Costly Grace

Frequently I read books devotionally.  (This may just be a "spiritual" way to say that I read books slowly.)    In the course of doing this for several years, I have encountered a number of authors and books who have rocked my world - Chan's The Forgotten God, Manning's The Furious Longing of God, Pratt's Radical, Claiborne's Jesus For President, and others.  I now working into another one - Jon Walker's Costly Grace: A Contemporary View of Bonhoeffer's The Cost of Discipleship.

With the Second World War and the Holocaust on the horizon,  German pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer noted with pain that much of West Christianity had been reduced to an easy, peripheral, low-cost lifestyle support system.  Jesus had been reshaped as a cosmic security system/lifeguard/complaint department, to protect our circumstantial happiness, health, success, and comfort if a person enjoyed those blessings, or to secure them if a person did not.  Bonhoeffer bemoaned that Jesus was the equivalent of our present day 911; valued if needed, and ignored if not. Against this, Bonhoeffer argued for a faith that yielded completely to a Jesus who changed lives and upended the world's value systems.  He famously championed the truth that the grace of God in Jesus is free, but it is not cheap.  Jesus does not invite us to come and be pampered, Bonhoeffer insisted; Jesus invites us to come and die.  Pastor Bonhoeffer did not just preach this; he lived it.  (Google him.  It's worth it.)

In the spirit of Bonhoeffer, Walker writes this:  "Do we follow dogma instead of Jesus?  Do we create impersonal discipleship models that are hopelessly irrelevant to our personal lives?  Do we preach, teach, and discuss the same biblical concepts over and over again-our favorite ones-at the expense of others that are just as important?  Do we follow Jesus based more on our own opinions and convictions, and to little on the commands of Christ?...We must look to Jesus and no where else for our answers.  We must know a Christ who is real and solid, and this knowing doesn't come from conveniently memorizing Bible facts and comfortably studying theological systems.  It comes from the willingness  to pay the cost of knowing him and sacrificially living out of what we believe to be true of him." (Page 22.)

I'll see you around the next bend in the river.  I anticipate rough and exciting waters ahead.

Suicide Rates Climb; Pastors Among the Afflicted

Yesterday a friend and colleague in ministry shared the sad news about a pastor in Macon, Georgia.  He didn't show up for worship on Sunday.  When his family members went looking for him, the found him in the driveway of their home, dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.  He was 42 years old, married, and the father of two.  His 800+ member congregation is fruitful and growing.  He was one of thousands who suffer from severe manic depression.  For most of his life and ministry he prevailed over it.  Something happened, though, or a complexity of circumstances came together, and he simply felt he couldn't go on any longer.  Needless to say, it has left his family and his church devastated.  No one will ever know the full circumstances of this tragic event.  Suicide rates continue to rise in America.  According to TIME Magazine, in the 50-54 year old age range of men the rate of suicides increased 49.4% in the last ten year U.S. Census period.  An alarming number of suicides include faith leaders and professionals.  Three things capture my attention since hearing of the Macon, Georgia pastor's death.

First, it's time to pull our heads out of the sand and to recognize that depression is epidemic.   Many of us know depression from the inside.  Yes, there are things we should and can do to help minimize the effect of depression on us and on those we love and serve.  Depression is curable, and we who are prone to suffer from it must take responsibility to seek health.  But depression is not a moral flaw, a character weakness, a lapse in faith, or an excuse.  It is an illness.  None of us who have ever dealt with it would chose it.  In the worst of it, it is a valley from which there seems no escape.  No one who has never dealt with it could understand this.  Unless you have been in this bleak hell hole, you cannot know how devastating depression is.   We have to start talking about it and deal with it,  long before the option to cease living is ever considered.

Second, I am so very grateful and humbled.   I have blessed as a pastor with amazingly caring congregations, including the awesome congregation I am a part of now, and with strong support from friends and colleagues in ministry.  I've been through tough stretches, and depression rears its ugly head from time to time.   But I've always had compassionate laypersons and assertive support from within and from outside the church who have been there to pray for and with me, to lift me up, to hold me accountable, and to let me know that I am not alone in the journey.   This is not something I have earned, nor is it a function of my ability or being favored in some way.  As is the case for many of us who are church pastors, as we look at the colleague in Georgia whom we have lost, it is literally a case of there, but for the grace of God, go I. 

Finally, even as I consider how graced I have been, I know of far too many pastors and church leaders who are not.   I will even go so far as to say that some pastors I know are in fact victims of abuse.  Some abuse is intentional.   I've heard of church people who go after their pastors with a vengeance, having convinced themselves that they're doing so for Godly reasons.  Some abuse happens by neglect.   Colleagues tell me of congregations who will throw something at their pastor during Pastor's Appreciation Month (October), then use that as an excuse to ignore their pastor and his/her needs for the rest of the year.   Abuse happens in guise of praise,  heaping superhuman expectations on those who lead.   Some churches treat their pastors almost as a third gender - beyond anything human.  Pastors are people, just like anyone else.  They face the same problems, the same needs, the same pressures, the same temptations, the same angers, the same pains as anyone else.  They are faulty, and they make mistakes.  As I have experienced, it is a wise congregation that expects excellence in leadership from their pastor(s) and holds them accountable to that, but which asks about a pastor's personal needs, cares about a pastors human side, and supports their pastor as they would any brother or sister in Christ.

Just feeling pain for a brother in The Lord who is no longer with us.  I'll see you around the next bend in the river.  Never paddle alone.

Jesus Did Not Die the Cross to Protect Your Lifestyle!

I think it's time to name an elephant in the evangelical Christian world.  And I do so recognizing that I am the first one guilty of what I am about to identify.  Many who would seek to be followers of Jesus want to do so without making a single dent in our lifestyle.  We want to enjoy the same pleasures, have access to the same amount of money, pursue the same recreation and leisure, stockpile the same amount of stuff, and have the same amount of control over what pleases us personally and what does not.  We want Jesus to put His stamp of approval on this so that we can see it all as the "blessings" he wants us to have.   It's like we believe that Jesus died on a cross to protect our lifestyles.

In contrast to this, I offer the words of the prophet Rick Warren.  Yes, I intentionally typed "prophet". A prophet is one who humbly speaks on behalf of God, whether it is popular or not.  And, yes, I know all the stuff flying around about the lead and founding pastor of Saddleback Church.  I know all the rumblings about Rick inviting BOTH presidential candidates to interviews at Saddleback.  I know the ugly innuendos and judgmental comments that floated around following the tragic, self-inflicted death of his son.  And I know the ridiculous urban cyber-myth about Rick promoting the Koran.
All of that aside, Rick is a man after God's own heart.  He is on fire about winning people to Jesus and building strong discipleship in a way about which most of us haven't thought.  Thousands walk with Christ because of his leadership and his writing.  Able to live like billionaire if he chose to, he instead chooses to leverage that considerable financial power for the Kingdom.  Rick Warren walks the walk, period.

Rick writes this in a foreword to Jon Walker's book, COSTLY GRACE: A Contemporary View of Bonhoeffer's The Cost of Discipleship.  "Sadly, millions of Christians are confused about what it means to surrender to Jesus and so they go on living their lives without ever changing the way they live.  The 'cheap grace' Bonhoeffer describes...has so deeply saturated our congregations that, despite our evangelical theology, the idea of surrender is as unpopular and misunderstood as the idea of submission.  Surrender implies losing, and no one wants to be a loser. Yet Jesus says we must be losers, losing our lives in order to find life in him.  (Matthew 16:25-28)"

Jesus did not die on the cross to preserve my standard of living.  He died to save me and to transform me, and that will mean living differently than I would otherwise.  I can serve Him or my lifestyle, not both.  That's it.  I'll see you around the next bend in the river.