90 Minutes in Heaven?

I don’t have time to write a review, but questions about this book (which I’ve read) have been brought up, so here’s my assessment: I don’t believe it.

Now, if you want a better review, here are some good links:

90 Minutes in Heaven

Book Review: 90 Minutes in Heaven by Tim Chailles

Gospel Inoculation

Besides the fact that she has an accent, she’s a she, and she’s wearing pants, this is not much different than the kinds of invitations that I heard while growing up. A commenter called it “gospel inoculation.” Sad, but true. (HT: Jason Parker)

Boys wrestling girls?

*I put this on our church blog, but post it here since I think the linked articles are worth spreading around.

Only a few more days to benefit Haiti by buying coffee

Reminding you of what I said here (which hopefully did not offend anyone with its tongue-in-cheek humor). Buy some coffee NOW! 50% of the profit will go toward our Global Grace efforts in Haiti.

The Islamisation of the West Continues

http://downloads.cbn.com/cbnnewsplayer/cbnPlayer.swf?aid=17933http://downloads.cbn.com/cbnnewsplayer/cbnPlayer.swf?aid=17933

Micro-managing: “I don’t accept you as you are.”

There is a time for everything. And, yes, there is even a time for micro-managing. But it’s not often.

I was scheduled to do five weddings this year and thus have spent a lot of time blocking out time for a total of 30 sessions in pre-marital counseling, six sessions a piece. I won’t marry a couple unless they’re willing to do the time with me. My process is getting more and more systematized as I go through the various themes I want to address before the big day and since we’ve been entrusted with a younger generation of people, I do a lot more weddings than funerals.

One discussion I like to have with the young lovers is about the matter of non-negotiables vs. negotiables. Happy is the relationship, marriage or other, that has a long negotiable list and a very, very short non-negotiable list. There are, of course, things in a relationship that should be non-negotiable. Jesus first is is one of those non-negotiables that a disciple of Jesus Christ brings into his or her marriage. A person cannot, in fact, be a disciple if he or she is willing to negotiate away Jesus and His Word. But if the non-negotiable list gets much longer there is an exponential increase in self exaltation at the expense of the spouse.

I marvel at the control-freakishness of men who dictate the details of their wives’ lives. Some even go so far as insisting that the house be decorated to accommodate their tastes, that the babies must be dressed a specific way, and that the schedule of the entire family revolve around them. They think they’re being leaders because they dominate. They think that by micro-managing everything that their wife or children do they are providing good leadership. In fact, they are saying, detail after detail after detail, “I don’t accept you as you are.” Mothers who micro-manage their children’s lives are undermining the single most important asset a confident person needs: acceptance.

I am persuaded that the confident Christian leader is such because he knows himself to be accepted in Christ. The assurance of acceptance is so powerful that even Jesus needed verbal affirmations from the Father that came to him via theophanies: “this is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased.” Friends, we must realize that micro-managing the choices of people around us, particularly those who are under our leadership, is a way of saying that we do not accept them as they are.

The beauty of the Gospel is that Jesus accepts us as we are. Indeed, there are commandments. There’s the cross and we must carry it. There is a yoke. But in Christ there is freedom because there is acceptance. Jesus has the right to dictate every second of my schedule and tell me whether I should get a tall or a grande at Starbucks, but I have a choice and so does the person in front of me!  One of the reasons why the Bible does not have a prescription for what we are to do in every single situation of our life is precisely because we are accepted as we are. Christ, the Lord of the universe, lets me decide whether I’m going to wear jeans or a suit to the funeral and accepts me either way; why can’t I restrain from dictating whether my wife hangs the portrait on the south wall or the north wall?

When I married my wife, I married her choices. Now, I am artistically challenged so I literally do not care what my wife does in our home, but being a human I have areas where I want to exercise my lordship and find myself trying to control my wife and children in order to get the desired outcome. I could call myself the helpful father, but it really is self-love. There are times when a parent needs to let the children do it their way without commenting, cajoling, correcting, wincing, or sighing. Particularly as they get older. There are also times when the parent must interfere.

Ironically, some of the most control-freakish spouses or parents that I know are also the most unable to actually take a stand on issues that matter. They can’t say, “As for me and my house we will serve the Lord” because they are always saying, “As for me and my house, we will this and we will that.”

When everything matters than nothing matters. Happy is the man when not much matters, but the right things do matter. The mother and father or spouse who figure this out become leaders and helpers and not, instead, oppressive and unhappy wanna-be controllers.

When a control-freak micro-manages every detail as if there is hell to pay if it’s not done according to their directives, eventually nothing matters. Eventually, control freaks lose the essence of real leadership: influence. This happens in marriage and parenting. And it can only be resolved when a person begins to realize that Holy God did not make him into a robot and embraces the full spectrum of his choices in all areas negotiable. When one realizes that playing lord in another person’s life is to defy the Lord in his own life then he little by little begins to develop the virtue that is the opposite of control-freakishness: meekness.

In marriage everything should be negotiable. Well, almost everything. God’s rules and God’s way are non-negotiable. But He gives us the freedom to choose Crest over Aquafresh so at the very least we should be willing to negotiate on issues of personal taste and strive to shorten our list as the years go by. Twenty years married, both my wife and I have shortened the non-negotiable list, negotiated compromises where needed, and in the main learned to love the choices of the person so amazingly different that we are married to. If I keep growing in Christ, I think I will increase in my meekness about many non-essentials that will resemble my “meekness” about home decor, a “meekness” that is not a fruit of grace, but of my nonchalance about home decor.

If I were to walk into the house today and Jennie had the walls all painted in a crazy and wild pink and purple, I speak the truth when I say I’d simply laugh and say,

Wow! I married a crazy fun woman!

If asked whether I liked it, I’d honestly say,

Not really. In fact, absolutely not! But I love the woman who chose it. It matters to her. And room decor is on my negotiable list. She can have it her way although if these colors do begin to affect my sanity I may woo her into negotiating a compromise that includes watching more ESPN than normal and letting me drink directly from the milk jug at will. Something that, sadly, is still on her non-negotiable list.

If colors are important to her and I micro-manage everything she does I’m saying: “I don’t accept you as you are.”

Today my Lord let me choose (and it wasn’t really healthy). I chose a Starbuck’s Grande Latté with vanilla flavor. My Master is not a control freak.

The Lutheran School Chapel and the Evangelical School Chapel

Our Father which art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name.

The life, culture, education, and school chapels of the professing Christian ought to be a passionate demonstration of a yearning to see the glorious name of God sanctified, hallowed, in the hearts and minds of all people who claim to worship the God of the Bible. While visiting an evangelical school program recently, I was reminded why I prefer that my daughter be in a Lutheran school.

One is the form of everything they do in chapel, including the congregational recitation of the Lord’s Prayer. “Hallowed be thy name” is a prayer that is also highlighted as a big deal by the forms that we choose.

Each week I attend chapel with my daughter and 300 children between the ages of k5 and 5th grade and I see the same thing everytime. On cue they all hush as the two designated acolytes (candle lighters) under the watchful eye of their teacher light the candles. The cross is then carried to the front of the sanctuary and the the three children reverently bow and with that routine symbolism chapel begins. Once after the routine of school chapel with my daughter I was visiting an area Christian school and was treated to children jumping and jiving on stage declaring to feel the Spirit in their toes and in their noses. The trite, vacuous, banal, and irreverent familiarity with the God of the Universe could not have been more stark.

“The problem with you Evangelicals is that you don’t think we Lutherans are Christian” opined the executive director of an area parochial school to me when he became aware of the fact that I was a Baptist pastor. This is an accurate analysis of the evangelical understanding of Lutherans and it shows a remarkable ignorance of all things Lutheran. Yet his assumption (if indeed it was) that all Lutherans are Christian is equally erroneous. I told him that it was truly egregious that a sweeping judgment of all Lutherans as not being in the fold was assumed by Evangelicals, particularly since I knew for a fact from my vantage point as a Baptist reverend that only some Baptists are actually Christian. And, clearly, that would also be the case for Evangelicals as well. And Lutherans.

However, if one were to juxtapose the Lutheran chapel that I observe weekly and the Evangelical so-called “worship and praise” that is drummed into the psyche of evangelical children week after week one could not blame a Lutheran for thinking that Evangelicals are mindless cultural grubs that think that drivel is proof of adoption as sons.  Few of the songs used in many Evangelical Christian School chapels neither lyrically nor musically would occasion the response of a hushed bow.  It’s the crass familiarity of uninhibited farting. The only symbolism that occurs in the Evangelical Christian School chapel is the closed eyes and bowed head during the opening and closing prayer.

But it’s a formality. And, of course, this is the pitfall of the formality in the Lutheran school chapel. I highly doubt that anyone is actually thinking of the symbolism of the candles and the cross. Probably the Baptist minister sitting near the back with his fourth grade daughter is actually pondering on it more than anyone else in the room, including those who have spent their entire lives in the confines of Lutheran formalism. Liturgical formalism is deadening and those of us in the tradition of “free worship” rightfully worry about the consequences of formalism.

But have we adequately worried about the consequence of no form and no symbolism? Or the bad formalism of our mindless forms?

Lest we hastily assert that we are formless and symbol-free, let me remind us that bowing our heads and closing our eyes is both form and symbol. Standing for prayer = form.

It is not formalism to insist on form even though people may not understand it. We must insist on certain forms not only even if people may not understand them, but particularly because people do not have enough understanding. Now, please do not read this as an apologetic for the use of candles in the service. That is not my point at all. I am merely appreciating the form as a message bearer to the children. They do not understand all the symbolism, but they do get a key part of the message conveyed through the form. The form is a simple message that they get: the service has started and this service is different than the pep rally. I don’t think that it is wrong that the acolytes and the children watching the lighting of the candles do not fully understand the reasons behind what they are doing, but you hear no shushing from teachers and, amazingly, nearly 300 hundred pairs of eyes are watching the candle-lighting.

Formalism is the sin of thinking that the form itself, minus heart and thought, is pleasing to God and a substitute for real devotion. But you cannot have devotion without form, especially corporate devotion. Music is a legitimate tool in worship because it is a form. Listen to a congregation read a Psalm out loud together. We do this in our church from time to time and some of our people are disturbed by it because they find the out-of-sync reading of several hundred voices to be distracting. Enter music as a form and instantly every word is perfectly in sync.

But the form is not just the carrier of the message. It is part of the message. It compliments it or detracts from it. It clarifies are obfuscates. Evangelicals want to elevate the worship so they add lofty words to banal forms. Poetically and musically and logically it’s the “praise and worship” rendition of a ring in a pig’s snout.

For good and for bad, I see evangelical influence in the Lutheran culture. On the good part, I see that they have learned from us the richness of a kind of grass-roots expression of praise. On the down side, too many of them are buying into the pop-culture idealization of worship as giddy tripe that makes kids jump up and down, and I roll my eyes and sigh when I see the real Christians introduce new slop from the Evangelical camp because they think that the answer to dead formalism is froth.

I put my daughter in a Lutheran school, not because I want her to become Lutheran, but because I want her to be less confused about what Christian is. I love the fact that they are distinctly Lutheran. At least I can peg who they are and we can understand ourselves more clearly. However, I have no idea what I will find in most Evangelical/Baptist schools. I’m not going to drop her in the the hodge-podge hobo’s soup of evangelicalism that is in our Christian schools where everything and anything that names Christ is called Christian. And I certainly don’t want her to be saturated in American evangelicalism that has so trivialized worship that even little children seem to subconsciously sense is ridiculously banal. The children who hush when the cross is carried in sense something far more lofty than the children who jump to the drumming beat and exclaim that they feel the Spirit in their noses.

Sadly, formalism has invaded the Evangelicals too. Their formalism is called “praise and worship” and looks more spontaneous and free. They feel that since their bodies have proved faithful to them by responding to the rhythm and that they have sung “God is greater, God is greater, God is greater” fifty times with intensifying passion that they have had worship. But since the form is so much like the forms of pop-culture, I can’t help but think while they’re chanting, “Who exactly is their god?”

Forms and symbols do mean something. And, yes, in the Lutheran chapel there are some forms and symbols that we don’t see in Baptist churches. But the very fact of their separateness from pop-culture makes them more effective and more meaningful. On the one side you have the lighting of candles and the silent bow. On the other you have the jarring twang of the electric guitar and the soto voce of the worship leader crooning that worship has begun. Both forms symbolize a beginning of worship. Both could be authentic; both could be mere formalism. The first, however, has the singular advantage of conveying that God and everything about God is actually bigger, transcendent, and serious.

So, that’s one reason I don’t have my daughter in the evangelical schools around here. Perhaps, in another post, I’ll explain why I don’t have her in the fundamental Baptist schools. Or, the Catholic parochial schools. Or, why we have chosen not to homeschool. But for now I’ll just say that we choose to risk exposing her to the formalism that is more serious versus the formalism that is trite, artistically evanescent, and flippant.