Older Brother Syndrome

This weekend, I heard an incredible sermon on the Prodigal Son. This sermon further strengthened my belief that God’s Word is living, because despite the fact that I’ve heard this story a thousand times, I saw it in a new way.  I want to specifically look at one small section of the story. I don’t think I’m guilty of reading more into this than is intended:

Luke 15: 25-30

²⁵“Now his older son was in the field, and as he came and drew near to the house, he heard music and dancing. ²⁶And he called one of the servants and asked what these things meant. ²⁷And he said to him, ‘Your brother has come, and your father has killed the fattened calf, because he has received him back safe and sound.’ ²⁸But he was angry and refused to go in. His father came out and entreated him, ²⁹but he answered his father, ‘Look, these many years I have served you, and I never disobeyed your command, yet you never gave me a young goat, that I might celebrate with my friends. ³⁰But when this son of yours came, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fattened calf for him!’

The older son skipped the opportunity to celebrate the return of his younger brother.  He was upset that the father had chosen to bless the younger son. It was unfair. The younger son didn’t deserve it at all. He had wasted his inheritance on foolish living and prostitutes, yet the father was overjoyed to see his youngest son. He even ran out to greet him, and kissed him, and had him clothed in the finest robe.

The father in this story, showed a great act of grace and mercy. Out of the goodness of his heart, he decided to pour out extravagant blessings upon a very unworthy recipient. The older son didn’t understand. He just didn’t “get it”.

For the last couple of days, I’ve been questioning my own motives. I must admit, that on the surface I bare a striking resemblance to the older brother. I can see where an outsider would make that connection. After all, churches like Elevation and Newspring are being blessed. I think (despite the conferences and such) even they would admit that they are wildly unworthy. It appears that I am unhappy about it.  Older brother syndrome. I see that.

Something else I’ll admit: I am wholly unworthy of the Father’s blessings as well. While I am pretty strong on theology and doctrine, I am pretty weak on sharing the Gospel with the people I encounter in my daily existence. Sure, sometimes they notice that I don’t cuss much, or that I try not to gossip.  If they ask why, I might hint towards my belief in Christ, but in general, I live as if we have forever. We don’t. We are not even promised today. I know that many of my colleagues are completely lost in their sin…and I don’t care enough about their eternity in Hell to share the Gospel with them. I can give you a ton of excuses. I might even lose my job if I were to begin evangelizing co-workers. All that means is that I care more about my standard of living, than I care about the souls of the lost.

What does all this mean? Am I going to stop pointing out error where I see it? No. The stakes are too high. People are being led astray at an alarming rate, and I won’t be quiet. Some of the issues seem minuscule, but they have to be discussed. Deception starts with the small points. Overlooking even the tiniest venture from Scriptural truth will only lead to larger errors in the future.

What this does mean is that I have to rededicate myself to reaching the world with the Good News of Christ, starting right here in my office. My passion for purity of the Church has to be matched with a broken-heart for lost souls.

I won’t ignore error, and I won’t ignore the lost. I will try to join in the dance and celebration when Father decides to put His best robe on a younger brother.

Tunnel Vision

Steven Furtick via twitter:

Don’t ever compromise God’s vision. For anyone. Or anything. At any time. Stay true to His purpose. At any cost.

I would be very interested to know what Steven means by “God’s vision” in this context. If we go on what he has said in the past, we can assume that he is talking about some extra-biblical revelation…almost certainly, extra-biblical revelation that furthers Furtick’s personal agenda. Steven has been known to get imagination and divine revelation confused in the past.

I find it unsettling that a guy who has been more than willing to compromise God’s Word, is completely unwilling to compromise his own imaginary vision.

Is there anything good that can possibly come from this mindset?

Filthy Roman Sponge

Troubling.

Thoughts?

Coop, perhaps you want to reword this

NewSpring preacher, Brad Cooper, summarizes his latest sermon on worship like this:

Worship should matter to us because WE BECOME WHAT WE WORSHIP! So right now as you read these very words you are evolving into your object of Worship. There’s only 2 kinds of Worship objects in this world: GOD & BAD – So who are you becoming?

Are we really evolving into God?

The idea appears in the statement four times, so it doesn’t seem to be accidental.

Was Jesus just a dumb hick?

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 that 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?

Now. You do it now.

Bell on the resurrection

Here’s Rob Bell explaining why the resurrection as historical fact is really not necessary (from his Velvet Elvis book, approvingly reproduced by a Bell supporter):

it is important to remember that we rarely find these first christians trying to prove that the resurrection actually occurred. for one, a lot of the people who saw jesus after he rose from the dead were still alive, so if people had questions and doubts, they could talk to somebody who was actually there. but there’s another reason: everybody’s god in the first century had risen from the dead. to claim a resurrection had occurred was nothing new: julius caesar himself was reported to have ascended to the right hand of the gods after his death. to try to prove there was an empty tomb wouldn’t have gotten very far with the average citizen of the roman empire; they had heard it all before. this is why so many passages about the early church deal with possessions and meals and generosity. they understood that people are rarely persuaded by arguments, but more often by experiences. living, breathing, flesh-and-blood experiences of the resurrection community. they saw it as their responsibility to put jesus’ message on display. to the outside world, it was less about proving and more about inviting people to experience this community of jesus followers for themselves.

Here’s how Bell’s reader applies the lesson:

people today could care less about the “proof” of our arguments, the “logic” of our evidence that demands a verdict, or our “cases” for faith, christ, easter, christmas or whatever else. the only evidence demanding a verdict people care about these days is how i live my life.

How, exactly, does Cooper’s retweet contradict this? The language is almost exactly the same, down to the emphasis on personal change.

This is why Cooper’s tweet is so foolish. There’s a dangerous movement in churches that look a lot like NewSpring to deny the necessity of the historical resurrection. Cooper’s message to his tweet peeps, many of whom have probably read Velvet Elvis, endorses Bell’s garbage.

UPDATE: Perhaps Cooper really has no idea what kind of doctrinal dynamite he’s playing with here. Earlier this year, one of his blog readers asked:

Brad, what are your thoughts on the whole Driscoll/Rob Bell ordeal that went down around this time last year I believe.

For context, Driscoll called Bell a heretic. Even though Cooper says he listens to Driscoll, he didn’t know what to think:

i definitely have convictions about Jesus… and i definitely have convictions about His Word— and i def think both of these men are being used by God— im not savvy to all the happenings of the Driscoll/Bell stuff.

Bell is “definitely being used by God” for what? An example of error, perhaps?

Dangerous flirtations with heresy

This retweet from Brad Cooper is giving me heartburn tonight:

Acknowledging the historical fact of His resurrection doesn’t save u (James2:9). Being changed by His resurrection does (Rom6)

I think more highly of BCoop than some of you might suppose, so seeing him entertain this kind of idea stuns me. The cancer in the modern church movement is the tolerance for the denial of the historicity of Scripture (c.f. Rob Bell et al.) With this tweet, Cooper seems to be endorsing the idea that believing that the resurrection is a historical fact is optional to our faith.

No. No. No. No. No.

If we don’t believe that the resurrection is a historical fact, we are not going to be changed by it because we have no faith. The resurrection as historical fact is everything; without it, the foundation of our faith crumbles.

Yes, I was disappointed in the whole BAMF stuff, but this is much more serious. Perhaps he’ll retract and explain in an upcoming tweet. I really hope he does.

(BTW, I don’t get the James 2:9 reference. Is it a typo, or am I missing something? UPDATE: It was a typo. The proper reference is James 2:19.)