Kevin DeYoung's Blog, page 116

CT’s “Insider” Interview Prompts Questions and Concerns

“Worshiping Jesus in the Mosque: Inside the World of a Muslim Follower of Isa.”

That’s what the cover says on the latest issue of Christianity Today. Inside are several articles on the insider movement–so named because in these movements Christian converts stay within their original religious context and continue to identify themselves with the religion of their birth. The whole issue is worth reading. In it you’ll find a background piece on the C1 to C6 spectrum by Tim Tennent, a pro and con piece by “John Travis” (pro) and Phil Parshall (con), and a predictably middle of the road editorial that is “cautiously optimistic about this deep insider strategy.”

The cover story is an interview by the missionary “Gene Daniels” (not his real name) with a Muslim follow of Isa named “Abu Jaz” (also not his real name). While we can clearly learn from someone like Gene Daniels laboring in a difficult Muslim context, and while we must certainly rejoice to hear of Abu Jaz’s commitment to Christ, the interview also raises a number of questions and concerns. Let me raise three of each.

Three Questions

Question 1: What is the role of the church? Proponents of the insider movement are quick to point out that insider believers belong to the church universal (see Travis’ piece) and share in Christian fellowship with other insiders. And yet, doesn’t the Bible understand the church in more robust terms than this? What about church officers, weekly preaching, the administration of the sacraments, membership, and church discipline? Are these all adiaphora? Doesn’t Paul’s missionary strategy and Jesus’ Great Commission presuppose that believers will be gathered in visible, constituted churches?

Question 2: Why not try to form a more culturally sensitive expression of the Christian church? Abu Jaz speaks of the evangelical church in his country. So it doesn’t appear as if the insider strategy was chosen because their were no churches or because the church was not permitted. Rather, Abu Jaz left the church to reclaim his Muslim identity. He says that when he went to the evangelical church “[e]verything was different–their way of worship, the way they sang songs, the way they danced. Nothing was familiar to me.” He was also turned off because the pastor wouldn’t let him use traditional Islamic phrases and greetings. I’m sure each specific situation is different; I imagine sometimes these phrases are innocuous cultural expressions, and other times they may be loaded with a lot of religious freight. But if I were talking to Abu Jaz I’d encourage him to dream of a church that embraces some familiar cultural styles without jettisoning the idea of church altogether.

Question 3: Shouldn’t some things be strange when we are called out of darkness into light (1 Peter 2:9)? Abu Jaz bristles at the Christian church because it feels like “a very strange thing” to Muslims. For the same reason he can’t imagine not using the word “Allah.” On the latter point, I’ve read good arguments for and against retaining the term Allah. So my beef is not so much about the word as the notion that there is something wrong with a Christian church that feels strange to Muslims. As aliens and strangers in this world, the community of the redeemed ought to initiate us in new practices, new vocabulary, new rituals, and new ways of living.

Three Concerns

Concern 1: There seems to be a naive view of culture. Abu Jaz says, “The Church should reflect Muslim culture, not Muslim theology.” This sounds appealing, and many in the West advocate the same kind of principle, but cultural forms, practices, and habits often reflect our deepest held theological commitments, especially in Islamic cultures where separation of sacred and secular is a foreign concept. Muslim identity is a “thick” culture, which is precisely why the insider movement is appealing, but this also means the church must think very carefully about all the ways cultural identity is wrapped up in religious assumptions. No matter how charitably we read the statement, Abu Jaz has profoundly misspoken when he says “God opened my eyes to understand that all cultures are equal in his eyes.” God may find elements in every culture that please him (modesty, hard work, marital permanence) and elements that displease him (sensuality, honor killings, abortion), but it’s simply not the case that all cultures are equal in his eyes. Insider proponents can help the traditional church see its own cultural baggage, but they must not ignore the way God wants to challenge every culture (and some cultures more than others). When Abu Jaz assumes that because general revelation teaches us about God, therefore Allah was revealed to Muslims through general revelation, he overlooks centuries of deep assumptions woven into the language and the culture about who Allah is. He fails to consider whether these ideas should to be challenged, rather than simply embraced because Christians believe in general revelation.

Concern 2: There seems to be an overly casual attitude toward theological truth. When asked about “the theology of your movement” Abu Jaz responds by saying, “We do not use systematic theology.” He goes on to state that he knows about different Christologies and the early creeds, but the sense you get is that these hard fought truths are largely irrelevant to his context. If we are quick to fault American Christians for being ignorant and unconcerned about the history of the church and the Great Tradition, why would we give the insider movement a pass when it perpetuates the same attitudes? There’s no problem with new councils to discuss new challenges (as Abu Jaz recommends), but let’s not assume we can safely ignore the truths hammered out in earlier generations. We need to claim the history of the whole church and not imagine any of us can (or ought to) start from scratch. And besides, most of those truths were hammered out in what today is the Muslim world, not in America or Europe.

Concern 3: There seems to be an implicit understanding that the Holy Spirit will do what human teachers don’t. Abu Jaz and his interviewer make much of the fact that Muslim background believers are a work in the progress. They don’t come to an orthodox understanding of Jesus overnight. They may struggle with syncretism for awhile, but this is all part of the journey. I’m fine with this kind of “messy” discipleship, provided we are deliberately trying to teach people through the fog into clearer light. And yet, over and over Abu Jaz speaks of the Holy Spirit doing this work rather than human teachers. Maybe human agency is implied, but I’m not confident it is. For example, Abu Jaz stresses that the evangelist can choose which benefit of the cross to share (in an effort to meet Muslim felt needs) because gradually the Holy Spirit will explain the rest.

This emphasis on the Spirit taking the baton from us to lead the Muslim into all the truth about Jesus shows up often. It’s a misappropriation of the promise Jesus made uniquely to the apostles (John 16:13) and an underappreciation for the role of Spirit-gifted teachers in the discipleship process (Eph. 4:11-14). The early church was certainly Spirit-filled, but it was also devoted to the apostles’ teaching. To expect the Spirit to teach what we won’t does not honor the Spirit. Instead, it dishonors the work he has already done in leading the once-for-all apostolic band into all truth we need to know.

Christianity Today is to be commended for highlighting such an important issue for the global church. What is less encouraging is the cautious endorsement of the insider movement in their editorial and the many weaknesses evident in this featured interview. Let us pray for seminaries, denominations, pastors, missionaries, mission committees, churches, and parachurch agencies as they think through these significant challenges and try to avoid these attractive compromises.

Monday Morning Humor

I didn’t see all of the Super Bowl commercials last night (thankfully), and with the exception of the Paul Harvey spot, the ads seemed pretty dull (or worse).

But here are a few funny ones from years gone by:

In Case You Missed It

This was the best Super Bowl commercial:

Super Bowl Predictions

I can save you a lot of time and a lot of punditry by telling you right now that after the Super Bowl you will hear that the winner was determined by some combination of the following:

Winning the turnover battle
Establishing the run
Protecting the pocket
Special teams
Making big plays

And if you are looking for more detailed analysis, I can tell you the 49ers will win because…

They executed their game plan
They came ready to play
They controlled the line of scrimmage
The Ravens had no answer for the read option

Or that the Ravens will win because…

They didn’t let Kaepernick beat them with his legs
Joe Flacco played mistake-free football
They were the better team tonight
It was a magical ride

To really impress your friends, try seasoning your conversation with statements like these:

I can’t believe the 49ers have never lost a Super Bowl.
There they go with the pistol formation again.
Man, does he have a lot of arm strength.
This must be such a roller coaster for Jack and Jackie.

And if this expert analysis is too much for you, just remember, above all else, these two things:

This is Ray Lewis’ last game.
Jim and John Harbaugh are brothers.

Failure to recall these two facts will leave you thoroughly embarrassed.

So there, now you know everything you need to know and why everything turns out the way it does. The only suspense left is to see whether Beyonce sings for real.

Crazy Busy

I just sent the manuscript for Crazy Busy to Crossway a couple weeks ago. The book will be released this fall.

Here’s a look at the cover design. Very sharp.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And here’s an alternate cover design that is quite appetizing.

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I Asked the Lord That I Might Grow

This remarkable hymn (1779) comes from the pen of that remarkable man, John Newton (1725-1807). It’s a beautiful poem about how the Lord afflicts us that he might comfort us.

The song can be used with any tune in Long Meter (88 88). We recently sang the hymn at our church using the tune O Waly, Waly, which was the tune used at T4G 12.

I asked the Lord that I might grow

In faith, and love, and every grace;

Might more of His salvation know,

And seek, more earnestly, His face.

‘Twas He who taught me thus to pray,

And He, I trust, has answered prayer!

But it has been in such a way,

As almost drove me to despair.

I hoped that in some favored hour,

At once He’d answer my request;

And by His love’s constraining pow’r,

Subdue my sins, and give me rest.

Instead of this, He made me feel

The hidden evils of my heart;

And let the angry pow’rs of hell

Assault my soul in every part.

Yea more, with His own hand He seemed

Intent to aggravate my woe;

Crossed all the fair designs I schemed,

Blasted my gourds, and laid me low.

Lord, why is this, I trembling cried,

Wilt thou pursue thy worm to death?

“‘Tis in this way, the Lord replied,

I answer prayer for grace and faith.

These inward trials I employ,

From self, and pride, to set thee free;

And break thy schemes of earthly joy,

That thou may’st find thy all in Me.”

URC Pastoral Interns

We have had a pastoral internship program at University Reformed Church for about four years. Being near Michigan State, most (but not all) of our interns are recent college grads, and as such spend nine months with us before heading off to seminary. So our first few interns are just now looking to enter full time ministry.

Knowing how difficult it can be to match the right person with the right church (and vice versa), I thought it might would be worthwhile to highlight three recent (or soon to be) seminary graduates from our church. I commend these young men to you as spiritually vibrant and theologically sharp.

I’ve posted a few details in the text below. You’ll find a fuller resume by clicking on each individual name.

Ryan Potter

Undergraduate Degree: Michigan State University (May 2008), Bachelor of Arts, Communication

Graduate Degree: Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary (January 2013), Master of Divinity

Interest: I am interested in head pastor and associate pastor positions, and am especially looking for opportunities for preaching, teaching, and discipleship/adult education.

Family situation: I have been married for almost five years to my amazing wife Sarah, and we have a nine month old son named William.

Zachary Garris

Undergraduate degree: Bachelor of Arts (Psychology), Michigan State University

Graduate degree: Master of Divinity, Reformed Theological Seminary (Jackson, MS), anticipated May 2013

Interest: Associate Pastor; Youth Pastor/Director; teaching Bible/theology/Greek at a Christian school

Family Situation: Single

Neil Quinn

Undergraduate degree: BA in Philosophy from Michigan State University

Graduate degree: M.Div from Gordon-Conwell (graduating May of 2013)

Interest: Although I eventually desire to be a senior pastor, at this point I wish to spend time as an associate pastor where I can continue to learn and grow. I would enjoy opportunities to preach/teach, work with small groups and adult education, and help the church be involved in the community and live out their faith.

Family Situation: Married to Leandra Quinn (will be 5 years in May) and expecting our first child (a baby girl) this February.

Don’t Let the Screen Strangle Your Soul (2 of 2)

(Note: Part 1 appeared yesterday.)

Second, there is the threat of acedia. Acedia is an old word roughly equivalent to “sloth” or “listlessness.” It is not a synonym for leisure, or even laziness. Acedia suggests indifference and spiritual forgetfulness. It’s like the dark night of the soul, but more blah, more vanilla, less interesting. As Richard John Neuhaus explains, “Acedia is evenings without number obliterated by television, evenings neither of entertainment nor of education but of narcoticized defense against time and duty. Above all, acedia is apathy, the refusal to engage the pathos of other lives and of God’s life with them” (Freedom for Ministry, 227).

For too many of us, the hustle and bustle of electronic activity is a sad expression of a deeper acedia. We feel busy, but not with a hobby or recreation or play. We are busy with busyness. Rather than figure out what to do with our spare minutes and hours, we are content to swim in the shallows and pass our time with passing the time. How many of us, growing too accustomed to the acedia of our age, feel this strange mix of busyness and lifelessness? We are always engaged with our thumbs, but rarely engaged with our thoughts. We keep downloading information, but rarely get down into the depths of our hearts. That’s acedia—purposelessness disguised as constant commotion.

All of this leads directly to the third threat of our digital world and that’s the danger that we are never alone. When I say “never alone,” I’m not talking about Big Brother watching over us or the threat of security breaches. I’m talking about our desire to never be alone. Peter Kreeft is right: “We want to complexify our lives. We don’t have to, we want to. We wanted to be harried and hassled and busy. Unconsciously, we want the very things we complain about. For if we had leisure, we would look at ourselves and listen to our hearts and see the great gaping hole in our hearts and be terrified, because that hole is so big that nothing but God can fill it.” (Christianity for Modern Pagans, 168).

Sometimes I wonder if I’m so busy because I’ve come to believe the lie that busyness is the point. And nothing allows us to be busy—all the time, with anyone anywhere—like having the whole world in a little black rectangle in your pocket. In Hamlet’s Blackberry, William Powers likens our digital age to a gigantic room. In the room are more than a billion people. But despite its size, everyone is in close proximity to everyone else. At any moment someone may come up and tap you on the shoulder—a text, a hit, a comment, a tweet, a post, a message, a new thread. Some people come up to talk business, others to complain, others to tell secrets, others to flirt, others to sell you things, others to give you information, others just to tell you what they’re thinking or doing. This goes on day and night. Powers calls it a “non-stop festival of human interaction” (xii).

We enjoy the room immensely—for awhile. But eventually we grow tired of the constant noise. We struggle to find a personal zone. Someone taps us while we’re eating, while we’re sleeping, while we’re on a date. We even get tapped in the bathroom for crying out loud. So we decide to take a digital vacation, just a short one. But no one else seems to know where the exit is. No one else seems interested in leaving. In fact, they all seem put off that you might not want to stay. And even when you find the exit and see the enchanting world through the opening, you aren’t sure what life will be like on the other side. It’s a leap of faith to jump out and see what happens.

The point of Power’s parable should be self-evident. Like Tolkien’s ring, we love the room and hate the room. We want to breathe the undistracted air of digital independence, but increasingly the Room is all we know. How can we walk out when everyone else is staying in? How will we pass our time and occupy our thoughts with the unceasing tap, tap, tap? For many of us, the Web is like the Eagles’ Hotel California: we can check out anytime we like, but we can never leave.

And the scariest part is that we may not want to leave. What if we prefer endless noise to the deafening sound of silence? What if we do not care to hear God’s still, small voice? What if the trivialities and distractions of our day are not forced upon us by busyness, or forced upon us at all? What if we choose to be busy so that we can continue to live with trivia and distraction? If “digital busyness is the enemy of depth” (17)  then we are bound to be stuck in the shallows so long as we’re never alone. Our digital age gives new relevance to Pascal’s famous line: “I have often said that the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.”

Or stay out of the room, as the case may be.

Don’t Let the Screen Strangle Your Soul (1 of 2)

The first time I really became aware of the full intensity of the problem was in a conversation with a couple students training for the ministry.

I was speaking at one of our top seminaries when after the class two men came up to me in private to ask a question. I could tell by the way they were speaking quietly and shifting their eyes that they had something awkward to say. I was sure they were going to talk about pornography. And sure enough, they wanted to talk about their struggles with the internet. But it wasn’t porn they were addicted to. It was social media. They told me they couldn’t stop looking at Facebook; they were spending hours on blogs and mindlessly surfing the web.

This was several years ago, and I didn’t know how to help them. I hadn’t encountered this struggle before, and I wasn’t immersed in it myself. Five years later: I have, and I am.

I used to make fun of bloggers. I used to lampoon Facebook. I used to laugh at Twitter. In my life I’ve never been an early adopter with technology. I’ve never cared what Steve Jobs was up to. I used to roll my eyes at technophiles.

Until I became one.

Now I have a blog, a Facebook page, a Twitter handle, a Bluetooth headset, an iPhone, an iPad, wifi at work and at home, cable t.v., a Wii, a Blu-ray player, multiple email accounts, and unlimited texting. Pride comes before a fall.

I was born in 1977 so I can remember life before the digital revolution. In college we had to go to a computer lab to get on the internet, which wasn’t a big deal because nothing happened on email and I didn’t see anything interesting online. By the time I was in seminary, however, things had changed. Email was a vital way to communicate and the internet was how my friends and I were getting our news (and doing Fantasy Football). But even then (in the late 90s and early 2000s) life was far less connected. I only got an internet connection in my room part way through seminary–one of those loud, lumbering ack-ack dial-up monstrosities. I didn’t have a cell phone in high school, college, or graduate school. As little as four or five years ago I didn’t do anything on my phone and barely accessed the internet at home. I’m not suggesting those days were purer and nobler, but my life felt less scattered and less put upon. Something has changed. A lot, actually.

What Are the Threats?

Much has been written and will be written about our insatiable appetite for the screen. I’ll leave it to others to decide if Google makes us stupid and whether young people are more or less relational than ever before. Let me simply suggest three ways in which the digital revolution, for all its benefits, is also an accomplice to our experience of being hassled, frazzled, and crazy busy. For if we understand the threats, we may have some hope of finding a way forward.

First, there is the threat of addiction. That may sound like too strong a word, but that’s what it is. Could you go a whole day without looking at Facebook? Could you go an afternoon without looking at your phone? What about two days away from email? Even if someone promised there would be no emergencies and no new work would come in, we’d still have a hard time staying away from screen. The truth is many of us can’t not click. We can’t step away, even for a few hours, let alone a few days or weeks.

In his bestselling book The Shallows, Nicholas Carr reflects on how his attitude toward the web has changed. In 2005—the year he says the “Web went 2.0″—he found the digital experience exhilarating. He loved how blogging junked the traditional publishing apparatus. He loved the speed of the internet, the ease, the hyperlinks, the search engines, the sound, the videos, everything.

But then, he recalls, “a serpent of doubt slithered into my infoparadise” (15). He realized that the Net had control over his life in a way his traditional PC never did. His habits were changing, morphing to accommodate a digital way of life. He became dependent on the internet for information and stimulation. He found his ability to pay attention declining. “At first I’d figured that the problem was a symptom of middle-age mind rot. But my brain, I realized, wasn’t just drifting. It was hungry. It was demanding to be fed the way the Net fed it—and the more it was fed, the hungrier it became. Even when I was away from my computer, I yearned to check e-mail, click links, do some Googling. I wanted to be connected” (16).

I’ve noticed the same thing happening to me for the past few years. Unless I’m really in a groove, I can’t seem to work for more than twenty minutes without getting the urge to check my email, glance at a blog, or get caught up on Twitter. It’s a terrible feeling. In a postscript to The Shallows, Carr explains that after his book came out he heard from dozens of people (usually by email) who wanted to share their own stories of how the Web had “scattered their attention, parched their memory, or turned them into compulsive nibblers of info-snacks.” One college senior sent Carr a long note describing how he had struggled “with a moderate to major form of Internet addiction” since the third grade. “I am unable to focus on anything in a deep or detailed manner” the student wrote. “The only thing my mind can do, indeed the only thing it wants to do, is plug back into that distracted frenzied blitz of online information.” He confessed this, even thought he was sure that “the happiest and most fulfilled times of my life have all involved a prolonged separation from the Internet” (226). Many of us are simply overcome—hour after hour, day after day—by the urge to connect online. And as Christians we know that “whatever overcomes a person, to that he is enslaved” (2 Peter 2:19).

Monday Morning Humor

An oldie but a goodie…