The Alternative to Changing the World is not Insignificance. It’s Faithfully Re-Presenting Christ.

Posted on November 5, 2010 by Pastor Foley

I agree with CT’s Mark Galli.  It’s stunning and disconcerting to see the number of new books and articles encouraging Christians to change the world.

But I disagree with Mark Galli that the solution is to glorify insignificance. The opposite of seeking to make a big difference in the world is not seeking to make a small difference in the world. It’s faithfully re-presenting Christ wherever he leads us. Sometimes that puts us in a city on the hill role. Sometimes it puts us in a role so private that even our left hand doesn’t know what our right hand is doing. Either way, it’s six of one and a half dozen of another to us; our role is simply to mirror into the world what Christ has done for us, wherever in the world he happens to plop us down.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s let Galli get a word in edgewise here, from his CT post entitled Insignificant is Beautiful:

I have a good friend who has been caring for his elderly mother. She sits in a wheel chair, complains a lot, and requires constant attention — to the point of cleaning her up after regular bouts of diarrhea. What my friend and his wife are doing is heroic, virtue with a capital V. But it is hard to see how it is “world changing” as we normally think about such things. Such an act doesn’t even change the mother’s life, only makes it less miserable. It’s not even “significant,” by our usual calculation, but “merely” an act of love.

When we think of making a difference, we think about making the world a better place for the next generation, not taking care of people who have no future. This is one reason we are quick to push the incontinent into “managed care” staffed with “skilled nurses.” No question that this is indeed a necessary move for many families—I had to do it with my own father, sad to say. But let’s face it. A fair amount of our motive is mixed. How much skill does it take to clean up excrement from an elderly body? Mostly it takes forbearance—and a willingness to give oneself night and day to something that, according to our usual reckoning, is not all that significant.

Galli takes a wrong turn right out of the driveway on this way. The problem with focusing on changing the world is not that we might focus on and glorify the significant rather than the insignificant. The problem is that we use an external measurement at all for our behavior.

In John 5:19, Jesus does not say, “Truly I tell you this; I don’t just do the significant things. I take time for insignificant tasks as well.” He says,

I tell you the truth, the Son can do nothing by himself; he can do only what he sees his Father doing, because whatever the Father does the Son also does.

The Son can’t do any tasks by himself, whether significant or insignificant. He can only do what he sees his Father doing, and it would not occur to him to ask whether anyone felt that whatever task he happened to be doing was significant or not.

That’s what it is disappointing that Galli characterizes the behavior of his friend and his wife as “heroic, virtue with a capital V.” When we characterize the behavior of Christians this way, we make out as heroic and virtuous what Jesus intends to be characteristic, normative behavior for his followers.  In Radical, David Platt, pastor of The Church at Brook Hills in Birmingham, Alabama, quotes Elisabeth Elliot, the widow of martyred missionary to Ecuador Jim Elliot, who later served as a missionary to the tribe that killed her husband. He then adds a great gloss of his own at the end of her quote:

“Is the distinction between living for Christ and dying for Him after all, so great? Is not the second the logical conclusion of the first? Furthermore, to live for God is to die, ‘daily,’ as the apostle Paul put it. It is to lose everything that we may gain Christ. It is in thus laying down our lives that we find them.”

As Elisabeth Elliot points out, not even dying a martyr’s death is classified as extraordinary obedience when you are following a Savior who died in a cross. Suddenly a martyr’s death seems like normal obedience.

A martyr’s death ought not to be “heroic, virtue with a capital V.” It ought to be normal obedience. As Jesus notes in Luke 17:7-10:

Suppose one of you had a servant plowing or looking after the sheep. Would he say to the servant when he comes in from the field, ‘Come along now and sit down to eat’? 8Would he not rather say, ‘Prepare my supper, get yourself ready and wait on me while I eat and drink; after that you may eat and drink’?9Would he thank the servant because he did what he was told to do? 10So you also, when you have done everything you were told to do, should say, ‘We are unworthy servants; we have only done our duty.’

The servant ought to say that whether his role is president of the United States or parental caretaker. It ought not to register with the servant at all whether the world looks at something he is doing as significant or not.

That’s why Galli is fundamentally off the mark when he has Jesus lauding insignificance:

If Jesus were to have written a book on ethics, he might have titled itInsignificant Is Beautiful. His is an ethic that glorifies giving a mere cup of water to a thirsty soul (Matt. 10:42), praises the relatively worthless donation of an indigent widow (Mark 12:41-44), visits those who have disappeared from history, and honors the one who changes the diapers of the incontinent.

Jesus’ book would most assuredly not be titled Insignificant is Beautiful. It would be So Whether You Eat or Drink or Whatever You Do, Do It All for the Glory of God.

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The Glaring Omission in the Empty Tomb Stats: the Church/Nonprofit Complex

Posted on November 3, 2010 by Pastor Foley

(Be sure to catch up on these stats before you read the rest of this post, as otherwise this post won’t make a whole lot of sense.)

In his farewell address in 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned of the “conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry”–what has become known as the Military/Industrial Complex.

To the best of my knowledge, this is not my farewell address, but the glaring omission in our industry’s analysis of the latest stats from empty tomb lead me to cry foul in the same way Eisenhower did:

Empty tomb (whom I really do like a lot, by the way) and others castigate churches and praise nonprofits for church’s decreased spending on benevolence and nonprofit’s laser focus on The Things That Matter. Empty tomb and others cluck their tongue at the church and see it receiving the just desserts of the desertion of its duty.

Let’s pick up from the Sylvia Ronsvalle quote we ended with yesterday, via The Lead:

Ronsvalle called the findings “unintended side effects of the ‘seeker’ mentality” that creates a consumer mindset within U.S. churches, one that says “‘We’re here to serve you,’ not ‘We’re here to transform you into somebody who serves others.’”

But here is the problem:

Nonprofits are not raising money by saying, “We’re here to transform you into somebody who serves others.” They’re raising money by saying, “We’re the professional life savers. Don’t try this at home. It is not the work of mere lay people. Send money so that we can do the ministry.”

The scandal behind the empty tomb stats is not just the church’s dereliction of duty. The scandal is the Church/Nonprofit Complex: Churches turned Christians into passive pew sitters, and nonprofits came in and profiteered. Christians became convinced that ministry was the province of professionals, so they shifted their giving to the Christians who were the most professional in each cause; namely, nonprofit organizations.

In short, the shift in funding is the logical consequence  of the professionalization of Christianity, in which churches and nonprofits are both complicit.

The only mention made of the possible reliance of nonprofits on churches is this one, from Sylvia Ronsvalle:

Of particular concern to Ronsvalle is data showing that 92 percent of charitable giving by people younger than 25 goes to “church, religious organizations,” according to federal data. As age increases, so does the amount given to other categories, including charities and educational institutions.

“What that strongly suggests is that young people are learning their charitable values in the religious context,” Ronsvalle said. “That’s why we’re concerned about the importance of denominations leading their local congregations into a broader vision than institutional maintenance.

Point well taken, Sylvia. Now join me in being equally concerned about the importance of nonprofits leading their donors into a broader vision of involvement in causes, one that goes beyond giving away money to professionals to do the job God intends the church to do.

Churches and nonprofits have to learn how to relate differently, for the sake of the individual Christians who have been reduced to human ATM machines by both institutions. Nonprofits are heavily leveraged into churches for their giving–and not just corporate church giving, which is clearly down. Nonprofits mine churches for individuals ripe to give, and they fail to acknowledge that such extraction has an impact not only on church finances but on the stunting of the growth of individual Christians, who never grow to full maturity in Christ simply by supporting the work of Christians who are better trained in a particular cause than they are.

It’s a tragedy of the commons in the making.

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Updated statistics: Christians Giving Less to Churches, More to Nonprofits

Posted on November 1, 2010 by Pastor Foley

Call & Response, The Lead, and MLive all do a nice job summarizing the new stats from the Ronsvalles at empty tomb that Christians are giving less to churches and more to nonprofits.

Religious News Service summarizes (via The Lead):

A new report from Empty Tomb Inc., an Illinois-based Christian research organization, contains an analysis that found from 2007 to 2008, Protestant churches saw a decrease of $20.02 in per-member annual charitable gifts.Meanwhile, Empty Tomb’s analysis of federal data found that annual average contributions to the category of “church, religious organizations,” which includes charities like World Vision and Salvation Army, increased by $41.59.

One reason? Churches spend more money on congregational finances and less on missions beyond the church walls, which is unappealing to people who want to support specific causes with a tangible, visible benefit.

Other highlights of the study noted by MLive:

Among the findings, based on data from about one-third of U.S. churches:

  • Giving to churches declined to 2.4 percent of a donor’s income, lower than during the first years of the Great Depression; an additional $172 billion could be available if church members tithed 10 percent.
  • Church giving spent on “benevolence” including global missions and social services slipped to 0.35 percent of income, the lowest in the study’s 40-year sample. Giving for “congregational finances” including staff salaries and building maintenance was at 2 percent, roughly steady for the previous 20 years.
  • While charitable giving nationwide fell 10.6 percent from 2007 to 2008, donations to “church, religious organizations” increased 6.5 percent, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Best quote comes from Sylvia Ronsvalle via The Lead:

Ronsvalle called the findings “unintended side effects of the ‘seeker’ mentality” that creates a consumer mindset within U.S. churches, one that says “‘We’re here to serve you,’ not ‘We’re here to transform you into somebody who serves others.’”

You know that I am the first to note that churches are no mere victims in this predicament, but I am beyond disappointed that none of the commentators, Ronsvalles included, take nonprofits to task for their co-starring role in this tragedy. Surprisingly, nonprofits are uniformly portrayed as heroes and paragons of responsibility and impact in these pieces.

We’ll change that in our next post.

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