EMBERS

INTRODUCTION

Who wants to be on fire for Jesus?!

It’s the question I heard asked over and over again as a teenager at Christian camps, retreats, concerts and conferences. It’s not a difficult question to answer. Who wouldn’t want to be on fire for Jesus?

It’s a question that was asked with the best of intentions. Placed alongside stories of missionaries who gave up everything to bring the gospel to unreached people, grotesque descriptions of Christ’s sacrificial death, and powerful personal testimonies of God’s transforming work in the lives of the speakers, these appeals seemed to be exactly what young Christians needed to hear.

Looking back on them today, I’m less certain. But before I offer my retrospective criticism, allow me to offer three qualifications:

DISCLAIMERS

1. Passionless Christianity is dead Christianity. The New Testament both describes (Acts 2:42-47) and prescribes (1 Thessalonians 5:16-18) joy, peace, commitment, and radical obedience as the intended norm for Christianity.

2. Those late nights of emotional prayer in, for example, a wooden chapel deep in the woods of Wisconsin, did bear fruit. At least, they did in my life. I first clearly heard God’s call on my life to ministry at one of those super-charged services. I’m sure many other Christians could tell similar stories of how God used those uniquely holy moments to get their attention.

3. While I will be raising objections, I have no interest in attempting to assign blame. I am convinced that the pastors, leaders, counselors, and speakers who encouraged these sorts of experiences were all doing what they thought was best. And an imperfect call to Christ is far better than no call at all.

THE PROBLEM

Ok, so what’s the problem? If something is better than nothing, and that something was rooted in Scriptural truth, and it bore fruit, why mess with a good thing? If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right?

The trouble is, the older I get, and the more undeniable the missing generation (mine) in our churches becomes, the more I feel that clarion calls for passion and fire may not have been what we needed most at the time.

To be clear, I’m not saying that it’s somehow the Church’s fault that so many of those young men and women abandoned the faith. We didn’t push them out; they went willingly. They plunged headlong into a culture that denies God, rejects His authority, exalts man, promises him the world, and ultimately destroys his soul. The atheists, evolutionists, new age spiritualists, secularists, and statists did not need our help to grab as many young Christians as they could get their greedy hands on.

No, the question is not whether we somehow caused this great exodus, but rather if we chose the best way to bar the gates, brace the dam, and perhaps preserve a few of those who now languish in abject spiritual poverty, despite being present in quarterly youth events.

ONE MORE QUALIFICATION

Before I enter my critique in full, one more qualification needs giving. And it’s the most important one:

God saves! We don’t. We must not deceive ourselves into believing that any of our varied methodologies is the magic ingredient to ushering in the next great awakening. 1 John 2:9 says, “They went out from us, but they did not really belong to us. For if they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us; but their going showed that none of them belonged to us.” We preach the gospel, but we can’t convert anyone. Only the Holy Spirit can do that.

Nevertheless, methods do matter. If they didn’t, we wouldn’t have the pastoral epistles. Not all ministerial methodology is prescribed down to the letter. But there are principles, guidelines, and goals offered in Scripture that we should receive, with gladness, as binding. We ought to do this not because it’s within our control who will be ultimately saved and lost, but because God’s way is alway the best way. And we would do well to remember that.

SPEAKING FOR OTHERS

Here, it may be helpful for me to concede some legitimate reasons for the pyromania of recent generations of evangelical Christians. Youtube creator Blimey Cow describes the phenomenon brilliantly in his tutorial on How to Write a Worship Song. “Don’t forget that one thing in your song should always be on fire, be it our hearts, our souls, this generation . . . just, something needs to be in flames!”

The original impetus for this desire for fire was, in my view, multi-faceted. First, it was a reaction to some of the traditionalism and legalism that became commonplace in the prosperity of mid-20th century America. The culture of religious obligation can be powerful in its ability to inflict trauma. When you grow up surrounded by Pharisees, it’s only natural to swing toward the Zealots once you’re allowed to leave.

Second, it was a genuine attempt to recapture the spirit of the Psalms. Consider Psalm 103:1-2. “Praise the Lord, my soul; all my inmost being, praise his holy name. Praise the Lord, my soul, and forget not all his benefits.” Why is the Psalmist referring to his own soul in third person? He’s acting as his own hype man! Worship should be passionate. God deserves that. Without a doubt, God deserves passion. The question, however, is what does that passion look like when the worship service is over?

Third, it was a scramble to compete in an age of mass media entertainment and sentimentalism. We have been living, for decades now, under the law of self-gratification. “Hold onto that feeling!” declared the band Journey in 1981, and we’ve been trying (rather unsuccessfully despite our best efforts) to do so ever since. We are enamored with the power of our own emotions. And they don’t even have to necessarily be good. Conviction, shame, anger, so long as we feel it strongly, we can’t get enough. And as our children fell headlong into the current of the culture, we felt we had to do something (anything!) to get their attention. Look over here! We can do that too! Games! Movies! And yes, of course, fire.

THE “R” WORD

The fourth reason for our obsession with passion deserves its own section. Every Christian worth their salt wants to see revival. It’s a bit of a slippery term, with different nuances of meaning depending on who you ask. But if I were to take a stab at summarizing our shared understanding of it, my definition would go something like this- Revival is a re-run of Pentecost. It’s a powerful move of the Holy Spirit that brings conviction of sin to a lot of people all at once, and some kind of mass conversion that revitalizes the Church, reinvigorates the Christian, and makes tremendous progress for the Kingdom of God in a relatively short amount of time. In other words, it’s a spiritual bonfire!

I, for one, would gladly welcome such a move of God! And I think we ought to pray for one, fervently, in fact. But I’m increasingly squeamish about revivalism. Revivalism seems, to me, like the attitude that the ultimate mission of the church is revival. Yes, we do lots of other things too, many of which are valuable. But the real goal, the pinnacle, the star at the top of the tree, is revival. Perhaps there is a grain of truth in such an attitude. Revival has always been necessary in the story of God’s people. We fade, we wander, we crumble. Then God goes SLAP! BANG! BOOM! and we’re back on track! Edwards, Luther, Paul, Ezra, Hezekiah, and so on all the way back, God has continued to awaken his sleeping bride with great men and women of faith and the great movements that swept out from their radical obedience and powerful anointing.

But there’s a very sneaky lie (after all, most lies are sneaky) that stows away with all the other cargo of revivalism. It’s the lie that if the great move of God isn’t happening, something must be wrong. This is not a lie that is expressly taught, but rather one that parasitizes the well-intended desires of young Christians seeking to live like Book of Acts Christians and see Book of Acts results.

WHY THE EXODUS?

So far, I have done little more than to offer some speculations on what motivated the methodologies of the evangelical pyromaniacs. Enough skirting around the edges; let’s strike at the heart of this thing. I submit to you that many young people have abandoned the local church (and oftentimes, along with it, their faith) because they were promised lives of great excitement, and when normal Christian life couldn’t live up to that standard that went looking for it somewhere else. Put simply, the flame burned too hot too soon, and once all the fuel was burned up, it went out with little more than a puff of smoke and pop of hot ash.

Whoa! So I must be saying that passion is bad for young Christians, right? No, not in the slightest. Young people are, by nature, emotionally driven. Proverbs 20:29 “The glory of young men is their strength.” We would be making a terrible mistake to take on the role of wet blankets for the sparks of young believers. If anything, we should be fanning the flames!

But isn’t that exactly what I’m speaking out against? Not exactly, no. My objection speaks not to bellows, but to fuel. Calls to passion must be directed toward something concrete, and that includes a whole lot more than conversions, rededications, and calls to full-time ministry. The deserters were not necessarily over-hyped. They were under-indoctrinated.

THE “D” WORDS

Doctrine and dogma have become, in some Christian communities, dirty words. “Don’t be so dogmatic,” they say. “It’s all about Jesus. Don’t get so hung up on details.” While it’s certainly the case that we can err on the side of pedantry and make mountains out of theological molehills, somehow I get the sense the our error of late has been quite the opposite.

If you don’t like the “d” words, try the “w” word on for size instead. Worldview. Young believers need a Christian worldview. The way we understand work, sex, education, family, and everything else in life must be dictated by Scripture. Jesus is not just Lord of our church, or our faith, or our ministry. He rules over all. What He says, we are compelled to believe, regardless of the subject matter.

Consider the early life of a human being. Infant, toddler, child. At every stage, they must be fed. First milk, then mush, and finally, meat. Milk and mush are good nourishment, but only for so long. “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so,” is true enough, and we shouldn’t ever outgrow such a simple and foundational reality. But we also shouldn’t stop there, dump our can of gasoline, light and drop the match, and then wonder why the conflagration was so short lived.

THE “B” AND “A” WORDS

Matthew 28:19 says, “Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” Boy, do we believe that! We’ve been doing that faithfully over the past few decades, and then also exhorting those new converts to do the same.

Unfortunately, we have often neglected verse 20, “and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.” The message of the gospel is an urgent one, no doubt. But disciple making doesn’t end once the baptized come up out of the water. Quite the opposite.

As I see it, two influences loom large in the face of this hot but shallow method of discipleship. The first is Billy Graham. Billy preached the gospel to millions of people, and there is no doubt that many of those conversions were genuine, and persevered to end. However, there were also many that never got off the ground. This is not to say that it’s entirely Graham’s fault. Perhaps the responsibility for what happened after the crusade fell on the local churches in those cities. Either way, the end result is undeniable. Decisionism swept through the evangelical church, and a hyper focus on the beginning of the Christian walk became, in many places, the norm.

The second influence is Adventism. Right off the bat, let me say that I am a committed and unapologetic Adventist! I believe that He could return today. That doctrine is a valuable one, firstly and most importantly because it honors the Scriptural testimony, but secondly and more practically because it emphasizes the reality that time is of the essence. Whether Jesus returns tomorrow or a thousand years from now, we are truly living in the last days. Unfortunately, sometimes this belief leads its adherents unnecessarily into an evangelical attitude of breadth over depth. If Jesus could return at any moment, converting the lost can seem much more pressing than discipling the saved. Yet we as the Church are commanded to do both. Neither can be neglected for the sake of the other.

GETTING PERSONAL

Over the past couple weeks, in several different conversations with different people over different issues, I’ve been asked the same question, “What are you getting at?” I’m not the most self aware person, and I don’t always do a thorough job of testing my own motives. But in this case, I can say rather transparently what is driving me to write this article.

For many years, I rode the waves of big dreams and even bigger prophecies. Godly men and women foresaw and spoke glorious visions of my future as a minister of the gospel. I know that God’s timing is rarely what we expect, and I have not completely abandoned those highest of aspirations, nor do I intend to any time soon.

But what about right now? Well, right now I am the pastor of a little country church with an average attendance of 60 and an average age near the same. My church sits in the middle of what used to be the bustling downtown, but is now half populated by abandoned and dilapidated buildings long out of use. Our resources are not meager, but they’re not overwhelmingly abundant, either. Which leaves me with the question, “Am I doing something wrong?”

What I mean is, should I be here? Yes, I think so. Central Advent Christian Church invited me, I came, and now I am preaching God’s Word and shepherding His people every day as best I know how. Though not perfectly, I am living in obedience to God’s call upon my life. And for the first time in a long time, I don’t feel like I’m missing out on something better. Could God still call us somewhere else? Sure. Could he do something great and mighty right here where we are? Of course! Is that still something I want? No question.

But I have begun to learn, over the past few years of small town ministry, the true meaning of being “faithful with little.” Sometimes we are Moses, leading a million delivered Israelites to the Promised Land. Other times, we are Moses, growing up in the palace without any clue in the world that our Pharaoh will one day be our adversary. Still other times, we are Moses, doing nothing more than caring for sheep in the middle of the desert and raising our family. And in each of those three scenarios, Moses was exactly where God wanted Him to be.

CHRISTIAN AMBITION & CONCLUSION

When we were kids, they told us we could do anything we put our minds to. The world was our oyster, the skies our playground, and that place just beyond the horizon our home. I still believe in the God who can do far more than I ask or imagine, but I’m beginning to wonder if that might sometimes mean doing less.

Picture this: a sanctuary packed full of teenagers from churches all across your region. Ripped jeans, smart phones, and hair gel abound. They stand and sing, over and over again ad nauseum the words of Will Reagan and United Pursuit, “Set a fire down in my soul that I can’t contain and I can’t control!” They sit down, and the evangelist comes to the podium, opens his Bible to 1 Thessalonians and reads, “Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life: You should mind your own business and work with your hands, just as we told you, so that your daily life may win the respect of outsiders.”

What if we told the young Christian man that he could be the prophetic voice of a generation, or he could just be an electrician and make enough money to marry and support a Christian wife and have kids and raise them to be Christians? What if we told the young Christian woman that she could a missionary to an unreached tribe in India, or she could be a mother and a wife and a homemaker and preach the gospel to her neighbors and her children?

Now, perhaps you’re thinking, “But we did do that! We didn’t tell anyone they had to be a big shot to honor God.” True enough. But I’m not convinced that we sufficiently encouraged them to be faithful in the little things, either. You see, when you’re changing your fifth diaper of the day, or answering your fourth customer complaint, or doing the dishes again because, well, they keep getting dirty, you start to wonder if this is all God has for you. And I think we might be a bit too quick to tell them no.

The God of oceans and dinosaurs and supernovas is also the God of raindrops, bacteria, and electrons. None is greater than He. But neither is any so enraptured with the smallest details of what we might consider the drudgery of daily existence.

Maybe, just maybe, we need less concern with infernos and more with embers. Embers aren’t very impressive, but they can stay hot for a long time. And it may be that, from time to time, the wind of God will blow those embers into a dense, dry forest and set the world ablaze. But until then, we need more water and less steam. More substance and less style. More “go to work, go to church, and raise your family” and less “reach for the moon and you’ll land among the stars!” And I don’t mean some robotic, dead, listless “go to work, go to church, and raise your family.” I mean the kind of admonition that teaches young Christians the full Biblical testimony of God’s holy purposes for all of human living.

I’d like to close with a quote from G. K. Chesterton:

Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.