I learned an important lesson from Noble’s recent sex sermon: never miss an opportunity to knock Christians. (This came seconds after he personally gave nonbelievers an exemption from following God’s rules for sexual propriety. It’s good to know who’s looking out for you, I suppose.)
At the end of the day I just want those of us who know Jesus to live like we know Jesus, because our testimony about Jesus matters to a world that don’t know him.
Listen, I am so sick and tired of the term “Christian.” And some of you are like, “It’s in the Bible.”
Three times. Three times.
People that were closely associated with Jesus were known as disciples or followers of Jesus.
The term Christian in America today has become so neutered and watered down, it’s not even funny. I want for us to be known as people who really do love and follow Jesus.
Some questions.
Why follow Jesus if it means I have to obey God’s law? God’s law applies to everyone, saved and unsaved. Perry’s “generosity” in exempting the unsaved from God’s law turns the relationship between grace and law on its head. If we don’t know, or if it doesn’t matter, that we’re breaking God’s law, what’s the benefit of grace? Using Noble’s formulation, what’s the point of grace if it means that only once it has been given to me do I suffer the consequences of breaking God’s law? Wouldn’t I be better off and happier without either God’s law or God’s grace? As far as evangelistic strategies go, this one’s an epic failure.
Shouldn’t our Christian walk be prompted by what God thinks about us, not what non-believers think about us? Note that Noble asserts that the reason we follow Jesus is so that we’ll impress nonbelievers, not that we’ll please our Savior.
How many times does God need to identify us as Christians before Perry Noble accepts it? If the Bible had said it four times, would that make the word OK? Five? Twenty-seven? Perhaps this is just another of those antiquated Bible words, like shepherd, that we need to scrub from Scripture. The Commandments are only presented twice. Can we ignore those too? I mean, how important can they be?
Should Perry’s emotional state be more determinative than Scripture? God, through Luke and Peter, thought it a fit word to describe his people, but it makes this particular 21st century pastor sick and tired, so we need to drop it.
What does it matter what the world thinks of us? The world will always hate God, so it can be expected to hate his children. It’s ironic that the word is sometimes discounted by appealing to extrabiblical texts that suggest it was used as a term of derision against the early believers. If that’s the case, and if we want to model the early church, wouldn’t the contemporary worldly derision generated by the term encourage us to embrace it all the more?
Why should other Christians affect my willingness to be known by God’s name? Piper put it this way a few days ago:
Being ashamed of the Bible because there are looney Christians is like being ashamed of Milton because of Hallmark cards.
If Christians make you sick, what’s your disease?
As I’ve argued before, this repeated hostility towards Christianity is profoundly worrying. Perry Noble says he’s not a Christian, and we keep trying really hard to disagree with him. At what point do we give in?
The answer, of course, is no, but one might be excused for coming to that conclusion after reading Andy Stanley’s assault on pastoral ministry in this lauded interview from 2007.
Stanley the Younger is a lead-by-example advocate of CEO pastoring and wants to run through the Bible with a large bottle of whiteout to get rid of the tricky bits that describe Christ-modeled pastoral ministry. Since Downing linked to this article last week, I haven’t been able to get this section out of my head:
Should we stop talking about pastors as “shepherds”?
Absolutely. That word needs to go away. Jesus talked about shepherds because there was one over there in a pasture he could point to. But to bring in that imagery today and say, “Pastor, you’re the shepherd of the flock,” no. I’ve never seen a flock. I’ve never spent five minutes with a shepherd. It was culturally relevant in the time of Jesus, but it’s not culturally relevant any more.
Absolutely. That word needs to go away. Think about that and how confidently it appears to have been uttered. This site has chronicled recent appalling disrespect shown to God’s Word by Furtick and his staff, and this Stanley quote shook me with the realization of just how riddled the Turnstile Church is with a low opinion of God’s written revelation.
Some related thoughts on Stanley and the horde of leaders who imbibe his wisdom:
They worship culture more than the creator of culture. Who created the sheep? Who taught man to care for those sheep? Perhaps there was a shepherd standing nearby when Jesus spoke, but that’s only because before the foundation of the world God had ordained his profession and his activities that day. The illustration was the product of a Creator, not of a culture.
They consider themselves equal to Christ. When Jesus said “Follow me,” Stanley apparently thought he was talking about Stanley, as in, “Follow Stanley.”
“Follow me.” Follow we never works. Ever. It’s “follow me.”
Stanley refuses to follow Jesus’ on shepherding, yet appropriates Jesus’ words to clear the deck for himself and bludgeon his followers into submission.
They blaspheme the Word. Jesus is the Word, yet Stanley thinks the best he could do was search for an about-to-expire metaphor because it happened to be close at hand. Jesus was so inept with his references to shepherding that Stanley claims they were irrelevant as soon as Acts. “By the time of the Book of Acts, the shepherd model is gone,” he said. In other words, Jesus’ own words were stale by the time the New Testament was written. If we can dismiss Jesus so easily, why pay any attention to anything the other old, dead guys wrote?
They strip the Word of inconvenient truths. The obligations of a shepherd don’t feel like they fit our more advanced times, so we shouldn’t even try to deal with them. Stanley cites Bill Hybels as inspiration for dismissing the Bible as too anachronistic.
It’s going to be the best corporate institution it can possibly be, and we’re not going to try to merge first century –
The church wasn’t an organization in the first century.
Not an organization? Don’t tell Paul or any of the supervising apostles in Jerusalem. How shortsighted was Jesus not to anticipate that the church would grow so much it would one day turn into an organization? You can’t expect too much business foresight from a young rural carpenter, though, so we’ll give him a break. He founded a pretty useful brand name, so we’ll keep him around.
They misunderstand the role of the pastor. Stanley allows that we can still see glimpses of shepherding.
Nothing works in our culture with that model except this sense of the gentle, pastoral care.
Yes, the shepherd could be gentle, but he was responsible for the life of his sheep. He fed the sheep, disciplined the sheep, and even sacrificed his life for them. Does David strike you as a gentle-all-the-time kind of character? Me neither.
They abandon the saints to the wolves. This was yet another important function of the shepherd, and how our aforementioned hero developed the skills that let him fell a giant. If the shepherd was a disposable metaphor, how do the references to heretics as wolves make sense? Note Jesus’ warning in Matthew 7:15:
Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravening wolves.
Note Paul’s last words to the church leaders on Ephesus in Acts 20:28-30:
Take heed unto yourselves, and to all the flock, in which the Holy Spirit hath made you bishops, to feed the church of the Lord which he purchased with his own blood.
I know that after my departing grievous wolves shall enter in among you, not sparing the flock; and from among your own selves shall men arise, speaking perverse things, to draw away the disciples after them.
So much for being irrelevant by Acts. Most on point is Jesus’ reference in John 10 to leaders who abandoned their roles as shepherds.
I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.
He who is a hired hand and not a shepherd, who does not own the sheep, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and flees, and the wolf snatches them and scatters them.
He flees because he is a hired hand and cares nothing for the sheep.
Yet according to Stanley and his brethren, shepherd is out, and hired hand CEO is in.
Good to know.
They add their own wisdom to their religion. Although Stanley is all for doing away with shepherding, he insists on adding the CEO as an essential part of church leadership.
I think a big problem in the church has been the dichotomy between spirituality and leadership. One of the criticisms I get is “Your church is so corporate.” I read blogs all the time. Bloggers complain, “The pastor’s like a CEO.” And I say, “OK, you’re right. Now, why is that a bad model?”
It’s a bad model for the church because it’s not shepherding and it’s not Biblical. It’s an excellent model for Starbucks, though.
They are building a mass of mindless followers. The followers must be kept quiet and uninformed.
As you increase the number of people, you have to decrease the complexity of the information. Congregational rule, when you’re trying to make a complicated decision, works against the principle. So consequently, the guy with the microphone and the clearest message always wins. The most persuasive person in the room is going to win. Whether right or wrong.
We don’t want good arguments to persuade people, then they might start doubting the leader. Think of all the time Paul wasted arguing his case to the council in Jerusalem (Acts 15) when he could have been about his business of being a model CEO.
They are building a guild of authoritarian leaders. Has it ever struck you how much time these head pastors (?) spend talking to us and each other about leadership? When was the last time they held a conference to talk about God in the fashion of a Piper? Steven Furtick noted the abundance of leadership talk and resources last week:
This generation has the most access to leadership development in the history of the world. We had better MAXIMIZE it.
For what? Historically, the combination of a little bit of religion, compliant followers and authoritarian leaders has usually led to bad outcomes.
They are building a nursery for heretics. At times, we at PP are pressed to declare that folk like Noble and Furtick are burn-them-at-the-stake heretics. When we refuse to do so, we’re usually told to go away because we’re hyperventilating about stuff that doesn’t matter.
For the last decade or so, astute observers of American evangelicalism have been complaining and warning about the church’s creeping anti-intellectualism. The Turnstile Church is what you get when you mix that anti-intellectualism with cultural flexibility–a church that looks like the culture it’s a product of, but can’t see what might be problematic with that. Note how criticism is dismissed without ever–ever–engaging ideas or Scripture. If you can’t defend your ideas, if you refuse all challenges, how would you ever know whether the wolves have entered the fold?
We live at a time where massive churches are led by pastors who quote Scripture like it was Shakespeare (a few well-known quotes repeated over and over), distort it, ignore it or reject it. We are not yet at the stage where we have much blatant heresy, but we’re getting there.
What happens to the generation that comes after Stanley and Warren and Noble and Furtick? The generation that has been encouraged to ignore the study of Scripture. The generation that thinks authoritarian leaders are more important than pastors. That knows there’s no value in Leviticus. That thinks Acts talks about pastors on video screens. The generation that thinks most other local churches are either corrupt or inept. That thinks you can talk about God however you want to.
I shudder.
The problem is that by the time we get there, it’s too late. How do you bring CEOs back to the Bible when they don’t know what’s in it and don’t think it should govern them? By then, the game is lost.
So when do you raise the alarm? When do you scream bloody murder?
This is the first I’ve heard of Skye Jethani, though he seems to be a pretty important figure in the church planting / pastoral conference world. You can check out his blog here. He seems to have a pretty good perspective on things. Here is his video from The Nines online conference from last week:
Skye summarizes his speach with three main points:
Your legitimacy does not come from the impact of your ministry.
If outcomes are in God’s hands, and not yours, you must stop judging the legitimacy of your ministry by the tangible outcomes of the ministry. You must also stop judging other ministries by the tangible outcomes as well.
If our identity is truly rooted in Christ, we will defy the expectations of our culture.
Listen to this eight minute clip. Jethani really makes some great points.
In this video we see Steven Furtick rage against churches with an angry little rewrite of the campfire favorite, “Kumbaya”. Here are Furtick’s new lyrics:
Kumbaya my Lord, Kumbaya. Our Church is stuck in the 1950′s and we won’t change anything my Lord, Kumbaya.
An Entire generation is dying and going to Hell with no role model outside of Paris Hilton, my Lord. Kumbaya.
Give me another program, another Bible study, Kumbaya.
A few things I want to point out about Furtick’s rant:
It’s hypocritical. – Furtick is usually strongly against criticizing preachers, or churches, or Christians that you don’t personally know. This apparently only applies when the criticism is aimed towards himself or his friends.
His anger is all about style, not about substance. Note that he doesn’t say anything about properly preaching the Word. It’s all about churches being stuck in the 50′s and not competing with Paris Hilton for role model status.
Since when did Bible study become a bad thing? Seriously. The whole clip is drenched with this hateful sarcasm, and then the very last line…which he emphasizes more than the others…lashes out against having another Bible study. It makes you wonder what exactly is happening after those 1,000′s of people are being baptized. Shouldn’t Elevation be starting many more Bible studies to ensure the growth of all these brand new Christians?
It seems there are quite a few Christian leaders (Warren, Driscoll) and Pajama Pages commentators who are arguing that because we can’t be sure that the Sabbath is really supposed to be on Sunday, or even that it’s supposed to be celebrated weekly, that we can observe it on any old day of the week. While I think there’s a Biblical argument to be made for a Sunday Sabbath, let’s just look at the issue from a cultural perspective and ask whether it’s such a grand idea to be ditching Sundays.
An important goal of the modern church, especially the Turnstile Church, is to be culturally relevant. I assume the ultimate outcome of cultural relevance is to make culture more like the church, rather than make the church more like culture. Perhaps that assumption is mistaken, but where might you say the church has been most sucessful in shaping secular culture? I would say it is in defining and protecting the Sabbath.
Most people the world over understand that Sunday is a day for worship, rest and recreation. Even though not all use the day for worship, you could talk to most unsaved folk and they would tell you that Sunday is a special day for Christian worship. You can see elements of this understanding in efforts by parents to send their children to church on Sundays, even though they may not attend themselves.
The heavy emphasis on televised sports (especially NFL, MLB, and NASCAR) on Sunday afternoons reflects the day’s special status as a day of rest. Even though the day is not what it used to be and is now highly commercialized, there is still a strong cultural gravitation towards rest on Sundays. Reduced trading hours and blue laws are also artifacts of the culture’s special regard for Sunday.
I would argue that the church has established a very strong cultural beachhead when it comes to honoring the Sabbath as a day of rest. Even though many people stay home, most Americans know that Sunday is God’s day.
I think there’s tremendous ground to be lost when some neoCalvinists and Turnstilers throw up their hands and say that they don’t know if the Sabbath is supposed to be exactly on Sunday, so let’s just do church whenever. For now, our culture continues to preserve and respect Sunday as a special day of worship. If Christians abandon it, we lose any claim on the day at all. We strip the day of whatever sacred cultural value it still has, as well as the church’s special cultural time, and clumsily plop the church down in the middle of all the other mundane cacophonous cultural forces competing for our attention and allegiance.
If you were trying to build a strong cultural movement, to abandon what you’ve already won seems rather illogical. The sacred Sabbath is one area of common ground where our culture understands and respects the church. We should embrace that and build on it.
Although it’s not a scriptural argument, it is an argument.
Although I reject the premise that we can draw people to Christ by changing their opinion of the church, let’s look at what a culturally contrite approach has wrought in the church.
This blog is mine alone and does not necessarily–or very often–represent the thinking or sentiments of anyone who disagrees with me, my wife, my employer, my friends, my family, my pastor, my brother, my church and, almost certainly, God. After I hit the Publish button, it doesn’t always even reflect my own thinking. It does seem to often reflect the thinking of Tommy F, Twit Conway and some guy in Minnesota, however.
