Threads from Henry's Web

Category: Christian Mission

  • Of Strategies and Goals

    As if it isn’t bad enough that we Christians many times cannot agree on what is essential and thus get carried away with arguments about minor details, we also sometimes have a problem distinguishing talking about a strategy from the actual goals. So we sometimes condemn brothers or sisters for disagreeing with the goals, when actually they simply differ on strategy.

    Because I don’t knock on strangers’ doors in order to hand them gospel tracts, does this mean I don’t care about evangelism? To many people it means precisely that. If you don’t pursue their goals with their preferred strategy, you don’t actually believe in the goal.

    Polycarp of The Church of Jesus Christ blog experienced just that when he wrote in opposition to the Manhattan Declaration.

    Because he opposes a declaration that opposes abortion, he must therefore support abortion, right? Well, not so much. You’ll find, in fact, that there are many reasons one might opposed this particular declaration, other than disagreeing with its goals.

    For my part I pretty much dislike declarations and such documents, few of which have any real impact. They just become another opportunity to impose litmus tests.

    In the meantime, just remember that opposing a particular way of accomplishing a goal doesn’t mean that one thinks the goal undesirable.

    Personally, I think that we Christians should consider the gospel the primary solution to moral problems. In fact, I think that when we go straight at moral problems with another strategy it’s as though we chose to try to crush a boulder with one of our bare hands whilst holding a jackhammer in the other.

    The gospel is the jackhammer. And no, I don’t believe those who disagree with me are necessarily opposed to the gospel or to various moral goals.

  • The Real War on Christmas

    I received an e-mail from the AFA giving me the wonderful news that the governor of Kentucky has backed down on calling the Christmas tree in the state capitol a “holiday tree” and will call it a Christmas tree. In order to help this happen elsewhere, I’m told to buy packets of buttons, wear them, and get all my friends to wear them. There are even church packs and a display pack of 250 buttons.

    At the same time I am already seeing Christmas advertising on TV and hearing it on the radio. I understand the reasoning behind it. After all, I’m a businessman too, and there will be lots of Christmas buying. I can’t help but hope that some people will choose various books offered by my company as Christmas presents. But that is a commercial desire related to a commercial holiday.

    Some Christians feel that there is a war on Christmas, and that this war involves rules requiring store clerks or government officials to wish people happy holidays rather than merry Christmas or the removal of creche displays from public parks. If I could steal an idea from C. S. Lews (Screwtape Letters) and think like a demon for a moment, I would regard this as an excellent diversionary attack.

    Before D-Day in World War II the Germans were convinced that the allied landings would come somewhere around the Pas de Calais. The distance was shorter, the logistics would be easier, and it made a great deal of strategic sense. The allies went to some trouble to foster this impression, even creating a fake army that consisted merely of tents and communications gear that simulated an invasion in preparation. Because the Germans were convinced that the real attack would come somewhat to the north of where it did, they delayed in committing their mobile reserve (panzers), much to the benefit of the allied forces.

    While we’re worried about losing the external trappings of Christmas, such as public trees and manger displays, the real war on Christmas is practically won already. Christmas has almost nothing at all to do with Jesus. This has been my opinion for many years. Christmas as celebrated in America, even in most of our churches, is about us and our economic prosperity, not about Jesus and his good news.

    Studying the liturgical year has just emphasized this to me more, and now that I’m teaching a series on the gospel of Luke for a Sunday School class, I find it rubbed in my face. The advent comes at a time of great trouble and need. There is long expectation, hope kept alive through times of hardship, and recognition of need. When God’s gift comes it does not look like what the world sees as success or greatness. The birth of Jesus is not a commercial success. God gives himself to us at the time of our greatest need. Receiving the gospel message is like a reenactment of this in miniature. The wise men come and give gifts to the king in the manger, though he hasn’t asked. Shepherds worship him. The babe in the manger is the center of God’s activity, even though the world around hardly notices.

    This is almost totally unlike our Christmas celebrations in the church or in our homes. Oh, we certainly do give something to others. There will be gifts sent to children who will not otherwise have a Christmas and food packages passed to people in need. But let’s face it. Most of our money will be spent on us. Christmas will not look largely like a spiritual experience. We’ll start celebrating it weeks early even in church. We’ll skip over the advent expectation and go straight to the Christmas celebration.

    And that celebration will mostly be about us. It will largely be a commercial holiday for us. The emphasis on Christmas, such as it is, will not be a witness to Jesus, but rather to “Christianity – the Brand.”

    The war on Christmas is going rather badly for us. Perhaps we should quit bothering about the wrong war, and save whatever money we were going to spend on “Merry Christmas” buttons to use to help others. If you don’t have any idea where to give it, I’d be happy to make some suggestions.

  • Doing Something

    Talk is cheap, and I’m a good talker. This past Sunday I visited a new Sunday School class and met a young man who told me that he was opposed to abortion. He went on to say that he believed that if you talked about something you should be willing to act, and in his case, that meant going out and getting the home study done and being willing to adopt. He and his wife had done precisely that and had adopted an older child.

    I deeply respect someone who takes that sort of action. There are many ways in which one can act. Some of us are called upon to proclaim, but even then I think the proclamation gets weak if one isn’t personally involved in taking action in some way.

    Today Allan Bevere has a great post on the health care debate and how the church should be engaged. What can we do? Do we really believe the gospel has power? Consider this near Allan’s conclusion:

    … But in the midst of the debate over how the Principality and Power called the United States can initiate health care reform, I believe that the church should be ahead of the game and work to cover as many people as it possibly can, and thereby demonstrate a powerful witness to others concerning what is possible. The church is a sleeping giant with resources available to it, both spiritual and physical, that can shake the very foundations of every civilization, but they are under-utilized because we continue to think the nation-state is where the real action is. We continue to believe that Caesar is more effective in accomplishing tasks than the people of God brought into existence by nothing less than the resurrection of Jesus Christ. [emphasis mine]

    I think our greatest difficulty with sharing or proclaiming the gospel in this country is that we do not show the power of the gospel in the way we live as a church. If the gospel has power–resurrection power–then we should be able to point to something to show for it, as the early disciples pointed to an empty tomb.

  • Love Without Involvement

    I have, on occasion, been accused of being a “love preacher.” It’s not an accusation that frightens me, but it used to puzzle me. It doesn’t so much any more. There’s a difference between a casual “all you need is love” attitude and “love one another as I have loved you” (John 13:34), especially considering that the latter is a command given by someone who went on to die immediately afterward.

    The problem is that we want “love” as a kind of general good feeling about people, a general desire to have nice things happen to them, but at the same time we don’t really want to get involved in the actual implementation. I think many of us want to help the homeless, but sincerely hope we can do so by giving some money to the soup kitchen, or voting for politicians who will implement policies to help them, but not getting our hands dirty in the process.

    There’s nothing wrong with giving money to the soup kitchen, or with trying to implement policies that help the homeless, nor with voting for politicians who will support such policies. The problem is that too often we call this “loving one another as Jesus loved us” and that’s not how Jesus did it.

    He starts in heaven, takes on a human body, lives with us, eats with us, sleeps with us, gets dirty with us, and finally dies on a cross, all the time being like us. If you take the incarnation seriously, that Jesus was God in the flesh, you have to also believe that Jesus could have done as many or more nice things for people around him whilst hanging out in heaven.

    But the Jesus kind of love doesn’t allow that. It gets dirty. It suffers. It cares in a personal way. Read Philippians 2:5-11.

    My friend Greg May is a contributor to our Energion.com Podcast, and I think he hit one out of the park with his podcast today–A Spiritual Tragedy. Please check it out!

  • Reflections on Church and The Jesus Paradigm

    As a publisher I have the joy of spending a great deal of time with a book as it goes through the process of publication. I don’t expect you to read my thoughts on The Jesus Paradigm as anything like a review, but there are some special things about this book and the way it has influenced me as I worked on it.

    I like to think of my business as a ministry, which is “churchese” for “service.” It is my intent to serve both the church and the community with materials that challenge and educate. Now don’t get me wrong here. For a small publisher, signing an author who has written nearly as many books as the company has published is a sound business decision. I didn’t decide to sacrifice myself in service and publish this book contrary to my better judgment. It’s a good book; it’s a book that is likely to sell quite well; it’s also a book that is kingdom building.

    Now as I frequently must, let me warn you that I’m going to be writing quite a few words. I’ve been thinking about the concept “church” for a long time and struggling with many things. This is also largely addressed to a Christian audience, so it may well bore others. Read on at your own risk!

    What happened with this book was that a number of things I’ve been thinking about, things that have challenged me over the years, came into sharper focus while I was editing and preparing it for the printer.

    I traditionally point out about now that I disagree with some things in a book I’ve published, and that this is a good thing rather than a bad thing. That’s part of developing brand identity since in a company founded by one person, it’s easy to confuse the person with the company.

    But in this case I think anyone who looks at the header of this blog and reads a few essays, and then does the same thing on Dave Black Online will be in no danger of confusing the two of us.

    What I think I need to emphasize instead is just how much I agree with in this book, and the tremendous value I find even in the things about which I have reservations (ecclesiology) or differences in emphasis (hermeneutics-maybe).

    In my personal testimony I note how I left church after my seminary training (MA, not MDiv) because I then regarded Christianity as a total “one-way street” surrender. I note that at the time:

    Some Christians argued with me that such a total surrender as I described was not required, but I could not see a partial surrender to God at the time, and I still can’t do so.

    Despite believing that, I have struggled with how to put that into practice, particularly in church life. The extent to which “church” doesn’t work, or perhaps doesn’t appear to be what it seems the Bible points to, has continued to bother me.

    Let me list some of the threads of thinking that have bothered me.

    (1) Again as I note in my testimony, I felt God’s call to ministry as I was registering for the second year of a pre-law program. I switched to Biblical languages. Unfortunately I found that while many people would talk about a lack of Biblical knowledge in the pews, the church had no place for a teacher who was not also ready to pastor a church. I observed that pastors got overloaded and rarely had a chance to actually teach.

    (2) If you look at most pastors and then write up a job description as you might for a business, you will see a job that nobody can actually perform. Our pastors cannot lead, teach, and equip, because they are so busy doing, and not necessarily doing the things that truly go with their calling.

    (3) I grew up with missionary parents who were truly dedicated to their work. By this I mean being willing to go out to serve God at risk of life and limb and at times depending on God for their next meal. I spent four years in southern Mexico, and then three in Guyana (South America) and while we were in the United States, they worked in underserved areas.

    In this process I experienced a number of things:

    • I experienced mission trips as loading up mules and backpacks and hiking to a village, or in Guyana getting in a boat and heading up river. This gave me a different view of “discomfort” than I have encountered in various short term missions in which I have been involved.
    • I experienced worship and teaching in circumstances that varied from outdoors under trees to small, simple churches that were no more than walls and a roof. I have felt the presence of God in places most Americans would regard as unusable.
    • I learned that “mission” was not necessarily something you did in somebody else’s country

    (4) By contrast, I have sat in American churches that would be inconceivably luxurious while people debated the color of the carpet for hours. Somehow I just couldn’t get into it. We’re replacing chandeliers that don’t look just right; Christians somewhere else are trying to do the minimum necessary to keep out the rain.

    (4) I have wondered just how we could create a church that would carry out the work of the gospel as its primary mission. I don’t like evaluating ministry purely on a numbers basis, but I believe that you can often calculate what real priorities are by looking at where the money goes and secondarily by looking at how time is used. By this measure the priority of American churches in general is neither social service nor gospel preaching but rather self-maintenance.

    Enter The Jesus Paradigm. In a sense it is almost fitting that the author, Dave Black, contracted Malaria while in Ethiopia and the book was released while he was in the hospital. As I have noted recently in writing about 2 Corinthians, the person can be inextricably linked with the written message. Paul didn’t want to boast, but he had to, while at the same time defending himself from the charge of weakness by claiming that he was weak.

    In some of the reviews and in comments brought to me personally there have been questions about a number of things that are either lacking in the book or that people question. I’m not going to try to defend this book by saying that every word is absolutely correct and will stand the test of time. I’m not trying to make Dave Black into a prophet or incorporate his book into the canon of scripture.

    These questions relate to ecclesiology and the lack of extended practical directions, both of which I will address, and the political commentary, which I will not.

    One major question has been the lack of detailed practical advice on how to put the message of this book into practice. I don’t like to criticize reviewers as a publisher, but I think that criticism misses the point.

    The way you put this into practice is by prayerful, constant surrender to Jesus. Read John 6:28-29. The problem is that we want a checklist, a program, or at least a detailed guide. The fact is that we have one–scripture brought to the moment by the power of the Holy Spirit.

    I recall from my experience here in Pensacola with the Brownsville Revival. Now please lay aside your issues with what was being done in that revival. I’m not pointing to Brownsville as an example. Pastors and church leaders would come from far away and they would want whatever it as they perceived that Brownsville had. So they would go back home and try to apply what they had seen at Brownsville.

    They would use the same music, not just the same style but the same songs. They would organize their services in the same way. They would try to style their preaching after the revival preacher Steve Hill. Then they would wonder why it didn’t work.

    It didn’t work because kingdom service is not a program, nor is it a checklist, nor is it an organizational manual. It’s a surrender.

    If you don’t know how to do this, dig into Acts and the Epistles, though only after you’ve thoroughly dug into the gospels. Spend your time in prayer and study and in listening to what God has to say to you. You will find ways to put the Jesus paradigm into action.

    Another issue is with ecclesiology. How can this material be applied to a different structure of church than just Baptist? Here we may certainly have many disagreements as to details. These are good to discuss with the proper spirit.

    I can look at this from my Seventh-day Adventist background and now as a United Methodist, and I think that the most critical thing here s the way church leadership thinks of themselves and behaves. I believe a Methodist church pastor could spread the Jesus paradigm through the committees of teams of his church structure just as boards of elders can do so in other church structures.

    But the bottom line, in my view, has to be more revolutionary, but again I think it applies to all different structures. The issue is this: Where do our resources go? Do they serve our desires or do they serve others? As I have looked at the church budgets of the churches I have attended over the last few years, the vast majority of the budget goes to buildings and staff salaries, and the staff is largely charged with maintaining the members that are already there.

    As long as we’re spending the majority of our money on maintenance, we’re not going to be reaching people as we should either in social services or in proclamation of the Christian message.

    This is why I’m so delighted to have the opportunity to publish The Jesus Paradigm, and yes, to have the opportunity to market it as well. It will challenge us to apply this “downward path of Jesus” (also a phrase from the book) to our circumstances wherever we are. It will direct us to Jesus himself and the early church to find ways of doing that.

    I don’t think this will necessarily be simple, but I think it’s time for us to be praying, thinking, and listening for the Holy Spirit in regard to how we can accomplish it. Otherwise, our churches are just an extremely expensive and annoying form of social club.

  • On Evangelizing Atheists

    Caraleisa has reposted her essay
    Repost: Sick and Tired of God-stuff; an open letter to theists    . This is something she first wrote several years ago and has reposted unchanged. I think every Christian should read it.

    Just as Caraleisa stuck with her original post, I’m just going to link to my previous response: Witness Without Being a Pest. I don’t think I’ll change anything either!

  • Do We Live What We Believe

    When one edits a book, one has an extraordinary opportunity to think multiple times about some of the statements. In the case of a revolutionary book such as The Jesus Paradigm, which is in the final stages before release, there are quite a number of such sentences.

    One of these impressed me enough that I quoted it on Twitter, and also used it in an ad for another book on discipleship. It reads:

    The key to church renewal is very simple: every follower of Jesus is to live what is believed.

    Now on the face of it, it’s a fairly straightforward statement. I have very often said myself that the one tool of evangelism I would prefer above all others is a church congregation living the message of Jesus. Now please don’t bother with comments about legalism and about how we are not perfect. Certainly none of us are perfect. I’m not even close to a candidate for that adjective.

    But “I’m not perfect” quickly becomes an excuse for any level of inaction. Jesus does give commands, such as “love one another as I have loved you” (John 15:12). One suspects that Jesus anticipated some sort of response to this command.

    So I think this little sentence expresses a critical principle of renewal in the church.

    But then I started thinking of it the other way around. This reminded me of a conversation I had with a friend who is an atheist. Somehow the misbehavior of a televangelist came up in conversation and after we discussed a particular incident, she said, “You know, Henry, if I believed in God I would be terrified to do something like that.”

    I carried that sentence in my head, and even used it in a sermon that I titled “Practical Atheism.” (It was on a Sunday night, and was one of the best attended services, if I remember correctly! Perhaps many Christians would like to know how to be atheists.) I told this story and then quoted Psalm 14:1 “The fool says in his heart: ‘There is no God.’” I suggested that in the modern world, an atheist observing our church services–and our reactions to them–might not be a fool to say “There is no God.” He might simply be observant.

    This keeps coming back to me as I study through Leviticus again. It isn’t a popular book, to a great extent because very few people understand it. It takes lots of work to understand, and even then there is much that is very difficult.

    But there are a few themes that are very clear. First, approaching the holy is both desirable, even essential. Second, approaching the holy is dangerous. Third, God’s presence is powerful and active. Things change when God gets involved. I’m not going to develop or support these themes; I’ll leave that for another time. Suffice it to say that they seem quite clear to me.

    These days, however, I hear frequently about the presence of God. “Wow! God was really present in our worship service this morning. I could feel it!” Now don’t take me as deriding the idea that one can feel the presence of God, though I prefer to say that God is present everywhere and everywhen, and we should discuss how aware we are of his presence.

    What I do question is how God can be especially present at so many worship services with so little impact. People go back again and again to experience the presence of God and then leave and go on living in the same way.

    Either we are not experiencing the presence of God as much as we say we are, or that presence is having much less impact on us than it should.

    I’m afraid it may come back to belief. We need to practice what we believe. That’s true. But is there another dirty secret in many of our churches–that we don’t actually believe the stuff we claim. I’m not talking here about doctrinal statements or theological propositions. I’m talking about belief that there is a God and that he does have expectations, that he might get involved in our lives in some way.

    Perhaps if we become certain that this is important we can get on with discussing those particular beliefs more effectively. I don’t know, but I’d like to try.

    So let me ask one question, of myself as well as of my readers:

    Do we really believe what we say we believe?

    I think that if we do, we’re going to live it, or to express it better, let Jesus live it through us.

  • Value of Short Term Missions

    When I first led mission teams to eastern Europe, I told the folks we were there to support that my team would be a colossal waste of money unless the team learned more than they taught. I know a Dentist who leads mission teams–more than 20 of them to Central America as I write. He also doesn’t sell his trips first for how others will be helped, but rather as a way for the members of the team to be changed. I have heard him tell groups over and over (and I went on one of his mission trips) that they will be changed by going on the trip.

    Now it may sound selfish to talk about the mission trip doing more for the team than for the folks we serve, but I think that is just one of the paradoxes of the kingdom. The more we give, the more we are transformed. If you haven’t gone somewhere to serve, try it. You will find yourself transformed. Your service doesn’t have to be overseas, but I do think it is valuable to get away from your support structures so that you will find yourself dependent on God and on those brothers and sisters you aim to serve. That will make it easier for you to bond with them and learn from them.

    There’s a great article on the Duke Divinity School’s Call and Response Blog by Olu Menjay (HT: Hi Lites and Dr. Platypus). It’s well worth a read.

    It also models one important point I always try to make. Build your mission team and trip plan around a need identified by people on the spot. Don’t plan you activities and then push them down somebody’s throat. It is truly the cooperative ministry that builds all concerned.

  • Resident Alien, Agent of a Foreign Power, Patriot

    I planned to post this yesterday, but both work and family intervened, leaving me with insufficient time to complete the task. Work involved family as I helped my brother with a computer problem at his office. Family was in the form of listening to my stepson play baseball via the internet, as the Pensacola Pelicans lost to the Grand Prairie Air Hogs. While it isn’t fun to listen to your team lose, I wouldn’t miss it! Now that it’s Saturday, however, I’m going to finish the post.

    As an advocate of separation of church and state, I’m often mistaken for an advocate of separation of faith, ethics, and politics in one’s own life. This misunderstanding is encouraged by the effort I put into learning to express goals in a secular or interfaith context. But this separation does not exist in my own mind.

    As a Christian, everything centers around the incarnation, and my acceptance of that belief. I put my faith in Jesus as the anointed one of God, and if God invaded human space in the form of one Jewish man in 1st century Palestine, then that has to be the central fact of my life.

    Now before someone determines from this that I mean that anyone who doesn’t have the same faith I do is less ethical, less trustworthy, or even is evil let me say clearly that I mean no such thing. I mean that my view of life centers around that one point of trust. I acknowledge that I live in a secular world when I express my political goals in secular language. I acknowledge that this is my own commitment and choice by saying that it is best that faith and spiritual commitment not become a matter for the use of force. Thus starting from my roots as a committed Christian I conclude that for the sake of both church and state the church and state should stay apart. But that’s for other posts . . .

    As a committed Christian, I live in a world shaped by metaphors, and in the literary sense myth. One of these metaphors is that of the alien and stranger in the land. This shaping story goes all the way back to Abraham. Israel was formed first as strangers and aliens, and only afterward as residents of the land. (This is one aspect that should be part of any struggle we have with the genocide recorded in Joshua.)

    In the book of Hebrews (11:13) this metaphor is presented to Christians, who have taken it up and embraced it as their own. When we pray “thy kingdom come, thy will be done” we are talking about another country, a kingdom not of this world, that will transcend our concepts of “nation” and “kingdom” so much that we probably cannot imagine it.

    So while I am a citizen of the United States in an earthly and a secular sense, my primary citizenship, as a Christian, is in the kingdom of God. If my prayers frighten you–and they should not if you don’t make the same faith commitment I do–then you should be afraid. I sincerely pray for a new kingdom. If you realize, however, that I serve the one who said, “My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would fight” (John 18:36), you would also realize that I will never use the tools of force to advance God’s kingdom. In fact, I believe it is antithetical to that kingdom for me to force you or even manipulate you into proclaiming your acceptance.

    I’m a resident alien, serving and praying for another kingdom, an outside sovereignty.

    One of the great concerns I have with American Christianity is that we have forgotten this fact. Our nation, in fact every nation on earth is contingent and temporary, always assuming we really believe the core elements of our theology. We serve a greater sovereign. When his commands come into conflict with the commands of our secular rulers, we have the example of the apostles in obeying God rather than men, though we also have ample advice to make sure it is God we’re obeying rather than our own desires (Romans 13). In fact, their temporary nature is part of the reason one should obey them in all ways possible.

    Second, and derived from the fact that I’m an alien, I’m also the agent of a foreign power. I am a representative of my sovereign Jesus Christ in the world. I serve him. I report to him. I give him my allegiance. He says to keep on living here until he comes, and I do that.

    I think we should frequently pray and meditate on the Lord’s prayer. When we pray “thy kingdom come, thy will be done,” do we, as Christians, actually mean it? Is our primary concern that God’s will be done on earth? I ask, because it seems that in politics we have tended to equate our own nation’s desires with God’s will, and have often failed to live as resident aliens who are agents of another power. But I think that the Lord’s prayer clearly says that.

    The interesting thing is that my foreign Sovereign doesn’t tell me to subvert my earthly country, but rather to be a voice there for what is good and right. Sometimes that will place me in a position to challenge actions. That’s why I take a firm stand against torture, why I believe that the unnecessary and counterproductive killing in Iraq ought to stop. It’s why I think my country should live up to its proclaimed ideals and follow its own constitution. Integrity demands it if nothing else. Integrity is a feature of my Sovereign’s kingdom.

    And that leads me finally to patriot. I am a patriot. Many interpret the first two points as a mandate to work to overthrow and subvert the government. And I do, in fact, believe that there are circumstances in which such a things would be appropriate. If you have a government that is oppressive, that refuses, for example, to allow you to live for your other Sovereign, then there may be a time when one must resist that sovereign.

    But when one has the ability to argue and act for one’s beliefs in the public square, when elections are generally open to anyone, when ideas can be exchanged freely, one has a legal way to advocate for the right.

    I love America as my home. I served it as a member of the United States Air Force. I continue to serve it loyally. I also criticize some of its actions. I am appalled that Americans, even many Christian Americans can sanction the use of torture or even long term confinement without a proper trial. I feel that it would be disloyal to my country if I failed to protest those actions.

    There’s a certain contradiction in 4th of July celebrations. There are people who call themselves American patriots who object to any protest of their own country’s actions, who call those who oppose war, torture, or other oppression disloyal, and yet they are celebrating the time when America’s founders acted violently against their legal sovereign, George III, ostensibly over a matter of taxes.

    Now the point went deeper than that. It went right down to the foundation, to the notion that one person could not be devalued over another, or one group of people (Englishmen on this side of the Atlantic) cannot be treated as inherently less than another (Englishmen on that side). Even with that foundation, this nation still continued to treat some people–slaves, for example–not merely as less than, but actually as nothing, not people at all. It took more patriots protesting laws and policies that were wrong to change that fact.

    I can’t help but believe that many of today’s American patriots, had they lived at the time of the American revolution would have been Loyalists and might have moved to Canada (not a bad place to live!).

    For me, the best loyalty that I will give my earthly nation is that I remain totally loyal to my Sovereign whose kingdom is not of this world. And I think that loyalty is the best kind of loyalty of all. May God help me live up to that goal.

  • Healthcare and the Church: But What is the Church?

    [Since I have readers from a variety of viewpoints, let me note that the following is written from within the Christian tradition and to those in that tradition. It’s OK to read, of course, but it’s unlikely to be of great interest to non-Christians.]

    Mark at Pseudo-Polymath has started a discussion on health care and the church and I have become involved. His latest post is here, which responds to some of my personal reflections as I begin posting. I have some further personal reflections, based on the five year battle with our son’s cancer. But those personal reflections are intended to lead to some thinking about the broader role of the church. My posts on this subject are in no way intended to be thoughts of an expert. I am far from an expert on this topic. But they are reflections from the consumer’s point of view on the health care system, and from the church perspective from one deeply involved in church activity.

    I want to post just a few thoughts and questions here. My problem in thinking about this discussion has been that it is very easy to shift the discussion from the role of the government to the role of the church without changing the actual content. In other words, I can make this a debate over how much is the role of the government, and how much the role of the church. I can prepare a list of programs, and ask whether the church or the government (or some other private group) should carry them out.

    That might result in a list of church programs: Education on death and dying, end of life care, support for individuals undergoing treatment and for their families, prayer, economic assistance (I know very well how demanding illness can be on one’s pocketbook even with good insurance), good lifestyle and health education and training, and so forth. I intentionally left out most of the spiritual things from that list (except prayer) because we often simply tack those on.

    It seems to me that the church has become more of an adjunct to our secular lives, a club to which we belong, rather than our spiritual center. I’ve been reading Acts 2 as part of my lectionary readings lately, and it strikes me that the church that was breaking bread together and worshiping together constantly, sharing all their good, and so forth, was much more than an adjunct to the lives of those early disciples. I think they believed they were living at least a part of the kingdom of God. That fellowship was the central part of their lives.

    Any health care related program of the church may be helpful, but it cannot be most helpful unless the church feels and acts like a body, the body of Christ in service to the world. Only in that case do we really have the ability to respond full to those within and without. In general, when a family in the church has a problem, it’s their problem with which we (the rest of the church members) may help them. It’s not our problem.

    Should healing be an adjunct to our other activities, something we do as a program, or should it perhaps be an essential part of living as the body of Jesus Christ in the world? This is the question that’s been hitting me as I have been thinking about this. My father’s church, the Seventh-day Adventists, established health care facilities all over the world as a means of evangelism. Perhaps there is another step here, where the church in general establishes (or becomes) such facilities in order to be Jesus in the world. We’d then operate them in such a way as to look as much like Jesus in action as possible.

    I don’t know precisely what this would look like, but I think it would look much different than what we have. The problem with resolving end of life care issues is not so much in knowledge, though knowledge is necessary, but in support.

    Let me illustrate. The hardest moment in my son’s illness was not the day he died, but several months earlier. My wife was on a mission trip in eastern Europe. I had no means to contact her by e-mail. I was here alone with James. I had to call the doctor and get the results of a scan. Those results said that the cancer had returned in four places. Now theres knowledge, and then there’s the ability to apply the knowledge, to take the steps one has to take.

    My knowledge was not adequate. I needed the support of my family and my church in order to work through the situation and take care of it. It seems to me that this is the most important consideration. No amount of training is going to help if we’re not there at the time of need. Being the church in some sense means that we are there at the right time.