…… skipped a few cartoons here ……

View the rest of the cartoons here.

When our church culture becomes increasingly consumeristic, it is inevitable that everything that involves money (e.g. hiring a new staff, charging for a summer camp, fundraising for the third world…) feels like asking people to buy an iPhone app. The reason why people exhibit extreme stinginess and frugality is because of the low perceived value they attach to these things or judge what they can get out of it (i.e. always asking the question “Am I getting the worth of what I’m paying for?”)

Such consumerism will only lead to a cancerous death.

Rather, we should strive to cultivate in our churches extreme generosity — not only towards internal needs, but also and especially external needs in missions and aid. As Archbishop of Caterbury William Temple said: “The Church is the only society that exists for the benefit of those who are not its members.”

We can be and ought to be generous, because our Father in heaven is abundantly generous in the first place (Matt. 7:11).

“The church lives in the midst of history as a sign, instrument, and foretaste of the reign of God. But this does not mean that in the life of the church there can be at any point in time a simple identification of the justice of God with the justice of a particular political cause. The church has too often fallen into that trap. To refuse the identification is not to fall into some kind of idealist or spiritualist illusion. It is not to detach the interior life of the soul from the business of doing justice and mercy in the life of society. It is simply to acknowledge that all human causes are ambiguous and all human actions are involved in the illusions that are the product of our egotism. It is to confess that final judgment belongs to God, and that when people usurp that prerogative they fall into self-destructive blindness.

The issue may be put in another way. If we acknowledge the God of the Bible, we are committed to struggle for justice in society. Justice means giving to each his or her due. Our problem (as seen in the light of the gospel) is that each of us overestimates what is due to us as compared with what is due to our neighbors. Consequently, justice cannot be done, for everyone will judge in his or her own favor. Justice is done only when we all acknowledge a judge with authority over us, in relation to whose judgment we must relativize our own. It is the business of an earthly judge to represent that higher judgment. Because the judge is also a sinful human being, his or her judgment will also be corrupted by self-interest, and the judge may have to be overthrown in the name of the justice of God. A just society can flourish only when its members acknowledge the justice of God, which is the justice manifested and enacted in the cross. If I do not acknowledge a justice that judges the justice for which I fight, I am an agent not of justice, but of lawless tyranny.

At this point the Christian has to be aware of the trap set by Marxism. I am not here questioning the Marxist analysis of the nature of capitalism, which I find very convincing; I am speaking of the Marxist understanding of human nature. The most obvious feature of the dedicated Marxist is extreme moralism. For the Marxist, evil is always something external to oneself. It is the ‘class enemy’ that constitutes the locus of evil against which one has to fight. Consequently there can be no thought of forgiveness and reconciliation. There are only two realities–the oppressor and the oppressed, the exploiter and the exploited. The oppressed and exploited are the exclusive bearers of truth and righteousness. There is no truth or righteousness over them, so to speak, that is able to judge and forgive them. Two things follow from this: (1) When the ‘oppressed’ acquire power, absolutely no check exists upon their use of that power. There is no righteousness over them that can judge them. The result is the kind of ruthless tyranny that we have seen under Stalin and his lesser imitators. Those who identify themselves as the representatives of the ‘oppressed’ are in a position to combine unlimited self-righteousness in respect of themselves with unlimited moral indignation in respect of their opponents. This is the most characteristic feature of the dedicated Marxist. Since there is no transcendent righteousness that can judge and forgive both the oppressor and the oppressed, the way is open for unlimited self-righteousness.

The church can only represent the righteousness of God in history in the way that Jesus did. It is enabled to do this by being constantly reincorporated into Jesus’ saving action through baptism and Eucharist and through the preaching and hearing of the Word, which explains these and applies their meaning to the actual situation. The heart of the matter is reached in the celebration of the Eucharist. Here the ultimate horizon of grace and judgment touches the present moment. Here the church has to learn to live by the grace that forgives but does not condone sin and under the judgment that exposes sin and yet keeps open the way of repentance.”

Lesslie Newbigin, The Open Secret: An Introduction to the Theology of Mission (Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1995), 110-112 (my highlighting)

最後他談到教會只能藉著聖禮（聖洗禮、聖餐、聖言）才能彰顯出神絕對的公義和恩典，不知這對於那些脫離了教會、以及那些認為獨自在教會以外也能成就神的公義的基督徒社運人士有甚麼感受呢？

Ever since I got married and have two kids, time and energy have become even more precious commodities. It is not unusual for those in my life stage to feel like friendships have to be “maintained,” since it truly takes much effort to build relationships. However, Rodney Clapp argues that our managerial language towards friendship actually distorts it.

“As MacIntyre, Robert Bellah and others worry, perhaps the exclusively contractual structure of the economic and bureaucratic world is becoming the model for all of life, including the practice of friendship. The danger is that now we can see and unironically talk about even our friends only in the way managers see and talk about employers.

Thus ‘time demands‘ weigh on couples seeking friends, just as they do the manager. Friendships have ‘agendas‘ and are ‘maintained‘ until they no longer serve a purpose and are ‘terminated.’ Given the chaotic busyness of our lives, visits with friends are a matter of ‘organization‘ and ‘arrangement.’ We can regard the advantages of friendship in managerial terms, namely that it provides ‘accountability.’ And friendships are viewed from the vantage point of ‘productivity,’ so that we ‘invest‘ in a friend. I have been struck recently by how much I and other suburbanites worry about keeping ‘ledgers‘ in our friendships. Have we been negligent and not invited Shelly and Kenneth over for too long? Willis and Lisa have now asked us to baby-sit their kids three times to our one–maybe it would be better if they just hired sitters and we stopped trading off. Should I borrow Frank’s tools again, or have I done so little for him lately that I’m in danger of sponging?

I am suggesting that managerial language and culture constantly distort friendship. They maximize its work and burden while they minimize its spontaneity. They incline their users towards manipulation and calculation rather than free appreciation. They make inappropriate external demands on friendship while denying or at least ignoring its abundant internal rewards.”

If we shouldn’t view our friendships in managerial terms, what then? As Christians, Clapp argues, we need to recover a Christian understanding of what friendship is all about.

“The basic statement of the gospel in relation to friendship is that we are (or can be) friends to one another because Christ chose us making us his friends by laying his life down for us and revealing to us his Father’s intentions. Christian friendship, then, is a matter of what God accomplishes rather than what we do. It is not best addressed in the managerial terms of technique, nor is it primarily yet another assignment to be squeezed onto a packed agenda. The good news is that friendship is a gift, an opportunity provided by God in Christ. By first of all making us his friends, Jesus frees us to be friends to one another.”

Rodney Clapp, A Peculiar People: The Church as Culture in a Post-Christian Society (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 1996), 207-8.

I think Clapp’s argument echoes Bonhoeffer‘s in Life Together. We can only come to one another through Jesus Christ the mediator. Without Christ, any attempt to achieve genuine community or friendship will easily be distorted with self-seeking agendas, filled with unnecessary stress and disappointments.

Great article. Very well argued. It is true that life is full of tensions and complexity. There is no easy way to resolve them with simplistic formulas. I really agree that case-by-case spiritual discernment is a skill we really need to develop. After all, we are people of the Spirit, not people of rigid priority lists.

That being said, I have heard of one additional compelling reason why family should come before the church: You can always find substitutes in ministry, but your wife has only one husband and your children has only one dad. No one can substitute your role in your family.

Agree or disagree?

Related posts:

1. No more privileged
2. What motivates you?

Have you ever thought that things like V.I.P. access, preferred customers, premium memberships, special rush services, and in general things that you can pay to get ahead of others, have no difference, in principle, from the uncivil behavior of scrums elbowing one another to cut in lines? New York Times columnist Anand Giridharadas argues so:

“A line conceives of people as citizens, presumed equal, each with an identical 24 hours a day to spread among the lines around them. A market conceives of people as consumers, presumed unequal, with those who can pay in front of the others. It allocates efficiently, but it eliminates a feature of line culture: the idea that, in line at least, we are no better than anybody else.

In a way, the market’s spread is a return to another kind of scrum, one in which financial, and not physical, might means right.”

Getting in (and Out of) Line by Anand Giridharadas (New York Times, Aug 7, 2010)

When the church succumbs to the market model and treats people fundamentally as consumers, inequality and privileged access becomes an inevitable consequence. Think about how big donors often receive the honor to sit in the best seats in events and treated with extra sensitivity.

“My brothers and sisters, believers in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ must not show favoritism…… But if you show favoritism, you sin and are convicted by the law as lawbreakers.” (James 2:1, 9)

“With the mind cure movement, Americans first adapted a new definition of health. Before affluence, Meyer writes, health was understood only as a means to an end. Health was good because it was a necessary condition for anyone to accomplish worthwhile ends. You could not lay a railroad or missionize China without being of able body and sound mind. This attitude, of health as instrumental rather than an end in itself, is exemplified by the seventeenth-century Puritan divine Richard Sibbes. Sibbes declared, ‘This is a sign of a man’s victory over himself, when he loves health and peace of body and mind… chiefly for this end, that he may with more freedom of spirit serve God in doing good to others.’

But with the inception of the new attitude, health as an end in itself, a ‘new style’ of person emerges: he or she ‘who lives to avoid affliction.’ I need hardly add how pronounced this style is in our day, when smokers are met with an opprobrium that can only be described as intense moral disapproval, when we religiously exercise and eliminate cholesterol from our diets–always, always that we might live longer. Period. Not live longer to find a cure for cancer or help lift a neighborhood out of poverty or ‘serve God in doing good to others,’ but simply live longer. Long life has become an end in itself.”

Rodney Clapp, A Peculiar People: The Church as Culture in a Post-Christian Society (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 1996), 37-8.

This is a sober question we ought to ask ourselves:

What do we want to be healthy for?

Try to fill in the blanks:

I want longevity and health so that ______________.

P.S. For further research: I wonder when and how did this “inception” occur……

“The seed that we planted in this man’s mind, may change everything.” — Dom Cobb

1. Quote and reference cultural icons during sermons (e.g. Stephen Colbert and Lady Gaga)
2. Sponsor the screening of the R-rated movies
3. Give the pastor a metrosexual makeover, with skinny jeans and a $80 haircut
4. Insist on trendy eco-friendly paper and helvetica-only fonts on all printed materials
5. Hold a worship service in a bar or nightclub
6. Stream online church services
7. Encourage texting, Twitter and iPhone interaction with the pastor during the service
8. Shock people with sex-themed marketing gimmicks (e.g. sermon titles like “Biblical Oral Sex”)
9. Worship with indie-rock music

“But are these gimmicks really going to bring young people back to church? Is this what people really come to church for? Maybe sex sermons and indie- rock worship music do help in getting people in the door, and maybe even in winning new converts. But what sort of Christianity are they being converted to?”

“‘And the further irony,’ he adds, ‘is that the younger generations who are less impressed by whiz-bang technology, who often see through what is slick and glitzy, and who have been on the receiving end of enough marketing to nauseate them, are as likely to walk away from these oh-so-relevant churches as to walk into them.’

If the evangelical Christian leadership thinks that ‘cool Christianity’ is a sustainable path forward, they are severely mistaken. As a twentysomething, I can say with confidence that when it comes to church, we don’t want cool as much as we want real.

If we are interested in Christianity in any sort of serious way, it is not because it’s easy or trendy or popular. It’s because Jesus himself is appealing, and what he says rings true. It’s because the world we inhabit is utterly phony, ephemeral, narcissistic, image-obsessed and sex-drenched—and we want an alternative. It’s not because we want more of the same.”

The Perils of ‘Wannabe Cool’ Christianity by Brett McCraken (Wall Street Journal, Aug 13, 2010)

I agree very much with McCracken, and I don’t think it is necessary to do any of those 9 things above in order to attract young people, but what’s wrong with #4?

Any comments or thoughts?

P.S. I just realized I might very well be a “Bookish Intellectual” Christian hipster. What do I do now? =P

1. We are really good at burning people out.
2. We focus way too much on what we don’t have.
3. We are afraid of change.
4. We use “let me pray about it” as an excuse to get out of making decisions.
5. We LOVE meetings.
6. We try to do way too much.
7. We try to be something we’re not.
8. We spend too much time looking at other churches.
9. We worry about people leaving.
10. We don’t feel trusted.

Read the whole post with full explanations here. He included some great quotes from the management and leadership book REWORK.

Seriously, I said AMEN ten times in my heart while I read through it.

I wish I could be as brave as Martin Luther to nail it to the door of my church……

Even if you can’t nail it to the door of your church, please at least repost on your blog or facebook or twitter if you share the same sentiments. It might spark a new reformation in our overly-tired and burnt out churches today.

“We are all the best person we know and, in general, tend to think we’re pretty unbiased as well. Illusory superiority can help us keep a healthy, optimistic attitude, but it can also prevent us from doing something great.

Recently Derek Sivers, founder and former president of CDBaby, posted about the benefits of assuming you’re below average. The suggestion is this: if you don’t assume you’re all that great you’ll be much more open to learning new things, asking more questions, and approaching situations with the sort of humility that leads to considering a good idea you may have otherwise thought to be stupid.”

Get Smarter by Realizing You’re Not That Great – Lifehacker

“Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves.” (Phil. 2:3)

“Love is exhausting. It’s work to really love. Have you ever felt like, ‘I don’t have any more love to give’? Most people don’t understand that their physical condition has a strong impact on their relationships and their ability to love.”

“What happens to your relationships when you’re run down? Little issues become big problems when you’re tired. You’re more cranky, defensive, and critical when you’re physically low.”

Daily Hope (Aug 1, 2010): Keep loving others by maintaining physical health by Rick Warren

Related posts:

1. Faith Works, Love Labors, Hope Endures