Do I Really Need God?

I taught a class at the seminary last month titled "The Life of the Youth Pastor." As part of that course, we spend the first half of the class focused on the inner life of the minister, especially dealing with issues of formation.

During the class I spent a ton of time reinforcing the idea that focusing on the inner life of the minister is absolutely crucial if we want the professional life to be successful. I especially stressed the idea of creating balance between the inner and outer (professional lives).

In the three weeks since I taught that class, I've come to believe that I may be the world's biggest hypocrite. Do I believe in balance? Do I believe in the necessity of prayer in my life? And do I believe in practicing various forms of spiritual disciplines to assist me in my growth? Do I believe that I really need God? Of course.

But do I? Sometimes I wonder. For all my talk about creating balance, the last few weeks of my life have been anything but balanced. I find myself increasingly drawn into the busyness of life (school responsibilities, dissertation, speaking engagements, church responsibilities, mentoring students and others, etc.), rather than taking the time to slow down, stop, and take time to actually listen to God.

I recently read the book Far From Home by Joseph Stowell, former president of Moody College. Stowell so beautifully expresses my own feelings these days:

"I have found that busyness for Him has not drawn me closer to Him. In fact, in some ways it creates a false and treacherous sense of spirituality. It causes one to assume that spirituality is a performance; that intimacy with God is a business arrangement. It creates a flat and dull sort of Christianity that begins to turn our hearts cold and even sour if we are not careful...I know I need Him--my problem is that I find it easy to lose touch with the reality and ramifications of that knowledge."

I resonate extremely well with Stowell. Early on in life, my sense of need was apparent as I was part of a family that, at times, literally had to pray our next meal in. As I started my ministry career, my insecurities as a minister and public figure kept me very aware of how much I needed Him. Each new church or assignment that my wife and I were called to challenged my sense of self-sufficiency.

Through all of this, God has abundantly provided. He has given me gifts that enable me to be fruitful in my ministry. He has provided finances to adequately cover expenses. I have been doing ministry long enough now to know the ropes and to enjoy what God has built me to do.

And yet, I know that all of these things, in some way, threatens my sense of need for Him. I find that I am becoming increasingly self-sufficient, and my self-sufficiency is what keeps me from trusting God. I don't want this.

Stowell summarizes this feeling when he writes, "In all of this soul-searching about longing for Him and needing Him, I have been and continue to be deeply committed to God. I believe I would die for Him if necessary. I have had the unexpected privilege of being used by Him in ways that I never dreamed or expected. Yet this longing in my soul is real, and I am realizing that my tendencies toward independence and self-sufficient are debilitating my ability to get closer to God. What it all comes down to, I guess is this: If I don’t believe I need Him, I probably won’t desire Him" (Far From Home: The Soul's Search for Intimacy With God, Moody Publishers, 1998, pp. 12-13).

I am becoming convinced that when my spirituality is characterized by self-sufficiency rather than God-sufficiency, I find that I rarely feel the need to depend on God, nor is my soul consumed with a passionate desire for Him. Instead God becomes a celestial father, there to meet my needs, but not really impacting my life. It seems that I find myself longing for Him in the tough times instead of cultivating a daily, ongoing, deepening relationship to Him.

I know that I, and maybe some of you, are more like the camel than the deer. Rarely sensing our need for God, we go for months without really desiring Him. In fact, for some of us, life has had long stretches of religious activity without any real sense of dependence on or desire for God. The problem is that we weren’t built for life in a spiritual desert. We were built for regular satisfying access to the refreshing presence of God in our souls. That's what I so desperately want.

As we enter into this Lenten season, my desire is to spend these 40 days acknowledging my lack of dependence on God and in so doing, discover, for perhaps the first time in my life, how to really depend on Him in every aspect of my life. My prayer for these 40 days is, "God strip me of my self-sufficiency and make me totally dependent on you."

May this Lenten season be a time of grace in our lives as we learn to totally depend on God.

Emergent--vs.--Scripture???

I read the following post today. As someone who is a friend of Emergent (and wholeheartedly embraces their core philosophy), I am also quite willing to critique some of the aspects/practices which some (certainly not all) emerging churches engage in (and have done so in other places). However, the article I linked to above is not just a critique. It is first and foremost an interpretation of Scripture.

I understand fully the problem that many folk have with the emergent movement--namely, that they believe we are doing things contrary to accepted Scriptural truths. This is obviously the perspective of the author of that article.

Of course, the issue is how one interprets Scripture. Our hermeneutic plays a huge role in this. I abhor labels, and thus won't stoop to trying to label where I think this person is coming from. We recognize that all throughout history many well-meaning folk have tended to interpret Scripture to suit their needs. The most obvious example in our recent history in the United States is the number of Christians who used Scripture to support the pratice of slavery.

This may well be what this person believes Emergent is doing. So, is the emerging movement twisting Scripture to suit their needs? Far from it. I think the leaders of Emergent (e.g. Brian McLaren, Tony Jones, etc.) are doing a superb job of showing how Scripture addresses the current culture in which we live.

Instead, I would argue that sometimes those who embrace a modern interpretation of Scripture are simply fearful of postmodern interpretations. When we in Emergent start making interpretations that move beyond foundationalism, moderns become concerned that we are trying to destroy the foundation upon which their lives have been built. And truthfully (here comes my critique of some emerging folk), these moderns have a right to feel this way.

Imagine this scenario for a moment. You’re ready to build your dream house. You work with a realtor to secure a piece of land that will serve as a solid foundation for your new home. The realtor identifies a parcel that she says has bedrock just a few feet under the surface, an ideal piece of land. You build your home, secure in the belief that nothing can ever sway it. However, after living in the home for 20 years, you begin noticing some cracks in the walls. Soon the foundation itself has cracks, and they appear to be growing larger. Concerned, you have an inspector come and check things out. His report is not good—the “bedrock” upon which you built your house was really just a limestone deposit that has shifted, and your home is soon going to wind up being sucked down into a sink hole. How would you feel? Confused? Angry? Of course! You’d immediately want to take legal action against the realtor for not doing her job properly. You would check out what options you had for shoring up the house, work to repair the foundation, and anything else in order to keep intact the beautiful house you worked so long to create.

Now imagine if someone told you that everything that you believed, everything upon which you had built your life, was false. How would you feel? Confused? Angry? Well, that’s how most moderns feel when they are told by us postmoderns that the principles which have served as the foundation of their lives are now considered either antiquated or irrelevant.

We have to remember that postmodern ideas are largely terrifying to moderns. It is incumbent on us to make the ideas palatable to them. Unfortunately, rather than extolling the virtues of postmodern ideas and gently helping our modern friends understand the implications of some of their modern ideas, because we are convinced that our postmodern ideas are correct, we have attempted to force-feed them to our friends.

One of the ways we have done this is by dichotomizing the two philosophies, pitting them as opposites radically opposed to one another, and therefore forcing folk to choose one way or the other.

I have been guilty of this. There are ideas associated with postmodernism that I personally find fulfilling and honestly believe to be the truest expressions of Christianity as revealed in Scripture and theology. Because I believe so strongly in the postmodern expression of these ideas, I have found myself dichotomizing the two positions, subjecting modernism to intense critical analysis while basically giving postmodernism a free pass, thus making it difficult for anyone to reject these ideas. As a friend of mine recently stated, “Those who advocate postmodernism by and large present it in such a way that any mature Christian would have difficulty not embracing it.” And yet my friend, who holds a Ph.D. in history, reminds me that dichotomizing modern and postmodern values inevitably leads to oversimplification and distortion of the actual ideas and feelings being investigated. It is important for us to remember that in real life people do not divide on modern and postmodern issues as clearly as we would like to think.

A second way we make postmodern ideas unpalatable to our modern friend is by making statements regarding modernism or postmodernism that are simply indefensible. For instance, one of the cool things to do is to contrast the individualism of moderns with the community of postmoderns. In our efforts to draw a distinction between the two, we make it black and white—moderns are autonomous individuals who never gave a thought to community and sought only to serve there own selfish needs, while postmoderns are reaffirming the bonds of family, the wider community, and even tradition, as they seek the best for others.

However, truth be told, the notion that modernism was devoid of any belief in the importance of community is patently false. The human rights identified in the Declaration of Independence were explicitly associated with a “decent respect for the opinion of mankind” and the “modern” Declaration of Human Rights assumes that a human community is a necessary aspect of ensuring human rights. Conversely, the “community” that postmoderns participate in may not look anything at all like the biblical concept of community. In his insightful book, Postmodern Youth Ministry, my friend Tony Jones states that community for postmoderns may be expressed in untraditional ways such as cohabitation, or in TV shows like MTV’s Road Rules, Big Brother or Survivor. Jones is right. However, is it just me, or do you also see a strong hint of narcissistic hedonism in this expression of community?

I don’t know if it is an issue of some folk wanting to prove their point by making a straw man out of modernism, or if they simply aren’t doing their homework. However, when postmoderns make statements like these, they only contribute to the stereotype moderns have of us—as folk who reject reason and logic entirely and base every decision on our emotions. When we fail to engage moderns in honest discourse on why we think a postmodern characteristic is preferable to a modern value, preferring instead to dismiss those who disagree with us, we only prove the modern person’s assumption that postmodernism is nothing more than some hocus-pocus that we’ve dreamed up in order to play fast and loose with the rules.

Like any philosophy, postmodernism, especially deconstructive postmodernism, has some ideas that are wonderful expressions of Christianity as well as some ideas that are simply incompatible with Christian beliefs. [NOTE: I am NOT talking about the philsophies/beliefs of the Emergent movement here, but rather postmodernism as a philosphical construct in general.] If we are really interested in hastening along this transition from modernism to postmodernism, we need to take seriously the objections that our modern friends raise about postmodernism and dialog intelligently with them about the issues. For instance, many of my modern friends greatly appreciate how deconstruction has led us to consider marginal voices that need to be heard in the church. However, they find it quite difficult to accept the idea that many postmoderns don’t believe in absolute truth (as a modern would define it).

When faced with such circumstances, we have two choices. We can label our friends as “modern” and simply dismiss their criticism, thus ensuring that we will continue to speak past one another. Or, preferably, we can recognize that their critique of our postmodern beliefs may be just what is needed to help us critically analyze those beliefs, weed out the junk, and come away with a stronger, more cogent postmodern worldview, one that can carry us forward.