Time to Get “Radical?”

Having just received a copy of David Platt’s Radical: Taking Back Your Faith From the American Dream, I am already anticipating that it will make my top-10 books of 2012.  Here, are the opening few pages for your consideration.  If they capture your imagination, be sure to purchase the book.  It only gets better.

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“The youngest megachurch pastor in history.”

While I would dispute that claim, it was nonetheless the label given to me when I went to pastor a large, thriving church in the Deep South — the Church at Brook Hills in Birmingham, Alabama.  From the first day I was immersed in strategies for making the church bigger and better.  Authors I respect greatly would make statements such as “Decide how big you want your church to be and go for it, whether that’s five, ten, or twenty thousand members.”  Soon my name was near the top of the list of pastors of the fastest-growing U.S. churches.  There I was … living out the American church dream.

But I found myself becoming uneasy.  For one thing, my model in ministry is a guy who spent the majority of his ministry time with twelve men.  A guy who, when he left this earth, had only about 120 people who were actually sticking around and doing what he told them to do.  More like a minichurch, really.  Jesus Christ – the youngest minichurch pastor in history.

So how was I to reconcile the fact that I was now pastoring thousands of people with the fact that my greatest example in ministry was known for turning away thousands of people?  Whenever the crowd got big, he’d say something such as “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.”  Not exactly the sharpest church-growth tactic.  I can almost picture the looks on the disciples’ faces.  “No, not the drink-my-blood speech!  We’ll never get on the list of the fastest growing movements if you keep asking them to eat you.”

By the end of that speech, all the crowds had left, and only twelve men remained.  Jesus apparently wasn’t interested in marketing himself to the masses.  His invitations to potential followers were clearly more costly than the crowds were ready to accept and he seemed to be okay with that.  He focused instead on the few who believed him when he said radical things.  And through their radical obedience to him, he turned the course of history in a new direction.

Soon I realized I was on a collision course with an American church culture where success is defined by bigger crowds, bigger budgets, and bigger buildings.  I was now confronted with a startling reality: Jesus actually spurned the things that my church culture said were the most important.  So what was I to do?  I found myself faced with two big questions.

The first was simple.  Was I going to believe Jesus?  Was I going to embrace Jesus even though he said radical things that drove the crowds away?

The second question was more challenging.  Was I going to obey Jesus?  My biggest fear, even now, is that I will hear Jesus’ words and walk away, content to settle for less than radical obedience to him.  In other words, my biggest fear is that I will do exactly what most people did when they encountered Jesus in the first century.

That’s why I’ve written this book.  I am on a journey.  But I am convinced it is not just a journey for pastors.  I am convinced these questions are critical for the larger community of faith in our country today.  I am convinced that we as Christ followers in American churches have embraced values and ideas that are not only unbiblical, but that actually contradict the gospel we claim to believe.  And I am convinced we have a choice.

You and I can choose to continue with business as usual in the Christian life and in the church as a whole, enjoying success based on the standards defined by the culture around us.  Or we can take an honest look at the Jesus of the Bible and dare to ask what the consequences might be if we really believed him and really obeyed him.

I invite you to join the journey with me.  I do not claim to have all the answers.  If anything, I have more questions than answers.  But if Jesus is who he said he is, and if his promises are as rewarding as the Bible claims they are, then we may discover that satisfaction in our lives and success in the church are not found in what our culture deems most important but in radical abandonment to Jesus.

 

We May No Longer Call Them “Bastards,” but the Real Question is: Do We Treat Them as Such?

In 1965, Daniel Moynihan, then working for the United States Department of Labor, issued a report in which he found that 24% of black children and 3% of white children were born out of wedlock.  At the time, the report was a scandal, and the culture was abuzz with questions regarding the state of black families in America. 

 

Lessons from a Dying Pastor

This is the story of Ed Dobson – the story of a dying man.  In 2001, Ed was diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), and was given 2-5 years to live.[1]  But this is not what makes Ed’s story so fascinating and so worthy of our time.  You see, Ed is a Christian whose life has taken him down a path that few within our society are willing to travel – a path that ultimately puts him at odds with political activists on both the left and the right.

Born in Northern Ireland in 1949, Ed Dobson immigrated to the United States in 1964.  By the age of 23, he had earned his Masters Degree from Bob Jones University, and had taken his first post as the Dean of Men at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia.  Just seven years later, in 1979, Ed joined the Board of Directors for Falwell’s newly organized Moral Majority.  In the hopes of combating the moral decline of American culture, Falwell, Dobson and others eschewed the traditional Baptist practice of separating faith and politics; and instead sought to build a grassroots network that would lobby for a “pro-family” agenda in America.

But by the late 1980s, Ed Dobson had come to realize that Falwell’s vision of a fundamentalist “Christian Nation” was one that he could no longer embrace.  While his convictions regarding Jesus and the Scriptures remained rock solid, he came to believe that the cultural problems of the late 20^th century were not problems that could be remedied through political activism.  So, in 1987, Ed left Liberty University and the Moral Majority, and became the Senior Pastor of Calvary Church[2] in Grand Rapids, Michigan.  For the next 18 years, he labored to build into this congregation, before eventually resigning when the rigors of his illness became too great to bear.

Now, in the Twilight of his life, Ed Dobson has undertaken a new venture.  No longer able to minister in the ways that he once did, he has released a series of short films, in which he ruminates on the lessons he has learned as a follower of Christ.    These are not lessons about building grassroots organizations, nor are they lessons about ministering in the context of a megachurch.  Instead, Ed is taking us on a journey to the doorsteps of death, bravely offering insights about what it means to live as a Christian at the end of a long and unexpected journey.

Today, I’d like to challenge you to sit down for 10 minutes with Ed Dobson.  Listen to what he has to say.  And if, by the end, you find yourself longing to hear more, you can follow this link,which will lead to you to Flannel.org.  There, you can purchase all five “shorts” for just $7.99.

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[1] Amyotrophic lateral scleosis (ALS), or Lou Gehrig’s disease, is a motor neuron disease.  In the simplest of terms, it is a disease in which the spinal cord begins to deteriorate, which in turn leads to weakness, muscle atrophy, and spasticity.  Generally speaking, most patients die of respiratory compromise and/or pneumonia within 2-3 years of the initial diagnosis.

[2] It may be of interest to the reader to know that Calvary Church is the church responsible for planting Rob Bell and Mars Hill.