Something has happened to me over the past five years. I’ve experienced a revolution. The chains around my faith have been broken and I now live in the freedom only Christ can bring. The chains were expertly fashioned, carefully reasoned; they were chains around my mind, mostly of my own making. I wish I could say they were completely gone, but in reality, I continue to discover a new link almost daily.
I’ve been in church most of my life. I sensed a call to ministry when I was 16, was licensed at 17, was ordained and pastoring my first church by 22. I’ve spent most of my life in the bubble of the church, speaking church language, and experiencing church culture. I went to a Christian university, attended seminary, worked at the seminary, and pastored a little country church while working on two seminary degrees. I thought I had everything figured out. I thought I knew what the church needed.
As I read old books (which is a good thing) I fell in love with another culture and deluded myself into believing that the great need of our day was to return to a simpler, more spiritual time in the history of the church. It doesn’t matter what time period I preferred because they are all the same, really. I committed an historical fallacy because I looked back upon history through the lenses of uninformed nostalgia and assumed that theirs must have been the glory days of the church. I am a Reformed guy, and I like reading and talking to Reformed guys, but Reformed guys have a strong tendency to fall for the same fallacy. It’s not intentional; it happens because we love books and we love truth. We read and study great writers who love Jesus and we passionately desire to glorify God in all we do.
The problem comes at the point where we fail to extract Biblical principles from culture and to realize that we can transport the principles but not the culture. For me, that meant that I sought to revitalize my church by isolating my people from the surrounding “worldly” culture and educating them in a better, distinctly “Christian” culture. This method led me to an inevitable conflict with the people I served because they were stuck in the culture of the 1950s while their kids were begging us to meet them in their own present culture.
Over time, I refused to listen to contemporary Christian music, preferring the old hymns instead; I rejected the use of technology as a viable medium for gospel interaction; I built walls around my mind and lived in the monastery of thought where I attempted to control the undeniable changes and cultural shifts all around me. I can only begin to list the links of my chain because I am still discovering them, and frankly, they surround me in a cloud of confused assumptions. What the links actually are matters less than the means by which they are strengthened, which is the key to their undoing.
My chains were fashioned not by the books I read, the songs I listened to, or the seminary I attended. They were fashioned deep within my heart where I failed to grasp the full implications of the gospel. I struggled because I desperately wanted to reach people for Jesus. I wanted to bring release to the captives and healing to the broken, but I did not know how to communicate the gospel to the people I wanted to reach. They lived in one culture while I remained in another. Yes, while pastoring a church I did not know how to communicate the message of the gospel to another human being because we were not speaking the same language. We both spoke some form of American English but we were not connecting on any level of understanding because I stood before them entrapped by the bonds of religiosity and they ensnared by their own cultural assumptions. One of us needed to move toward the other, and I did not think it was I that needed to move.
The problem wasn’t with me, I thought, the problem was the culture around me. Pride was all it was and all it is. I did not see then what seems so clear now. The gospel transcends all culture. That part I got. What I didn’t get, however, was that the gospel I believed was cluttered with the baggage of a religious culture. These religious barnacles concealed the gospel from my own heart, making it impossible for me to proclaim it to anyone else.
These gospel “extras” impose upon us standards and rules the Bible doesn’t. Whenever we identify the gospel with a particular cultural expression we lose the gospel in favor of the culture because it is easier to see the culture. When the culture begins to shift (which is inevitable) we rally to our defensive posture because we believe the gospel is threatened. Maybe it is, and maybe it isn’t. It probably isn’t. If the gospel truly transcends culture then why do we waste so much time attacking and defending a particular culture? This reasoning is where I began to change. My defenses were dismanteld; my excuses were removed; my walls were destroyed. I stood naked before God realizing that I had been fighting the wrong war for the wrong side.
Broken, confused, and desperate I planted a church. I didn’t plant angry (by God’s grace), but I’m not sure I was ready. At first we attracted people who were like I had been, but over time we have begun to attract people who are moving with us toward our culture with the gospel. Our path is getting more clear, and our sense of mission is growing stronger. God has worked a revolution in my heart. I no longer want to stand in a pulpit and call the “worldly” culture around me to come to church; I want to go to where my friends and neighbors live, where my city plays and works, and where they make music in order to bring the gospel to them.
The transformation may not be readily apparent to anyone who has not known me for some time, but I feel it deep within me. For the first time in a long time, I feel myself in the midst of the gospel fight. A fight not with my brothers and sisters in the faith, but a fight within my own soul with residual self-righteousness and stubborn sin that clings tightly to me. I am renewed in my desire to honor Christ and see Him made much of in my world. Following Christ is much more about the trajectory of the heart as shaped by the Word of God than it is about conformity to religious preferences however good they may seem.
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