The Return of a Pet Peeve

Early on in this blog's life, a reoccuring theme of mine was the devestating effects that removing the doctrine of Sin have on the gospel. Past examples of my concerns can be found here and here.
One of my fellow bloggers reignited my interest in the subject (if only for a moment) by posting this excellent article on his blog. I recommend reading his entry entitled "Smart Baptist" (which contains a link to the article).
In times like these (when the gospel is turned into a cloak for political or consumerism agendas), I like to read more G.K. Chesterton (a Catholic) and Oswald Chambers (a Protestant) because both of these men firmly point to the fundamental reality of Sin and the fundamental reality of Redemption (and to the fact that without a proper view of the fundamental reality of Sin, there is no proper view of the fundamental reality of Redemption).

A Lengthy Comment to Master Jenkins on Preacher-Boy Syndrome

In regards to bad preaching:

Most preachers today (young and old) suffer from what I call "Preacher-boy Syndrome." You probably know what I mean: You have a friend you've known for years. His a cool guy. He loves life, loves hanging with friends, loves the Lord, and has a humor and vigor that lighten the room.
Then he gets called to be a preacher. He goes to Bible College for a year and comes back. What happens? Now he is all...strange. You feel a certain distance that wasn't there before; you could be looking him in the eye and he'd still seem oceans away. He seems almost brainwashed. Some would say "sanctified," "holy," "excited about God," and other such foolish misdirections. All you know is that anyone with two good eyes and plain common sense could see that there is something not right about him at all. He seems stressed, always pressured. He's always trying to smile a smile that seems plastered on. He's always spitting out "Amen!" and "Praise God!" to everything you say to him (even when what you said does not even merit such a response). You find him asking you weird questions in public, like "You think I should witness to those people over there?" Beforehand, he had never asked you that; he just did it. In short, you feel this terrible atmosphere of anxiety wrapped around some sort of artificial covering that was once your friend. You feel as though he's jumping through hoops with a gun put to his head, as though he's putting on a show to save his life. Sometime, many times, pastors never recover from this.
What happened to your friend is "Preacher-boy Syndrome," which is the Black Death of Bible Colleges these days. Aspiring young preachers, all bright faced and eager, get told (with different words than the ones I'm about to use) that a "preacher" is not who they are, not who God wants to be through them, but is a part that they perform. In order to perform it right, they must say the right things, do the right things, dress the right way, ask the right questions, hang with the right people, etc. In short, preaching, shepherding, stop being who they are (who God is through them) and start being some thing that they are to produce. In other words, it is no longer real; it is contrived. The problem you sense when your friend comes home from Bible College is that he feels utterly, abysmally, undeniably fake. Everything, from his dress to his sermons to his conversations to even his wife, all of it feels contrived, concocted, there because that's what's supposed to be there.
Preach the grandeur of God? Engage the depths of theology? Intellectually challenge your congregation? Spiritually prick their hearts with mighty missiles of God's truth? Good heavens, man! I'm still trying to organize all the charities and events and meetings and fund raisers and parties and choir outings and cantatas and three-point sermons! I'm too busy doing what I'm supposed to do! Doing what I have to do if I'm to be seen as a pastor! How can I be a pastor if I'm not doing all these things! Saying all these things! Wearing all these things!
Since when did following God's will for your life become about anything you do? When did it stop being about God using you and working through you? When did we feel it necessary to put ourselves in the way?

Why does preaching suck these days? Because we have no real pastors. We have performers in pastor costumes. Thus is Preacher-boy Syndrome; thus is another plight and blight upon the modern church.

A Comment to Master Jenkins on Psychological Screw Jobs

In regards to psychological profit from frisson.

Chesterton once said (in "Orthodoxy") that humans have a paradoxical need for both security and adventure. Perhaps in Modern Christendom Suburbia, this boils down to a tension between laziness and restlessness, a strange desire to be content and create change.
So what typically happens? Do people actually seek out what's actually wrong and actually change it, and actually seek out what's actually true and actually rest therein? No; they start up fancy movements "touring in eleven cities" that cost a hundred smackers to see, which skim the surface of the issues, give pet answers, pump up self-esteem ("You're all okay!"), and leave everybody without real change (so they still feel content) but with the illusion of having done something (so they feel like they satiated their need for change).
Real contentment is too irrelevant, and real change is to costly. Instead, we get a huge psychological screw job under the auspice of a "Christian" seal of approval.

A Lengthy Comment to Master Jenkins on Temples of Self-Worship

In regards to "J-Mime".

First of all, how is this "miming" any different from ad hoc worship interpretive dancing? Does changing the rhetoric without changing the form make this a NEW ministry? A NEW thing? Something relevant and chic? Was ad hoc dancing going out of style that fast?
Second of all, to what purpose did the girls in the background serve? They just stood there. Do they represent something about the prayer of Jabez? What exactly? If this crap is supposed to be "Christian art" then the form must match the theme entirely, not partially.
Third of all, what is the "Ministering Prayer of Jabez" really saying? "God enlarge my territory, God I pray for increase in my anointing, I pray for increase in my ministry, I pray for increase in my finances.. Oh God Bless Me Indeed!!!" THAT is what "enlarge my territory" means? Let's break it down:

• Increased anointing? I thought the Holy Spirit is given to us completely at salvation, not in installments.
  
• Increased ministry? What happens when God lets your ministry die? Did you not pray hard enough? Did you not have enough faith? They are not allowing God the room He needs to be God, which includes wounding you for your own good (see The Great Physician).
  
• Increased finances? Oh, of course. Fill me up with the fleeting things of this world. Such a "blessing" is purely materialistic and has nothing to do with true Christianity. What if God lets your finances fail? What then? Like "increasing ministry," there is no room allowed for God to be God.

The really sad part of all this is that it is so hard to discuss this stuff without feeling like you'll offend someone's feelings or be accused of racism. Let it be said here that the ridiculous and the blasphemous cuts through all churches of every color and culture. That Christians choose to let Christianity be filtered through their own personal emotive and/or political filters is a sad sign of the state of the Church, and that state is this: we have a whole lot of religious people and very few regenerated people. There are few people in it to know God, but a whole lot of people in it for themselves.
Too many churches are clogged with people "doing religion" for emotional, psychological, political, and/or cultural reasons. Very few are the people who come seeking a relationship with God, to walk with Him in EVERY circumstance (good, bad, and ugly) and see His hand draw you closer into Himself through every circumstance. Instead, it all becomes about what you can get out of it.
Churches, of all denominations, traditions, and cultures have become temples of self-worship. Even "traditional" churches who abstain from Praise and Worship blasphemous fluff can still be havens for people who go to church to gratify themselves emotionally, psychologically, politically, and/or culturally. Remember this fact: Modern Christendom always points to self, but Christianity always points to God.

Thoughts on the Nature of "Relevancy" to Master Jenkins

In regards to the failure of relevancy movements.

How did Dorothy Sayers put it? "Surely it is not the business of the Church to adapt Christ to men, but to adapt men to Christ."

The main flaw with "relevancy" movements is that they treat Christ Himself as fundamentally irrelevant. Thus, He must be "updated" to something new and chic, as though the timeless Word were bound to first century Jerusalem, or the Middle Ages, or the 1950s.
Perhaps now people will begin to see relevancy movements for what they truly are: blasphemy of the highest order, a deliberate denial of the timelessness of Christ and the gospel.

A Thought to Master Jenkins on "The Next Big Thing"

In regards to "Christian Fads":

Christian fads (generally speaking) are good things gone bad. Before Praise and Worship became a sentiment, fluffy, self-centered type of self-worship, it was a true movement of God-centered worship in the seventies and eighties. The next big fad is probably already among us as a good thing. We just have to wait until it goes sour.

A Thought on "Unnecessary Divorces" to Master Jenkins

In regards to "Memoryless Christianity"

The book review mentioned can be found here.

What irked me was the reviewer (and author) making the issue an "attractional versus missional" thing. Why is it "versus"? Why is it not BOTH? Why does the church not PULL IN as well as GO OUT? If the institutional church merely "pulled in," is not merely "going out" just restating the same problem with different words? Why is there this unnecessary divorce? Why is it an oppositional relationship and not a complimentary one? Why do we, as Christians, in regards to many things (worship, missions, church structure and service etc.) keep making there unnecessary divorces? Why is that when we slowly slip into letting one thing dominate one area of Christendom that we suddenly (and with much panic) run completely the other way and commit the same fallacy on the other end of the spectrum?

It's like this: we're standing on a bar held up by a thin pole. When we stray to far to one side and are in danger of completely flipping over, we think we solve the problem by running completely to the other side. It's like no one in the Church understands BALANCE anymore. These unnecessary divorces are the cause of much confusion, division and chaos in the Church today.

A Small Response to Master Jenkins

In regards to Aesthetics and Morality:

When Christianity becomes casual and based on emotions in form, then it will become casual and emotion-driven in theme as well. Throw away the truths about the atonement or the nature of the Trinity: give us grandfather God (or grandmother, whichever makes you comfortable) who gives me what I want, and friendly Jesus who taught us just to be nice and cure AIDS (just don't force any salvation nonsense down their throats while you cure them!).

A Response for Master Jenkins to "A"

The context for this response can be found here.

The YouTube link mentioned can be found here. I suggest you watch it first.

I watched the YouTube link, and although I personally found it funny, clever, and quite enjoyable, I find myself lead to dispute the claim of "A" that "it is indisputable that these guys are more effective in our culture for the cause of Christ than some archaic creed." My grounds for dispute is that Christ is never mentioned or discussed, nor is the gospel message mentioned once. I would argue that the song isn't even primarily about the Bible...er..."Book" itself but about "Southpaw's" attraction to strong Christian girls. That's a nice thought, but hardly evangelistic, and hence not at all affective for the cause of Christ.

"Whens the last time some Creed led a person in the prayer of salvation?" Um...try EVERY time. Those "archaic" Creeds are practically the gospel themselves: they explain quickly and effectively who Christ is and what He did (as well as Who God is and What the church is). They are, perhaps, the greatest contextualization of the gospels, if not the whole theme of the Bible itself. "A" seems (as far as I can tell...I could be wrong) to be showing a severe lack of understanding of what the Creeds actually are and say.

A Further Comment to Master Jenkins

In regards to the loss of "hardcore" doctrines:

I suppose it is moot to say that no one takes "hardcore" doctrines seriously anymore, i.e., are "hardcore" about it.

Man, how we need people like that again. A hardcore Trinitarian like Lewis told (as best as he could) all the mysteries of the Trinity, and incorporated all of his journeys into his writings; and when you read his writings, you begin to think that all this "Christian" stuff in most churches today is half-baked. Lewis' writings could lick relevancy movements dry precisely because they let lose the full fury and glory of the truth about what we believe. All the Inklings did the same. Few are there now that do the same; few are the beautiful feet that bring the good news that heaven has wedded to earth, that the sky has rejoined the world, that myth become fact, that the Word became flesh. It is all lost under a stinking pile of sentimental rubbish and selfish consumerism.

(sigh)...I've been reading Chesterton lately...it's been fun.

A Chant for Master Jenkins

In praise of his excellent comments on Social Gospel:

"Jenkins, Jenkins!
Way to go!
Thinkin', thinkin'!
Like Plato!
Beard is, beard is!
Like bulrush!
Brain is, brain is!
Not just mush!
Reminds, reminds!
Us of Lent!
Jenkins, Jenkins!
For president!
GOOOOOOOOOO JENKINS!"

Rah rah.

A Suggestion to Master Jenkins

In regards to Pop Prot novelists and the "Buechner center."

Perhaps it would do Pop Prot writers some good to go to this "Buechner center." Maybe we could start a fund of some sorts?

"Props for Pop Prots: Help send poor, artistically and sacramentally starved Pop Prot writers to school! Just 35 cents a day helps the potential of Prot writers!"

Yeah...it could happen.

A Bit of Satire for Master Jenkins

In regards to "Church Space":

1) ALL Catholicism (whether it be Roman or not) is "scary" to Prots because they cannot separate the original Christianity from the corrupt political institution it became (and maybe still is). Therefore, ANYTHING Christian that is "catholic" is labeled under the Prot's file folder of "scariness."

(2) Putting Christian imagery all over your walls would overwhelm visiting unbelievers (or visitors from "The Church of Relevancy and God, Inc.") and "push" religion on them. We're not here to push any kind of standard on anyone. We're here to make them comfortable and complacent, remember?

(3) Putting Christian imagery all over the place would shout loud and clear a conformity to a particular tradition and worldview and offend our post-modern (or hyper-modern) aesthetics. We're not here to offend or rock boats, remember? I don't recall Jesus doing anything outlandish, like beating people with a whip, insulting religious leaders, dying as a criminal, or any other paradox invented by G. K. Chesterton.

(4) Putting Christian imagery up is old, therefore it is irrelevant. We're supposed to be relevant, remember? We are to conform to the norm, not live in the past.

-from the desk of the Pastor/Curator/Therapist of the Church of Relevancy and God, Inc.

An Addition to Madam Johnson's Comment to Master Jenkins

In regards to the modern church feeling more and more like looking for Jesus at the mall:

From the P.A. of Wolfchase's new "Church of Relevancy and God, Inc.":

"Bluelight special on Jesus' 10 steps to a thinner waistline."

"Price check on the latest copy of 'How to re-energize the church with the latest pop art and clever sermon titles.'"

"Are you tired of thinning hair? See how God doesn't want you bald!"

"Price check on 'How God would manage His stock portfolio.'"

"Clean up on the Communion aisle. We have spilt grape juice on the Communion aisle."

"Attention shoppers: Will the owner of a silver BMW with 'God is my co-pilot' and 'Follow me to Sunday School' bumper stickers please come to the front. You left your lights on."

"Attention shoppers: There is a lost child in our store, and no one seem to want to find him."

"Attention shoppers: If you find the lost child, please give him a copy of 'God's Five tips on how not to Get Lost in the Mall.'"

"Attention shoppers: We are apparently overstocked on Bibles, so there going from 75% off to 99% off."

"We have a return at the service desk. Someone has returned relevancy to go and seek reality."