona. This is greatly magnified in those churches who embrace the personality-driven church model and use a charismatic pastor’s performance skills as a means of growing the church.

Hence, the church gathering becomes just another version of “screen time.”

Now consider how “screen time” becomes literally true in the proliferation of video venue churches, where many congregations only interact with a version of the pastor that is literally unreal. Now replace the video screen with hologram which remains unreal, but magnifies the level of illusion.

Moreover, much like the teens in the second study cited above who talk to each other about the fictional characters they’ve mutually engaged as relational surrogates, church members will often interact around the pastor’s persona. In this way a false persona can become a means of false social relationships. This is akin to kids talking enthusiastically about what “happened” to Hanna Montana in the latest episode (nothing happened…she doesn’t exist!). In celebrity-driven churches much of the social energy occurs around the campfire of a false persona.

Does it matter? Is there harm being done by moving church toward just another version of “screen time?” What are the consequences of this to discipleship? Perhaps, like the studies above, the consequences are spiritually obese, socially disconnected and disaffected Christians.

On Getting It Right: Doctrinal Confession Gone Wrong

Three quick postlude items from my recent series blogging through Dallas Willard’s book Knowing Christ Today.

First, I recently conducted an interview with Dallas Willard on this book for Christianaudio.com. If you’re interested, you can download the interview for free by clicking here (registration is required).

Second, Dallas will be speaking at a conference in Anaheim CA called “Knowledge For Life,” on these same themes. The date is April 17, and you can register by clicking here. I’m planning to attend, so if you are too I’d love to connect, so shoot me an email!

Finally, in my recent series in Dallas Willard’s book, Knowing Christ Today we discussed what he calls “soft pluralism” or “inclusivism.” There was an excellent footnote in Chapter 7 that didn’t fit my post on that day, but is important enough that I want to quote it here and open it up for discussion.

Willard is talking about recognizing that other religions may indeed contain true knowledge about God that we can respect, saying:

“This “pluralism” might well concede that all of these features of religions involve important aspects of truth and goodness and should be respected as such. Those dead set against pluralism in any form would of course deny that. But disciples of Christ certainly would not have to do so. [...] outstanding spokespeople for Christ in the Bible have been more generous toward other religions than that and have held that the God of the Bible and of Christians deals lovingly and justly with those who fall far short of “getting it all right” in their understanding and in practice.”

This is where the footnote begins, and where it really gets good:

“In any group the vast majority of those in “good standing” do not believe many of the things the leaders of the group teach as “necessary.” More often than not they don’t even know about them, and if they did, they would not be able to understand them. An example of this would be what is stated about salvation it he Athanasian Creed. After laying out extremely subtle points about the Trinity, it is declared there that “he therefore that will be saved must think thus of the Trinity,…neither confounding the Persons, nor dividing the Substance” of the Trinity. The issues in this creed are extremely important. But if one must “think thus” to be saved, 99 percent of professing Christians are not going to make it. Try this creed on and see what you think. Groups and their institutions tend to confuse what they need to teach with what one must believe in order to be saved. This leads to their members professing lots of things they neither believe nor are committed to – indeed, do not even understand. That, in turn, makes it inevitable that they will not “live up to what they profess,” for they actually do not believe what they profess. The effects of this on genuinely trusting and following Christ is devastating. They can be abundantly observed in most Christian groups.”

What do you think might be the “devastating” effects of pressuring people to profess what they don’t actually believe and do you think they’re readily observable?

Reading Blog: Knowing Christ Today, Chapter 8

(This is the 9th and final installment in my series on Dallas Willard’s latest book, Knowing Christ Today. Previous Entries: Intro | Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 6 | Chapter 7)

Pastors as Teachers of the Nations

Of all the chapters in Willard’s latest book, this final one surprised me the most, starting with the seemingly outrageous title, “Pastors as Teachers of the Nations.” Isn’t that arrogant? Imperialistic, even, in a post-Colonial sort of way? Still, it is the logical conclusion of Willard’s line of thought regarding the central importance of spiritual knowledge in general and knowledge of Christ in particular:

“Who is to bring the knowledge that will answer the great life questions that perplex humanity? [...] The primary responsibility to teach falls upon those who self-identify as spokespeople for Christ and who perhaps have some leadership position or role in Christian organizations.”

He makes it clear that he is not speaking exclusively to those who hold official leadership positions, but he is speaking especially to them and in so doing he addresses Jesus great comission to”make disciples of all nations,” and says something perhaps challenging to us pastors:

Above all, perhaps, we must not think of the task as making adherents to a particular brand of Christianity now current. If we do, we will then lose the cosmic viewpoint and see the task only in terms of religious organizations and political realities. Jesus, however, did not send people out to make Christians or start churches as we understand them today. He set them to make disciples (students, apprentices) to him and, supported by his presence, to teach them all that he had taught by word and deed. That is a very different enterprise!

Here Willard stresses, again, the central importance of genuine knowledge for teachers of any kind, but particularly Christian teachers. It is not enough to know about Christ, or scripture, or theology proper. Our task is to know Christ and make him available by that knowledge to others. This, of course, means that we must actually be people who possess such knowledge of Christ and be able to demonstrate it; and this leads to another challenging point – Willard says we should ask for and expect no priviledge accoriding to title, but rather be ready to demonstrate the truth of the knowledge we profess:

True spokespeople for Christ need no special advantage and seek none. It is one again – but now on the worldwide stage that comes with “globalization” – a question of the God who answers “by fire” (1 Kings 18:24).

Are pastors really ready and willing to be tested in that way? Being willing to have one’s knowledge tested and demonstrated as true in real life speaks to a level of confidence we don’t often see in Christian leadership. Instead, what we tend to see is endless defensive bickering and accusations aimed at belittling the competing dogmatic thoughts of others (usually other Christians). Entire ministries and churches are now built on that foundation. Willard has something to say about that as well:

It is not knowledge, but nervous uncertainty, that makes people dogmatic, close-minded, and hostile – which spokespeople for Christ must never be. Paul wisely said to his young pastor friend, Timothy” “The Lord’s servant must not be quarrelsome but kindly to everyone, an apt teacher, patient, correcting opponents with gentleness. God may perhaps grant that they will repent and come to know the truth” (2 Tim 2:24-25).

Of course, because we live in a time when all religious thought – and the status of Christian leaders along with it – has been relegated to the scrap heap of mere opinion, pastors will have to repeatedly, and under tremendous external opposition, present the basic tenets of Christianity as knowledge and be ready to defend and demonstrate it. This is largely not the case today, where pastors as seen as teachers of what Christians are supposed to believe, not of what is known and can be known as true by anyone through fair inquiry.

Finally, all this discipleship is an activity that happens not in the church, but in the world – for that is where people live their lives and that is where God is at work. Raising people up to serve in the church is ultimately a dead-end. “Discipleship is for the sake of the world, not for the sake of the church.” Willard ends the Chapter and the book with this exhortation and encouragement:

The most important thing that is happening in your community is what is happening there under the administration of true pastors for Christ. If you, as a pastor, do not believe that, then you do not understand the dignity of what you are supposed to be doing. Whatever your situation, there is nothing more important on earth than to dwell in the knowledge of Christ and to bring that knowledge to others.

Questions:

1. What’s your reaction to Willard’s claim that pastors are to be the “teachers of the nations?”
2. How do you feel about the idea that our claims of knowledge about Christ must be testable and provable as true?
3. What other thought or questions are you left with as we finish this book series?