Tag: church growth

What Happened to the Jesus People?

This week I watched Jesus Revolution, the story of the Jesus Movement in Southern California, and it brought back memories of what, at least according to Time magazine, was the greatest spiritual awakening in American history. I was not familiar with the characters and events in the film, yet it all seemed so familiar from my experience in Kansas (of all places). The film might leave the impression this was a local event that spread, but it seemed more of a spontaneous combustion igniting across the country. Counter-culture, drug-culture, youth-culture meet Jesus was not an isolated event; at least it seemed spontaneous with us. Which raises the question as to what it was and what happened to it?

The most obvious lasting effect in most churches is the music (which to my ears started so sweet and has now become intolerable), the vague influences of the charismatic movement (mostly reduced to hand raising), casual attire, and the lack of concern with denominational markers. As portrayed in the film, the movement was intensely evangelistic – a lot of handing out tracks and dramatic personal testimony. The tenor may have been Hal Lindsey (the end is coming) meets David Wilkerson style evangelism, but there was also a sense of return to the early church and communalism (at least we made a run at it, as did many others). But other than the rise of new forms of worship and the “new paradigm” churches such as Calvary Chapel and the Vineyard Fellowship, the theology was more of the same. Even the focus on peace and love was gradually absorbed into the general evangelical ethos.

In the end, sociologically and politically, the movement captured a large portion of the counter-culture for the Republican Party and right-wing conservatism. The evangelical sub-culture became a social, cultural, and political force of mainstream proportions in the 1980’s, and a major contribution must have been that the Jesus Movement succeeded in preserving “traditional” values for many counter-cultural “radicals.”

The even greater irony – the anti-materialistic Jesus Movement gave birth to the church growth movement, with its pure materialism of bigger is better. The open acceptance in the Jesus Movement of youth culture, translated into a seeker-friendly anti-theological focus – not for the purposes of openness, peace and love – but for larger numbers. The unity of the Jesus Movement, in its rejection of denominational division – was a felt unity, the crossing of boundaries that has translated into bland sameness.  The radical edge (however vague it was) is long gone and is unwelcome in groups seeking the largest common denominator. No mention of hard doctrine (certainly not anti-materialism, nonviolence or views of God and atonement advocating as much), politics, or pressing social issues, are generally welcome.

The Jesus Movement came with a lot of baggage, which no one was sure how to deal with, and which subsequently was translated into an already existing evangelical theological understanding. This is partly reflected in the Jesus Revolution’s treatment of Lonnie Frisbee. Lonnie came to Jesus during an LSD trip. He assumed Jesus had come to earth on a flying saucer, and he was an active homosexual, none of which is mentioned in the film. He must have adjusted some of his doctrine, but part of his radical appeal (he was the original draw for the large crowds) was his assumption that God was speaking to him and that he was a latter day prophet on the order of John the Baptist. He would eventually contract aids, but it is clear in subsequent interviews that Chuck Smith never knew what to do with his sexuality (other than that he should repent of it), let alone his free-wheeling theology. As Smith tells it, he backslid, contracted aids, and then repented.  The bizarre, and obviously fragile human nature of Lonnie, was not simply his “weakness” but the very thing that drew the crowds.

The same thing could be said for Larry Norman, who is not treated in the film, but who claimed to be the father of contemporary Christian music. Larry came through our town in Kansas, and embodied the cool of Jesus Music. His were some of the most memorable lyrics of the period, but Larry suffered from mental illness, probably arising from childhood sexual abuse. Friends and family did not intervene or confront him; it just seemed that Jesus did not deliver him, and that he too tended to backslide. Evangelical theology was not and is not capable of accounting for the fragile, beautiful, but broken humanity with which it was openly confronted by the Jesus Movement.

The great joy of the time is the most memorable part of the period, and I think for many of us who passed through the period, that joy has been preserved, not through the focus on experientialism but through grappling at an intellectual and theological level with the deep things of God. The Jesus Movement was heavy with experience and light on theology, but many of us were naturally inducted, through thinkers like Francis Schaeffer (with all of his limitations) C. S. Lewis and others, into a deeper theological pursuit and a conversation that is unending.

This is my recommendation to this generation seeking revival (through what often seems a misplaced experientialism): the abiding experience of joy comes with an ever-deepening transformation of the mind.

What Louie Giglio Doesn’t Get in his Inadvertent Confession and Subsequent Apology: The Form is the Substance–In Other Words, “No, I think you meant it.”

When you’ve predicated your whole approach to church and the Gospel on making the cross look attractive, then you’ve given up any moral authority you had to acknowledge and speak to its inherent injustice. When you can’t speak to the injustice of the cross and our call to bear it because it’s not attractive, then you can also no longer identify with others on their own crosses, such as brown people suffering systemic injustice and violence, without attempting to make that palatable as well.

When it comes to churches, Atlanta is a fascinating place.  On the one hand, you can visit the old Ebenezer Baptist church and sit before the pulpit that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. cut his preaching teeth behind.  I’ve sat in that building and felt the chills of its history and choked on the lump in my throat. You can also find the small Berea Mennonite church that operates a farm in a neighborhood deep in East Atlanta.  I have worshiped with those saints as well.  And, of course, as with any town there are as many myriad other churches per capita as one might expect.

What I hadn’t prepared myself for before I got to Atlanta was the immense popularity of the “megachurch.”  The place is loaded with them.  In a galactic analogy, it’s like a stellar nursery of red giant stars, but sick ones, always threatening to collapse in on themselves under the weight of their own structures into theological black holes of inanity…always needing to “attract more ‘butts in the seats’” (as a former colleague invested heavily in “church growth” once so eloquently put it when telling me how to solve all the problems at my church) in order to sustain themselves.  

There are white megachurches (always systematically planted in affluent, up-and-coming regions) and black megachurches.  Among both black and white megachurches, there are many who are unabashedly prosperity-oriented, and others denominationally structured.  And there are megachurches for every denomination, some having grown up organically, often with more traditional architecture, their appearances reflecting the life cycle of their surroundings.  

Others were clearly planted using the “church growth” model, having been strategically built, facilitated, and marketed based on careful market and consumer research.  This model, having been cursed to us by Donald McGavran and his disciples, has been elaborated on more fully by Paul Axton.  At its heart is a narcissistic, consumer-driven ideology, founded on growth capitalism, and modeled after the modern corporate CEO structure.  It’s intentionally designed to give religious consumers the “worship experience” they want in a competitive religious market.  Customer service can get those butts in the seats.  Corporate America can show us how.

I remember being shocked and disturbed the first time I saw a commercial for a church.  Worse yet, I remember after an experience we had where we were treated poorly in an application process, telling another minister how hurt we were and seeking solace.  I was mortified by his response. “Yeah, we did that to an applicant once.  I feel bad about it.  I guess we need to spend more time looking to the business world to figure out how to treat people.”  

I’m not making that up.  A minister of an organization claiming to follow (at the very least) the greatest ethical teacher in the history of the world recommended turning to greedy corporations to learn how we ought to treat each other in the church.  Failure.

These megachurches are all over the place, though, mammoth structures where throngs get whatever religious fix they prefer in front of the shiny lights and smoke machines and volunteer baristas, while three-chord guitar players lead them in emo-style, stupid-redundant, romance ballads to a God who calls them only to be more comfortable and fulfilled, while their kids jump on trampolines and play on McDonald’s playland gym sets.  And somehow they always leave more biblically illiterate than they entered. 

It’s why you can be a part of a “large church” doing some “good things” and not understand that Jesus wants you to care about black people being murdered.

Enter Louie Giglio, white evangelical preacher at the enormous Passion City Church, another big-box, multi-location “Six Flags over Jesus” (seriously, check out the link) that markets itself as an “inner city” church.  In the midst of what may be the most profoundly important moment for racial justice since the civil rights era, when after the killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Rayshard Brooks and countless others, a slumbering white giant is finally starting to wake up and feel the pain of their “red and yellow and black” brothers and sisters and say, “We’ve HAD it!”  and protests are finally becoming harder to ignore, and change may finally be on the horizon again–when the time to stand with our brown brothers and sisters and let them speak and be counted with them came, Louie decided to step in.

You can’t hardly blame him.  In a moment with so much attention, it’s hard to pass up the opportunity to capture some of that lime-light.  My friend posted an ad for their upcoming Sunday “panel discussion”.  Giglio, the Christian rapper Lacrae, and (of all people) Dan Cathy (white, fabulously privileged CEO of Chic-Fil-A) were going to sit with Bernice King (daughter of MLK and head of the King Center), who later (thank Christ) withdrew from the panel.  

My conversation with my friend did not go well.  The panel went worse.  At one point Giglio, free-riffing in front of the only black person on the stage revealed that, in his private conversations with Cathy (a wealthy, white, capitalist) they’ve often lamented that the term “white privilege” (being distasteful to privileged white people) is met with such resistance.  Why not call it “white blessing” so they can more readily accept that, although slavery and racism have been a blessing, they were still kind of unfair.  

He might as well have said, “I bet we could sell that.”

Giglio, when the issue rightfully exploded on him, has issued an apology.  But that damage is done.  He said it because he thought it.  But I’m glad he said it because it revealed something ugly about his version of the church.  

Giglio, on the surface of the comment, is talking about “the cross.”  He wants to call people to bear the cross.”  But the cross…it’s hard.  And in a church culture (like the church growth movement) where the goal has always been to make Christianity attractive in order to attract people to it, one’s goal in preaching the cross is going to HAVE to mean making the cross palatable.  But the cross is the cross.  “Palatable” isn’t the way it works.

Again, the church growth philosophy and the megachurches are predicated on making Christianity attractive.  The problem with the inevitable rebuttal one always hears “But what’s wrong with smoke machines and drum solos” is that it is based on the idea that the form of the message is different from the substance of the message.  It’s predicated on the idea that it doesn’t matter how we say it, it only matters that we say it.   But the question is, “what is ‘it’ that we’re trying to say?”. Is it true that the form of our lives is different than its content?

What Bruce Gorman’s work can help us see is that Christianity was never supposed to be a message that is divorced from its form.  It’s not just a set of belief statements that can be repeated like magic.  It’s not just a set of trite religious rituals to be completed to sate a bloodthirsty deity.  It’s none of that.  

What it is is a cruciform lifestyle of following Jesus.  This means that (contrary to well-meaning folks who try to overemphasize following over the content of our faith) what we believe (substance) is vitally important  but only because what we believe is what we live (form). It is both form and substance because the form is the substance.  When Jesus said “pick up your cross and follow” he wasn’t saying “yeah it might get hard sometimes if you believe in me.”  He was saying, “This is what it is like to be my disciple.  Come and die with me.” 

This means that things like wealth and comfort and self-indulgence and smoke machines and drum solos (though nice at a rock concert) are not worship of the God who submitted to the cross.  It means that consumerism and growth capitalism, both of which are contributors to and sustainers of things like injustice and racism and exploitation are absolutely antithetical to the cross.  You can’t do the cross AND base your church on a theme park.  Once you turn to capitalism (Dan Cathy?) for the answers, you lose the moral authority to talk about things like systemic racism.

Let me take that further: when you’ve predicated your whole approach to church and the Gospel on making the cross look attractive, then you’ve given up any moral authority you had to acknowledge and speak to its inherent injustice. When you can’t speak to the injustice of the cross and our call to bear it because it’s not attractive, then you can also no longer identify with others on their own crosses, such as brown people suffering systemic injustice and violence, without attempting to make that palatable as well.

I used to ask my students: how do you challenge people’s idolatry when you’re using it to attract them to the cross?  You can’t.  And what Giglio revealed in his Freudian slip was the failure of church growth: that it makes the cross incomprehensible.   

If Giglio was concerned with calling people to the cross instead of attracting them to a show, he wouldn’t need to call white privilege something else or try to turn slavery into “blessing” so that his rich white patrons could swallow the idea.  If he called people to the cross, then his white members would understand that they’re supposed to be willing to suffer and die with their brown brothers and sisters.  Because if you’re willing to die for brown brothers and sisters, then at the very least you’ll be able to bear the hurt of the notion that you have it better than them and that systemic racism and slavery were just bad–with no qualifiers.  

But telling rich white Atlantans that the culture that works so well for them is inherently evil is not attractive.  The cross isn’t attractive.  And that’s why guys like Giglio and others such as Andy Stanley, who may mean well and may even stumble on a nugget of truth every now and then, are ultimately not doing the Gospel.  They’re selling a religion that is a different form than Christianity.

And the form is the substance.

A Christian Devil?

The following is a guest blog by Allan S. Contreras Rios.

Matthew 4:1-11

When talking about Jesus’ temptation it is but inevitable to identify ourselves with Jesus.  After all, everybody is tempted, constantly. But, what about an interpretation in which a Christian can see himself as being Satan? This is a possibility ignored by many because, well, who likes to be called Satan?

In a hermeneutics class with Jason Rodenbeck, a book called “Grasping God’s Word” by J. Scott Duvall and J. Daniel Hays was used. A comment by Rodenbeck about the name of the book stood out (without demeaning the richness of the book) “the word ‘grasping’ has a violence to it. I’ve got it, I own that. I wish it was ‘being grasped by God’s Word’.” The idea is that the Bible is not something a Christian should hold, but that which holds the Christian.

It is a fact that everybody is an interpreter; and in this case, even Satan is. Satan uses misapplied Scripture to tempt Jesus. Several things must be pointed out: 1) Satan is called by three different words: tempter (v.3), devil (vs. 1, 5, 8, 11), and Satan (v. 10). 2) Satan is using the Word of God to tempt the Word of God (Logos, Jesus). 3) By doing so, he thinks his interpretation of the Word of God is superior to the Word Himself (Jesus). 4) The temptation is luring Jesus to succumb to the culture, religion and politics of this world.

Every teacher of the Bible should be careful about what he learns and teaches (James 3:1). It is not uncommon for teachers and preachers to use Scripture according to their agendas. It is not uncommon for them to believe theological doctrines based on verses out of context. It is not uncommon that their congregations end up believing these theological doctrines, whether they’re correct or not. And this is the reason why I think it is important to stop “grasping the Word of God” like Satan tried to do, and start “being grasped” by it.

The three words that describe Satan in this pericope can describe preachers as well. In Revelation 2:12-17 the Church in Pergamum is rebuked for holding false teachings and for committing acts of immorality. They are warned to repent or Jesus will make war against them with the sword of His mouth (the Word). Immorality and false teaching have crept into the church, many preachers even mishandle Scripture to teach that certain immoralities are no longer immoral, but normal. And so they fall into the first description of Satan, they are tempters. This control over what the Bible “teaches” is what makes them fall into the second description since “devil” comes from the words “calumniate, accuse, repudiate, misrepresent;” they are opposed to what the Bible teaches because they think that their interpretation of the Word is more important than the Word itself, even if or when it is a lie. Because of this misuse of the Scripture and their opposition to it, they become “adversaries” (the meaning of Satan) of the Word itself (Jesus).

Many preachers today use Satan’s strategy to have more “Christians” in their churches. They lure them to “following Christ” by remaining in the kingdom of this world, and by appealing to this world’s idols. There is no change of culture, or religion, or politics. Who would not like to have eternal life without sacrificing a thing? But, in this account Jesus does not fall into Satan’s temptation. Would He –having eaten bread or having thrown Himself from the pinnacle of the temple or worshiped Satan– gone to die on the cross? Not likely. And is it not what Jesus calls Christians to do as well–take up our cross to die (Matthew 16:24)?

Many preachers may not know that what they are teaching is opposed to the Word. And how could they not if they fail to do their homework when it comes to interpreting? “Ignorance is not the same as innocence.”[1] Christians must acknowledge this: bad theology leads to bad practices, many times violent ones. It is every Christian’s task to let himself be grasped by God’s Word in order to have good theology and as result, good practices. Mankind, since Genesis 3, is so used to the violence of seeing, holding, eating and sharing the wrong thing with others because it empowers them. And this is what makes the kingdom of Christ so radical, the citizenship requires the complete opposite of empowerment since it calls to an emptiness and denying of the self.

…the Bible is not something a Christian should hold, but that which holds the Christian.

Satan’s temptations follow his own pattern in Genesis: food, sight, pride. Israel fell on all of these during the wilderness. But Jesus shows a better way by denying His own needs in order to focus on ours. Christians are called to do the same to other Christians. But many, like Israel, fail to do so, or like Satan, they become the enemy to other Christians. What does Jesus call those who do Satan’s will? Those who refuse to be endorsed by a peaceable kingdom and therefore endorsing a violent one? Those who are not willing to give up their culture, religion or politics for a relationship with God? A Christian devil? No, He calls them “son of the devil” (John 8:44). Strong words that may apply to some who think are Christians, but not everyone who says “Lord, Lord…” (Matthew 7:22-23).

[1] This is a quote from the film Batman v Superman  which is thought to be a variation of the line from the English poet Robert Browning who said “Ignorance is not innocence but sin.”

The Delights of Dante’s Hell: Paula White and Oral Roberts Meet Robert Schuller

Gauging progress in the faith depends upon how one perceives the race. Another jet and a bigger mansion for Robert Tilton, more Rolls Royces for Creflo Dollar, and for their followers perhaps a desperate last attempt to be miraculously healed or to escape perpetual poverty.  In Dante’s definition of inverse progress in hell (hell being the “realm … of those who have rejected spiritual values by . . . perverting their human intellect for fraud or malice against their fellowmen”) it would seem that Bob and Creflo would land at the 8th ring. Dante reserves the depths of hell for those who have committed fraud – with spiritual fraud qualifying for the inner portion of the 8th – 9th circle. Those who “pervert and falsify ecclesiastical office, counsel, authority, psychic influence, and material interdependence” or those who made money for themselves out of what belongs to God: “Rapacious ones, who take the things of God, / that ought to be the brides of Righteousness, / and make them fornicate for gold and silver! / The time has come to let the trumpet sound / for you.” The violence done to the dispossessed (Kenneth and Gloria Copeland rail against modern medicine as the money is better spent on their jets) certainly puts them at the 7th circle. Kenneth and Gloria and all who have “plundered” their neighbors, according to Dante, will apparently be immersed in boiling blood forever. Oral Roberts, the father of seed-faith (promise of prosperity in return for giving) televangelism, televised faith-healing, can probably now report whether his “head is twisted around such that he is compelled to walk backwards for eternity,” but Dante would consign all false-prophets to the 8th circle of hell where they are “blinded by their own tears.” Continue reading “The Delights of Dante’s Hell: Paula White and Oral Roberts Meet Robert Schuller”