An interesting conversation erupted during a recent celebration among friends. The topic was Calvinism—a particular branch of Christian thought taught by a devout Christ-follower named John Calvin who lived in the 1500’s. Calvin, like all of us, had some right ideas and some wrong ones. In a world run amok with fuzzy thinking about God, Calvin’s cut and dried theses have recently gained renewed interest among people who are serious about following Jesus. Even TIME magazine has weighed in with an article on The New Calvinism in a larger piece about the Ten Ideas That Are Changing The World.

The piece of Calvin’s teaching that seems to garner the most interest is an idea referred to as “election” or “predestination.” It is the notion that long before the foundation of the world God decided who would be eternally saved and who would be forever damned. Proponents of the theory cite God’s (arbitrary?) selection of Noah to build the ark and survive the flood, his (arbitrary?) selection of Abraham to survive the wrath that rained down on Sodom & Gomorrah, and Paul’s discussion of pre-destiny in Romans 9 which was set in the larger context of understanding the juxtapositions between Christianity & Judaism. What they miss is “the rest of the story” that isn’t there. We don’t know the larger context of God’s dealing with humans around Noah and Abraham. We only know of God’s interaction with them. So the notion that God’s selection of those men was arbitrary is an argument made from silence; a largely unconvincing approach to forensics. (An example of an unconvincing and I believe fallacious argument from silence would be the notion that since Jesus never preached against homosexual behavior it must not be a sin. It is wishful thinking that won’t hold water against the light of all scriptural evidence. But I digress.)

Calvinistic thinkers ask some good questions, many of which I don’t have the intellectual capability to answer. I’m an armchair theologian at best. Nevertheless, I have a problem—a very serious “I don’t want anything to do with that kind of God” problem—with the notion that God in His sovereign omnipotence made a list and put some people on the list for damnation, just because He could. It is inconceivable to me that a God who is presented in the Bible as loving toward His creation, and whom I have personally experienced as incredibly loving, kind, gracious, and gentle-handed, could behave with such capricious insensitivity. Yet my Calvinist leaning friends persist, in a non-arrogant  but matter-of-fact manner, that this is just the way it is: God picked some and He didn’t pick others and “Boy isn’t it lucky for us that we got picked. Thanks be to God for his gracious mercy—-to US.”

Hogwash!

This Calvinistic form of predestination is unsupported in the whole of the scripture which instead portrays a God who created people ostensibly because He wanted to be with them, who created them with the capacity to reject Him, and who actively pursues those who reject Him bidding them to return to Him, voluntarily subjugate their will (desire to “be” God themselves and exert their own form of weak-potency) to Him, and allow Him to again enjoy their fellowship as He watches over and cares for them. This is a picture of God that I believe to be Biblical and which is antithetical to the notion that “God’s got a “damn you” list.”

II Peter 3:9 says “….the Lord is patient not wishing for any to perish but all to come to repentance.” I Timothy 2:4 says that God “…desires all men to be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth.” The notion that God wants man to be saved and that He doesn’t wish for any to perish is incompatible with the idea that God created some people for damnation. It is illogical.

Omnipotence and God’s Image

My Calvinist friends argue that God is omnipotent—all powerful—and that as such it’s not possible for man to reject God because somehow that makes God less than all powerful. That’s a limited and monolithic view of an omnipotent God. The many-faceted representation of God in the Bible is of a God who—though He is all powerful—doesn’t force His will upon people. He allows them to choose and then experience the positive or negative consequences of their choice. In creating man with the ability to make such a choice God paid man a great tribute: He gave us god-likeness. That’s part of what it means to be created in God’s image.

God creating us in His image doesn’t stop at our endowment with the power to choose. It also speaks to the inherent way that men behave toward their offspring: instinctively we protect them. It is inherent in my father nature to protect my children, ferociously, like a father. Not unlike my Heavenly Father. This “inherent” nature, coupled with the ten major laws God handed down to Moses are the root of our human law that prohibits infanticide (except in the modern, “enlightened” world where killing your baby before it is born is acceptable ) and homicide. How could it be that this inherent nature draped upon us with the mantle of God’s image, and the commandment “thou shall not kill” could have come from a God who is Himself arbitrary in his damnation of some men while saving others? Where I’m from we’d say “That dog won’t hunt.”

God’s “Choosing” of Us

One of the points of Calvinist contention is in the idea communicated in Ephesians 1 where it says “God chose us in Him before the foundation of the world” and that he “predestined us to adoption as sons.” Calvinists view that to mean that God “made a list” and in a way I can concur. Where I differ from my Calvinst friends is in whose name is on that “list.” I believe every human was on God’s mind. He chose us all. But his choosing us doesn’t mean we chose Him. In college I repeatedly chose a lovely young woman named Bobbie to go out on a date with me. But she never would choose me. Instead she exercised her free will and said “no.” Repeatedly. I was powerless to change her mind because I’m not omnipotent. You see, “choosing” is a two-way street.

Man’s ability to choose or reject God doesn’t threaten God’s omnipotence. Rather it fortifies what I understand about the unique nature of His God-ness. The gods that men create tend to be all-powerful, and capriciously arrogant in the exercise of that power. They are gods like Calvinists describe. They have their way with men, with no respect for the nobility of the human they have created. They are unlike my God who chooses to yield His omnipotence to man’s will. This suppression of power is the notion that Jesus communicated in His famous Sermon on the Mount when he said “Blessed are the meek.” By definition “meekness” is “power with restraint.” God is unique when contrasted with the gods men create precisely because He restrains himself. He restrained Himself when He came in the man Jesus who Philippians 2 says though He was God “……didn’t consider equality with God a thing to be grasped and put on the very nature of a servant….found in appearance as a man.” God coming to earth in the form of a man named Jesus and constraining himself to the daily rigors of life as a man didn’t make him any less God. Instead it portrayed a picture of a God who would lower himself on our behalf—-a God who would put our interest above His own—because He loves us, wants us, chose us, and pursues us yearning that we would return to Him and abandon our petulant insistence on being our own God in favor of voluntary surrender to His supremacy.

Wow! That’s a god worthy of my devotion. That’s the God of the Bible.

The Main Thing

Much loved friends who’ve read this far, I understand your desire to make sense of it all. I don’t pretend to know all or even most of God. But I do know that Jesus is His exact representation. Jesus who told the story of looking for the one lost sheep and the one lost coin; Jesus who endured separation from the Father and cried as He was forsaken; Jesus who smothered and bled on a splinter-filled timber for me. The God who He exactly represents cannot be the nasty God you  portray who choses (prefers?) that those who bear His image be eternally damned.

In our effort to understand God better, and our study under the many who would teach us about Him, let’s let them decrease as He increases. Let’s not fail to emphasize the study, and emulation of  Him. Let’s have less of John Calvin, and more of Jesus Christ.

In speaking about the build up to World War II, General and eventual President Dwight D. Eisenhower said “Rarely have the forces of good and evil been so amassed against one another.” That quote was displayed on the wall in one of the museums. Eisenhower’s clarity caused me think of George Bush. In the aftermath of 911 he spoke clearly about “good and evil” and was castigated for it. It had become politically incorrect to call someone evil. We might hurt their feelings, or incite them to an angry outburst. Seems to me the outburst had already happened and the using the word “evil” was just speaking the truth. Eisenhower said it. He was right. Bush said it. He was right, too.

Evil was behind the Holocaust. Evil was behind 911. Evil caused my fellow classmate Fred Winters to be shot down in the pulpit of his church a few months ago. Evil caused the psychiatrist at Fort Hood to open fire killing 13 people while wounding three dozen this week; and the guy in Florida who opened fire in the office complex this week; and the sexual predator in Ohio in whose home they found 11 dead women; and back home in mid-Missouri where the teenager bludgeoned the nine year old girl to death last week. Evil. It’s the work of Satan. It’s not lack of education, or intellect, or empathy. No, it’s evil. The Bible teaches that Satan is our enemy and that he searches to and fro looking for those whom he may devour. Some get devoured mentally and emotionally; some physically in violence. But its all rooted in Evil.

Ike wasn’t trying to make a statement. He was just calling it like it was. Likewise, regardless of his faults, God Bless George Bush for recognizing Evil and calling it what it was. You and I would do well to examine and know the times, to recognize what’s behind them, and to not hesitate or faint to call Evil by name when we see it.

Today I toured the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. I know it happened, yet it seems unreal. It is incomprehensible that humans created in God’s image could unleash such unspeakable horror on fellow human beings. Yet it goes on today.

For me the most moving part of the Museum was the small section about the murder of children who were mentally retarded or handicapped in someway; killed all in the name of “reducing suffering.” But they weren’t suffering. They just couldn’t do algebra. They were ordered killed because they were considered less.

I took my girls aside for a talk. We talked about how God made people in His image, about how they aren’t less because they are different, or even because they ARE mentally or physically less. We talked about how it is our responsibility to take care of them, to watch out for them.

There are two significant things happening in the culture today that seemed to come from the Nazi playbook.

First, the healthcare bill being debated in Congress has a provision for a death panel of some sort—-a team of people who reportedly would have authority to decide who was worthy of additional health care and who was too old, or too sick, or in some way…….less. I don’t pretend to understand all that goes into the healthcare debate, and I certainly believe we need to pay attention to this issue as a country. The system is broken. But I blanche at the thought that a “committee of the enlightened” would be given authority to decide who is worthy of more care, or less care because they are deemed more or less worthy. That is just inherently wrong.

Second, as I stood looking at pictures of naked children moments before they were killed, and at one physician posing over the surgical table holding the dead body of a sacrificed child he was preparing to cut open and explore in the name of science, I couldn’t help but have a gut reaction about the decisions we allow in America today for innocents to be killed. Abortion is simply wrong. Politicians say it should be rare but legal. I think that is doublespeak designed to placate both sides from men and women who either don’t know the truth or are afraid to speak it. It is our responsibility to protect the innocents, including those who haven’t yet drawn a breath. The Bible says that God knows them in their mother’s womb and there He knits them together. John, the cousin of Jesus is reported to have leapt in the womb of his mother at the announcement that Mary was pregnant with the Savior.

I don’t know everything about this issue. There are complexities. There are women who should have never gotten pregnant. There are babies destined to be born into adverse circumstances. But the notion that women can kill their babies because it’s not a convenient time in their life to have a child is just inherently wrong. I know some will say its about a woman’s right to her body,  and I agree that a woman has a right to her body, to keep her knees closed. But her rights end where exercising them deprives that baby of its right to life. God is knitting him in his mother’s womb, and what God has knit together let no man rend asunder.

I know that many of the people lauded so grandly for donating to the Holocaust Museum are also supportive of abortion rights. And, I just don’t get it. It’s wrong. How can an advanced nation like ours memorialize the horror of the Holocaust while simultaneously allowing it in our midst? I just don’t get it. It’s wrong. And I’m clear on that. If you think otherwise, you simple need to change your mind.

If you are looking for strippers, sex and drunkenness you’re in the wrong place. Move on. (Well, actually, there are strippers and sex….you’ll have to read on to get the rest of the story.)

Your heart may be in the right place, but you can still fail if you don’t have the right tools. In order to illustrate that principle I need to tell you about my bachelor party.

Twenty-four years ago I got married. On the night before the wedding, my best man and I had a party. It was a wild one; out of this world you might say. After the rehersal we went back to my little one-bedroom apartment number “A” at 401 N. Ann Street in Columbia, Missouri and had a prayer meeting. Oh, we talked some, and I’m sure we drank some lemonade or ice tea (not the kind that comes from Long Island, either) but mostly we prayed about my upcoming marriage. Same goes for the wedding night. I knelt beside that bridal bed and asked God to bless our union.

Fast forward nine years and you’d have found me in the abyss of the greatest and only significant failure in my life as I signed the papers allowing a judge to dissove that marriage. I still reflect on that today—15 years later. Most recently it occurred to me that you can have the best, most honorable, and most noble intentions (and I promise you I did) and still fail if you don’t also have the right tools (and obviously I didn’t).

Today, my life and work is really about helping people find the right tools to succeed, in business and in life. In the process we buy, rehab and sell hundreds of properties, while also designing financial plans, loaning money, making an occasional speech, leading a couple of small groups, and a variety of other things. But the focused intention of that effort is giving people the right tools for success.

I got to this little parable by thinking about a friend of mine. His marriage is on the rocks. A quarter of a century ago his bachelor party included strippers and all that comes with that. Hmmm. Mine started nobly, his in sin. But the result was the same. Neither of us had the tools.

I know that you largely have good intentions. But do you have the tools to deliver on that intention? If you don’t, what are you doing to get those tools? Somebody said “You are who you are because of the books you read and the people you hang around with.” What are you reading? Who are you hanging with?

The road to Hell is paved with good intention. You’ve got to proactively reach out and grab the tools for success.

“We spend a way too much time talking about how to do church, and not enough time actually doing church.” That thought popped into my mind randomly today. I don’t know why. It’s kind of weird when random thoughts hijack you. 

The topic isn’t foreign to me. I’ve gone to church all my life. I pastored a traditional country church, and then planted a suburban church 22 years ago—the first seeker sensitive church planted in Missouri which I pastored for seven years. I was pro-seeker when that wasn’t cool, yet. 

Popular Missiologist Ed Stetzer is a friend of mine (I hope I don’t use that word friend too loosely—we’ve shared a few meals, I’ve been in his home, and we’ve shared a common cheerleader for many years in Lizette) and he writes a couple of times a week about different people doing church in different ways. There are studies, and think tanks, and conferences, and books about festivals and fireworks and events designed to reach people. 

I’m really tired of all the talk about how to do church. I just want to do it. 

What does doing church mean?

I can’t answer that for you and fear my answer might be theologically insufficient for God. So, I’ll just try to answer it for me. I’ll guarantee you that I’ll leave something out, so save your corrective replies and emails. This isn’t a definitive and comprehensive tome. It’s me “talking” through my thoughts. 

First and foremost church is about worshipping God. I’ve been to a lot of church where God wasn’t worshipped. In many of the services influenced by the seeker movement, God is not worshipped. Man is. The service is designed around man. I’ve concluded that’s wrong. But the traditional church doesn’t do any better. That’s why we started this who seeker thing in the first place. 

Church is about teaching people. That means we need to open the Bible and explain what it means. I’m weary of services where the big screen is full of pop stars and cultural icons drawing analogies from People Magazine. Aren’t there enough analogies in life to help us clarify what the scripture means? People Magazine and Entertainment Tonight aren’t real life. The people I live among and work around don’t have boob jobs (most of them, anyway) or Botox their lips. They work 8-10 hour days, help kids with homework, clean house on weekends, and worry about mortgage payments and paying for the kids education. Their shoes are Payless, not Prada. 

Church is about community. It’s about knowing each other, caring about each other, serving and celebrating each other. It’s about mourning together when one mourns, about crying your own tears of joy when you see their tears of joy, about helping someone translate the confusing passages of life for which you hold the experience key, and their doing the same for you when your day comes to be lost in the woods. 

Church is about being real. It’s about real answers even when the real answer is “I don’t know.” 

Church is about helping people who don’t know God come to know him organically. It’s about reproduction not evangelism. I’m for soul winning. I’ve led many people to pray the Sinner’s Prayer. But I wonder how many of them over the years, the miles and the towns really became disciples? Heaven only knows and I fear the answer. There are likely way too many notches in my Bible. 

Reproduction comes from relationship, while evangelism is an event. You might liken reproduction to the baby born from a loving marriage relationship and evangelism as the bastard child born from a one night stand where a smooth talker like me convinced somebody to pray the Sinner’s Prayer. 

Now before you start throwing stones please realize I know that people do come to know Christ from chance meetings and go on to develop into disciples. I’ve been the midwife at those spiritual births. But in the big picture, evangelistic events and emphases feel contrived to me while reproduction seems a natural outgrowth of our own maturity in Christ. Yet I also wonder how many of us who call ourselves saved really have anything that is worth reproducing, and I wonder why more babies aren’t born. It seems we might have a lot of spiritual eunuchs in our midst. Hmmm. 

What I want out of my church experience.

I want to be a part of a people who are naturally glad to see each other, and who joyfully express their love for each other when they meet. 

I want to be part of a people for whom God is the central focus—the audience, and we are the actors and singers on the stage performing for the pleasure of the audience of one. 

I want to be a part of a people for whom it’s unthinkable to not have your own copy of the scriptures in your hand (electronic is fine, but I need paper) when you gather, and where the teacher cracks open the words, phrases, concepts and truths so that the sweet nectar of solid truth you can build a life on run down our arms and necks as we devour, discuss, apply, and revel in it.   

I want people who are hurting to be able to say “I’m hurting” and to tell us how without any fear of gossip, only the confidence that we’ll surround and love them. I want people who are experiencing joy and abundance to be able to tell us how great they are doing and how God is blessing them without any fear that they’ll be accused of bragging. 

I want to be able to ask odd questions, even those that might sound heretical. I want to chase rabbits until they help me uncover a new (to me) truth, or dissolve into heresy. 

I want to be able to confess my sinful actions, and let the light of honesty shine on my temptations without fearing that I’ll be thought less of or gossiped about at the next regular meeting of the spiritually superior. I want the brothers and sisters I worship with to be able to do the same, and in the few areas where I have actually obtained mastery I want to be able to help them find success themselves. 

I want to know that I can call those people at 3:00 in the morning and they’ll answer and help, and I want them to feel like they can call me (please wait until 6:00 a.m. I’m honestly not coherent at 3:00). 

I want to be among people who gather not to swap their anxiety-filled uncertainties, but to share their faith-filled confidences because of what God has done for them. I want to be able to lean on their faith when I don’t have any, and to learn from their wisdom when I don’t have any, and to be able to share mine when I do. 

I want to know that when I am sick and needy they’ll touch Heaven for me, and I’ll do the same for them.   

I want to do life successfully. 

I want to do life together. 

I don’t ever want to talk again about how to do church. I just want to do church. 

Now, in the words of that great theological giant Forrest Gump, “That’s all I’ll say about that.” For now.