Hundred Million Dollar Churches

I just finished reading a great book with a group of friends. The book is called, “Jesus Wants to Save Christians” by Rob Bell. There are probably a thousand statements in the book that I could use for a blog topic, but I've picked just one that had significant impact on the way I view my faith and my responsibility as a Christ-follower. So here it is:

“Jesus wants to save [Christians] from shrinking the gospel down to a transaction about the removal of sin and not about every single particle of creation being reconciled to its maker.”

America makes up less than 5% of the world’s population yet controls 20% of the world’s wealth.

One billion people in the world do not have access to clean water, while the average American uses 400-600 liters of water a day.

Every 7 seconds, somewhere in the world a child under age five dies of hunger, while Americans throw away 14% of the food we purchase.

40% of people in the world lack basic sanitation, while 49 million diapers are used and thrown away in America every day.

Americans spend more annually on trash bags than nearly half of the world does on all goods.

Never before in all of human history has the world seen a superpower as wealthy and as powerful as The United States of America. We have more at our disposal than any people group anywhere at any time has ever had. So here’s the premise of the book (something that will make you think):

Empires accumulate.

Accumulation gives birth to Entitlement.

Entitlement demands preservation.

Preservation is self-serving.

Preservation is costly.

The US accounts for 48% of global military spending. Less than 5% of the world’s population purchases nearly half of the world’s weapons. If we can spend a trillion dollars on a war, what else we could spend a trillion dollars on?

Most of the bible is written history told by people living in lands occupied by the superpower empires of their day. So it’s very difficult then to fully grasp and understand the Bible when we read it as a people born into the most powerful and wealthy empire the world has ever seen. We’re reading it from the privileged side of power, the opposite side from which most of the writers of the Bible lived.

I heard a pastor this week talking to his church about the need for some of his people to move out of their most attended and crowded service which is no longer growing because there are just not enough seats, to a different service time of which they offer quite a few, so that their church could continue to grow and reach more unchurched people for Christ. Sounds like a simple request, but do you think people are really moving by the droves to give up their seat at their service for someone else? Why should they? After all, they were there first. Why can’t they just encourage the new people to attend one of the other services?

A few weeks ago, while Katie and I were traveling, we caught an interesting story on the national news. They were talking about a church, a Christian church that spent more than 100 million dollars (one hundred million, in case you thought that was a misprint) on their worship center. Who am I to judge what another church spends their money on? After all, they’re a much larger church than any I have ever attended which means they have more money coming in every week which means they have more money to spend which means they can throw 100 million dollars into a church building that looks pretty and makes the Christians who go there feel very privileged. The question I have to ask though is, if we can spend 100 million dollars on a church building, what else could we spend 100 million dollars on?

It’s complicated I know. We are privileged. And yes, God has blessed America. We should be grateful and continue to expand and grow and influence. The problem is, blessing can become a burden, a curse, if it’s not handled God's way. We are made a blessing not for accumulation and self-gain but to be a blessing to others.

Christianity is so much more than a simple transaction about the removal of sin.

“To cities filled with the homeless and impoverished, Christianity offered charity as well as hope. To cities filled with newcomers and strangers, Christianity offered an immediate basis for attachments. To cities filled with orphans and widows, Christianity provided a new and expanded sense of family. To cities torn by ethnic strife, Christianity offered a new basis for social solidarity.” –Rodney Stark, Historian

Christianity is living life as Christ lived life. Christianity is standing up for the weak. Christianity is taking care of the widow and the orphan. Christianity is remembering our redemption through Jesus on the cross, remembering our Exodus as people who were once in exile and separated from God brought back into relationship with God through Jesus’ selfless sacrifice.

Christianity is remembering, remembering where we came from, remembering that we, who were once dead in our transgressions, have been made alive in Christ.

Christianity is identifying with the hurting, the sick, the poor, the oppressed and the suffering, even if the suffering is happening in another world, another place far from the comforts of our own privileged homes.

Christianity is movement, action. Christianity is to be embraced and expressed through selfless sacrifice and sacrificial giving. Christianity is lived.

So there it is. What do you think?

I think Jesus wants to save Christians from the exile of irrelevance.

Divided We Stand

My wife and I had the pleasure of taking a little road trip last week with the newest addition to our family, Macy Lee, who is already almost 8 weeks old! When we got home, a full mailbox and a pile of Wall Street Journals were laying in my driveway waiting for me to catch up on a week's worth of news updates and latest economic sagas. In that pile of newspapers, a particular article caught my attention. At first glance, it seemed like news-filler, but after I began reading I realized that God was showing me something profound and beautiful. So here goes...

It has been 20 years since the Berlin Wall fell. But deep in the forest of Grafenau, Germany, a breed of red deer called Ahornia still refuses to cross the old Iron Curtain. This deer inhabits the thickly wooded mountains along what once was the fortified border between West Germany and Czechoslovakia. At the height of the Cold War, a high electric fence, barbed wire and machine-gun-carrying guards cut off Eastern Europe from the Western world. The barriers severed the herds of deer on the two sides as well.

The fence is long gone, and the no-man’s land where it once stood is now part of Europe’s biggest nature preserve. The once-deadly border area is alive with songbirds nesting in crumbling watchtowers, foxes hiding in weedy fortifications and animals not seen there for years.

But one species is boycotting the reunified animal kingdom: the Red Deer. Herds of them roam both sides of the old NATO-Warsaw Pact border but mysteriously turn around when they approach the since dissolved border, this although the deer alive today have no memory of the ominous fence.

One reason stated by wildlife experts is that the deer have traditional trails, passed on through the generations, with a collective memory that their grounds end at the erstwhile barrier. Females, who stay with their mothers longer than males and spend more time absorbing their mothers’ movements, stick even more closely to the traditional turf. (Excerpts were taken from The Wall Street Journal’s article, “Deep in the Forest, Bambi Remains The Cold War’s Last Prisoner”, November 4, 2009)

In 2002, wildlife experts began tracking the herds of red deer using electronic collars and surveying their movement by satellite tracking and video surveillance at the old borderlines. Red deer born of herds from the West side will venture, nose literally touching the now open air where the wall once stood to divide them, and they stop. They move no further. Neither herd has ventured over the place where the wall once stood, though today, nothing stands in their way from expanding their territory into what is now free land for them to roam.

There are two points I’d like to make.

The first is that most of us have never ventured beyond the wall. For many, we’ve gained collective memory through things learned and things experienced which have become dividing walls for us, blocking us from advancing fully into the territory that Christ has already predestined for us to wholly obtain. Though nothing stands in our way, we limit ourselves by looking at the world through human eyes rather than through divine eyes. We have been called, each one of us, to expand, to grow, to accomplish, to achieve, to take risks, to be great.

We are not limited in what we can do, become or accomplish. The biggest limitation that we face is not the difficulty of what is to be grasped or obtained but our own insignificant view of ourselves. It’s our view of ourselves that blocks us in, keeps us small and limits our potential. What we need is God’s view of who we are, what we are to become, what we are to accomplish.

Genesis 1 recounts the words of God toward mankind before the first man and woman were yet living. God said, “Let us make man in our image, to rule over all the creatures and over all the earth…then God blessed them and said to them, ‘Be fruitful [great, successful, strong, influential] and increase in number [expand, grow, create]; fill the earth and subdue it [without fear and without hesitation, everything is yours; as big as you can dream there is yet more for you than that].’” –Genesis 1:26-28

Jeremiah 1:5 says, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.”

We’ve been called to be prophets to the nations. Jesus’ last command to His church as He ascended into heaven was to “Go and make disciples”, not “Stay put and remain in your comfort zones.”

Expand. Grow. Create. Influence.
Yet how do we do that, when we are stuck behind an invisible wall?

(Which leads me to my second point)

The church remains divided. We remain separated by doctrine and denomination. We remain segregated by culture, color and race. We have white churches and black churches. We remain segregated by generation, offering contemporary services for the young and traditional services for the old. We remain divided by the legalism that shapes our worldview and perpetuates the overwhelmingly justified judgment toward those who believe or look or act differently than we do.

The church stands with its’ nose against an invisible wall that was destroyed thousands of years ago by Jesus’ sacrifice to unite all of mankind to its’ creator and return all of creation to its’ fruitful beginnings.

Galatians 3:26-29 says to all of us, “You are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.

Freedom is ours.

We are rightful heirs to the promises of God.

All we have to do is step across the line.