Couldn't Help Noticing

Church growth, gospel growth, and church decimation

I like church growth as much as the next man. Who wouldn't? If it's your own church, you love to see people coming under the sound of the gospel. Even if you don't like large numbers, that's easily solved by taking 30 people out of the congregation and using them to start a new church when things get too big.

But the only sort of church growth that is of interest to Christians is gospel growth. Acts 6:7, speaking about the booming church in Jerusalem, encapsulates this idea beautifully:

And the word of God continued to increase, and the number of the disciples multiplied greatly in Jerusalem, and a great many of the priests became obedient to the faith.

So the question naturally arises, can you have gospel growth without church growth? After all, if the word of God is going out, wouldn't you expect churches to be growing in size?

No. Here is Isaiah learning what the result of his gospel ministry will be:

And I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” Then I said, “Here am I! Send me.” And he said, “Go, and say to this people:

“‘Keep on hearing, but do not understand;
keep on seeing, but do not perceive.’
Make the heart of this people dull,
  and their ears heavy,
  and blind their eyes;
lest they see with their eyes,
  and hear with their ears,
and understand with their hearts,
  and turn and be healed.”
Then I said, “How long, O Lord?”
And he said:
“Until cities lie waste
  without inhabitant,
and houses without people,
  and the land is a desolate waste,
and the Lord removes people far away,
  and the forsaken places are many in the midst of the land.
And though a tenth remain in it,
  it will be burned again,
like a terebinth or an oak,
  whose stump remains
  when it is felled.”
The holy seed is its stump.

(Isa 6:8-13)

This is all a dreadful shock, really. The word of God is preached faithfully, according to God's instruction, and the result of this Word going out is a judgement that results in devastation. Even verse 13—which speaks of a remaining stump—portrays a stump that has been doused in petrol and then burned, just to be on the safe side.

Those who are church growth afficionados (CGAs for short) may well respond that this is a unique event in the history of Israel which does not have relevance to the situation of our growing churches today. Perhaps, perhaps not. But it is hardly unique.

Jesus picks up this very passage to describe his own ministry in Mark 4 and other passages. After Jesus' death and resurrection, Paul applies it to his own ministry in Acts 28, and uses it more broadly in Romans 11 to describe the current state of gospel ministry amongst Jews and Gentiles.

The one comfort CGAs may still draw from this is that the devastating judgement that accompanies gospel growth appears to be linked in all these passages (Old Testament, Gospel and epistle) to the particular sin of the Jewish people. So it may well be that the sin of the Jewish people is specific to them, and has no relevance whatsoever to the Gentiles. Indeed, in this biblical scenario, the Gentiles end up benefitting from the sin of the Jews, because Jewish rejection of the gospel means that the preachers of gospel truth go on to speak to the Gentiles about the salvation and restoration that is found in Jesus.

Unfortunately, the sin of the Jews doesn't appear specific to them. In the early chapters of Isaiah, their sin is greed, idolatry, materialism, alcohol addiction, complacency, religious hypocrisy, failure of leadership, haughtiness amongst women, a murderous spirit amongst men, and apathy and lack of concern for widows, orphans and foreigners.

Perhaps it will be okay. Perhaps when God pays close attention to people in London, Durham, Pittsburgh, New York, Los Angeles, Sydney, Johannesburg, Singapore, and Perth, he will not discover greed, idolatry, materialism, alcohol addiction, complacency, religious hypocrisy, failure of leadership, haughtiness amongst women, a murderous spirit amongst men, or apathy and lack of concern for widows, orphans and foreigners. On the other hand, he may well discover these things there. If that ends up being the case, we should be very anxious when we hear about gospel growth, because if the gospel grows as it did in Isaiah 6, it may well mean, not church growth, but church decimation.

Faith

I was enjoying a bit of gentle verbal sparring between two journalists on the radio the other day, until one journalist speculated about the political motives of the Federal Police in the way they have dealt with the Dr Mohamed Haneef matter. The second journalist took umbrage at this speculation, and said something like this: “There is absolutely no evidence for that ... it is a faith-based argument”.

Immediately my hackles were raised. Was this man alleging that my Christian faith was something that lacked any evidence to support it? I resolved to write to him to correct his clear misunderstanding of the word ‘faith’. He seemed to have it confused with ‘superstition’.

I started drafting the letter in my mind, and soon thought I ought to bolster my slam-dunk letter with a quote from the dictionary. I sprang to the Macquarie:

faith noun 1. confidence or trust in a person or thing

“Yes, see, there's no reason that trust can't be based on solid grounds”, I thought. “Take that, Mr Journalist!” Then I read on:

2. belief which is not based on proof

Oh dear. Now here's a problem. It seems my journalist was just using the word ‘faith’ in a common and accepted way.

I know I'm not the first to ask this, but isn't it time we came up with a different way of expressing ourselves? Isn't it time we came up with a way that means Christianity is not continually associated in people's minds with ‘no evidence’ (i.e. superstition)?

Of course, ‘faith’ can also be used as a noun meaning a set of doctrines. So maybe we need a few different words and phrases.

Send in your suggestions. But here's a few to kick off the discussion. Instead of saying, “The Christian faith is centuries old”, we might say, “The Christian understanding is centuries old”. Instead of saying, “I want to grow in my Christian faith”, we could say, “I want to grow my Christian understanding and dependence on Christ”. (Yes, I know, ‘faith’ is shorter. But little progress comes without cost.) Instead of saying, “Put your faith in Jesus”, perhaps we should call on people to “Trust in Jesus”. Instead of saying, “God is faithful; we should believe in him”, we might say, “God is dependable; depend on him”.

It's a linguistic re-training exercise for Christians, and it will take time and effort. But surely it is worth it.

Josh Harris is ... giving up Facebook

For all you Facebook fans, Josh Harris' reasons for giving up Facebooking are worth a read.

Don’t waste your Second Life

On 2 August 2007, William Gibson, author of Neuromancer and ‘father’ of the cyberpunk genre (he coined the term ‘cyberspace’), gave a reading of his new novel, Spook Country, in the virtual world of Second Life. According to the Times Online, fans queued up for hours to get a good spot (yes, there are seating restrictions even in cyberspace!) Even though it was mainly a promotional event for Gibson's work, the main thing everyone wanted to know was whether Second Life lived up to his original conception of cyberspace. Did he like it? Did he think it was cool? Did he think they were cool for being there?

Well, according to this interview in Salon, Gibson found Second Life “too conventional”: “It never would have occurred to me to write something about a corporation building a virtual world in which shopping and real estate were two of the most popular activities”.

Conventionality aside, many find Massive Multi-player Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs) like Second Life seriously addictive. They can be a lot of fun, allowing players to live the life they wish they had—as someone important, someone rich, someone powerful or someone beautiful. Take millionaire Anshe Chung, the Second Life avatar of Ailin Graef, who has become so successful in real estate and brokerage in the virtual world, her picture was featured on the cover of BusinessWeek in May 2006. (Curiously, the French documentary about cyberspace worlds, La Vraie vie des mondes virtuels, which contained an interview with Graef, also filmed her getting tattoos and making various other cosmetic changes to her physical body so she could look more like her avatar. Graef, like many other gamers, seems to believe that she is the character.) MMORPGs also make it possible for players to live out their fantasies: they can become a woman (if they are a man), a child (if they are an adult), an elf (if they're human), or a wizard who can turn people into frogs (if they're not a wizard who can turn people into frogs).

MMORPGs also expand social networks. Whereas, once upon a time, gamers were holed up in their bedrooms or, at most, had a few friends around to play in their lounge rooms, now they can play with people from all over the world. MMORPGs can enhance your real-life relationships (for example, a father and daughter who live in different US cities meet up regularly in an MMORPG to spend time together) and help you form new ones. It's even common for players to fall in love. Indeed, Turbine (the company producing The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar), when they surveyed the major reasons why people played MMORPGs, found that “what players ranked as most important weren't beautiful graphics or compelling storylines. They said they played because their friends were playing.”

But on the flip side, MMORPG-addiction can be a seriously problem—especially when your Second Life starts taking over your first. Take the case of Ric Hoogestraat: he has only been playing Second Life for six months but already he averages six hours a day (14 hours per session on the weekend). He'll only break to use the bathroom, sleep or eat a bit of food. David Storey's parents make the effort to get him out of the basement every now and then so he doesn't spend all his time online in Entropia Universe, but they admit that if they went on holidays, he'd only leave the room to eat or sleep. Lee Seung Seop, a South Korean industrial boiler repairman, was so obsessed with World of Warcraft (or, as some call it, ‘World of Warcrack ’) that, on 10 August 2005, after playing for 50 hours straight in an internet café, he died from cardiac arrest induced by exhaustion and dehydration. In China, there are now clinics for the addicted—especially addicted children.

MMORPG-addiction can also have serious effects on your real world relationships. Ric Hoogestraat is a married man, but he became so intimate with another avatar in Second Life, he asked her to become his virtual wife. They even had a ceremony which was attended by 30 of their Second Life friends. When his real wife found out, she was, quite understandably, upset—so upset that she joined EverQuest Widows, an online support group for spouses of obsessive gamers. Her husband replied that it was just a game. However, as The Wall Street Journal has found,

Family-law experts and marital counselors say they're seeing a growing number of marriages dissolve over virtual infidelity. Cyber affairs don't legally count as adultery unless they cross over into the real world, but they may be cited as grounds for divorce and could be a factor in determining alimony and child custody in some states, according to several legal experts, including Jeff Atkinson, professor at the DePaul University College of Law and author of the American Bar Association's “Guide to Marriage, Divorce and Families.”

One ex-World of Warcraft player even wrote,

Blizzard [the company behind World of Warcraft] has created an alternate universe where we don't have to be ourselves when we don't want to be. From my vantage point as a guild decision maker, I've seen it destroy more families and friendships and take a huge toll on individuals than any drug on the market today, and that means a lot coming from an ex-club DJ.

Looking at all this from a Christian perspective, several thoughts come to mind. Firstly, as we have all been given a finite amount of time by the creator of time, we have a responsibility to use it well. There is a place for playing MMORPGs for entertainment, relaxation and leisure, but we must be vigilant and exercise wisdom so that MMORPGs don't take over our lives (and our bank accounts).

Secondly, although MMORPGs (and, for that matter, social networking sites like Facebook) can be useful for creating, building and maintaining relationships, they are no substitute for real world face-to-face contact. We need to be careful that we don't neglect non-Facebook friendships—that we put more time into looking after our marriages than building cafés in Second Life—that we don't get so lost in the game, we end up neglecting our children (like this Korean couple who left their four-month-old daughter unattended to play World of Warcraft for an hour, only to return five hours later to find that she had fallen on her chest and suffocated to death). We may delude ourselves into thinking we're doing this for the sake of God's kingdom—forming ties with non-Christians who may not otherwise hear the gospel—but we must not engage in this sort of ministry at the expense of the relational responsibilities we have been given in the real world.

Thirdly and finally, although there is a place for fantasy and a certain degree of discontentment in our lives this side of Jesus' return (for life continues to be marred by sin), we must remember we have a ‘second life’ in store that we will live out for the whole of eternity—an existence more fulfilling and enriching than our imaginations can ever conceive of. Our lowly bodies will one day be transformed, and we will dwell in the presence of God where there are no more tears, no more death, no more mourning, no more crying or pain (Rev 21:3-4), in a place whose beauty will far surpass the pixels of Second Life or the designer graphics of World of Warcraft.

In the meantime, while we wait, we must exercise a certain degree of contentment towards the way God has made us. We may wish we had the gracefulness of elves, but we must remember that it was humans, not elves, that God chose to create in his image. We may wish that we had been born male instead of female (or vice versa) but we must trust that, in God's wisdom, he “fearfully and wonderfully” made us male or female (Ps 139:13-16). We may desire to be powerful, rich, famous or beautiful, but we must recognize that power, riches, fame and beauty are worldly values, and that it is more important to be “rich toward God” (Luke 12:21).

Ultimately we must realize that life itself is a Massive Multi-player Role Playing Game—a game where the challenge is to live before our creator and judge the way he intended: in holiness, in love and in reverent awe of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Mohler on Jensen on Spong

Al Mohler on his blog notes the decision by Peter Jensen, Anglican Archbishop of Sydney, to refuse the pulpit to another Episcopalian (US Anglican) bishop, John Spong, based on the refusal by John Spong to see Jesus as more than an above average kind of guy.

I'm still mystified why anyone would mount a crusade with the essential message “Jesus is just an average guy”, let alone become a bishop in a church that believed him to be God become man, and raised from the dead.