In Changing Times. Ronald L Higdon
was a man who always woreA saucepan on his head.I asked him what he did it for –“I don’t know why,” he said.“It always makes my ears so sore,I am a foolish man.I think I’ll have to take it off,And wear a frying pan.”13It is much easier to see the nonsense in a children’s limerick than it is to see it in our own lives. Our solutions to problem situations in times of high anxiety are often as foolish as substituting a frying pan for a saucepan. (I speak from personal experience.) “Don’t just stand there, do something” may not be the best advice we can receive. In C. S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters, a piece of advice from senior devil, Screwtape, to his apprentice devil is all too familiar: “The game is to have them all running about with fire extinguishers whenever there is a flood.”When the prophet Jeremiah denounces the people for their idolatry and warns about God’s coming judgment, they respond:As for the word that you have spoken to us in the name of the Lord, we are not going to listen to you. Instead, we will do everything that we have vowed, make offerings to the queen of heaven and pour out our libations to her, just as we and our ancestors, our kings and our officials, used to do in the towns of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem. We used to have plenty of food, and prospered, and saw no misfortune. But from the time we stopped making offerings to the queen of heaven and pouring out libations to her, we have lacked everything and have perished by the sword and famine. (Jeremiah 44:16-18).The people choose to do what does not call for repentance (change of direction, mind, and attitude) and transformation. It is something that can be done without drastic change. It has been said that change is the most feared word in our language and yet it remains the most prevalent. I believe that what most of us fear is that we will have to change. The unstated motto continues to be the classic: “Come weal or come woe, my status is quo.” It has been said that you cannot live the twilight years by the rules of the morning years. My life in the seventies is not the same as it was in the twenties; to live as though it were is simply the refusal to live with reality. We cannot be the church of the fifties in the new twenty-first century.
5 Launching the Campaign against DelusionThomas Merton believed one of the primary roles of a good spiritual director to be that of conducting a “ruthless campaign against all forms of delusion arising out of spiritual ambition and self-complacency which aim to establish the ego in spiritual glory.”14 A ruthless campaign against all forms of delusion should be the number one priority in our personal spiritual journeys and in the life and ministry of our congregations. A major delusion that keeps popping up is that the basic requirement is sincerity. “He was so sincere.” It is possible to be sincerely wrong. In dealing with the idea that it doesn’t matter what one believes as long as one is sincere, I often challenge that idea by saying, “The devil’s on the level.” While much too simplistic and void of explanation, it usually makes my point. Many sincere people have done great harm to themselves and others. I do not doubt the sincerity of those who participated in the Inquisition or the Salem witch trials. “It is not sincerity, it is Truth which frees us, because it transforms us.”15It is easy to spot delusion in its most extreme forms:Texas tee shirt describing the Four Stages of Tequila: One drink: I’m rich. Two drinks: I’m good looking. Three drinks: I’m bulletproof. Four drinks: I’m invisible.16If only our own delusions were this quickly recognized! In a recent Dilbert cartoon, the boss addresses two of his employees: “I read a book about how to be a great leader and realized I don’t do any of those things. I’m surprised that a book with so many errors could get published.” It’s the repeat of those who could look through Galileo’s telescope and not see anything except what they wanted to see. Perhaps Frederick Buechner summarizes it best:The temptation is to settle for the lesser good, which is evil enough and maybe a worse one – to settle for niceness and usefulness and busyness instead of for holiness; to settle for plausibility and eloquence instead of for truth.17While I won’t go so far as to compare our time like being on board the sinking Titanic (although in many ways it seems just like that), I will say that it cannot be a time for business as usual, for living as usual, for tinkering rather than major overhaul, for courses about new designs in chair arranging. But perhaps these times are just what we need in order to persuade us to do what is necessary.When Randy Pausch faced the reality of his own mortality, he chose to deliver what he called his “Last Lecture.” Even though he lost his battle with cancer on July 25, 2008, his lecture and book are full of inspiration and challenge from one who did not hesitate to deal with his reality. In his book, he tells of a conversation with a student who thought he was doing okay being in the bottom 25 percent of his class. (He actually was dead last.) Among other things, Randy tells him, “I used to be just like you. I was in denial. But I had a professor who showed he cared about me by smacking the truth into my head. And here’s what makes me special: I listened.”18The times in which we live are smacking the truth into our heads. The only question is, “Will we listen?” This book is the challenge to listen to some truths that demand a hearing if we want to be somewhere other than dead last in our personal, family, church, and community lives. In this introduction, I have hinted at some of the things we will be exploring. These are not all the truths that are out there but these will provide sufficient fodder for reflection and discussion.Bill Adler’s letter from a child to her minister (“I think more people would come to church if you moved it to Disneyland”) is not really meant to be contemporary “wisdom” but it is much of contemporary thinking. The adage comes to mind, “A nice place to visit but you wouldn’t want to live there.” Sadly, many are attempting to do just that. This book is not a call to live in Disneyland. It is the call to live in the real world as it is right now. It is the call to live out our faith and our calling (which we all have) so that when our obituaries and the histories of our churches are written they will be what we always wanted them to be. Mediocrity and complacency are not the answer. When we look at ourselves and our churches, Dr. Phil’s is the necessary question: “And how is that working for you?”
6 It’s Not the Titanic, However……
I propose to shorten the seven last words of the church (“We’ve never done it like that before”) by three words to: “It can’t happen here!” As it was in the beginning, so it is now, and so it shall ever be does NOT apply to a local congregation. It is the philosophy of entrenchment and of blinders remaining in place.
Too many congregations do not want to hear modern prophets announce the realities of the present situation. (Note: Biblical prophets were unpopular because their basic calling was to proclaim, “This is how things are.” Most pictures of the future were warnings of what would result if current behaviors did not change.) How comfortable are we in listening to these prophetic words :
“I was shocked that the data also revealed the frustrations of young Christians. Millions of young Christians were also describing Christianity as hypocritical, judgmental, too political, and out of touch with reality.”
“A generation of young Christians believes that the churches in which they were raised are not safe and hospitable places to express doubts. Many feel that they have been offered slick or half-baked answers to their thorny, honest questions, and they are rejecting the “talking heads” and “talking points” they see among the older generations….Their judgment (is) that the institutional church has failed them.”
“I think this next generation is not just slightly different from the past. I believe they are discontinuously different than anything we have seen before.”
“Christianity is no longer the ‘default setting’ of American society.”
The above quotations come from a book by David Kinnaman (president of the Barna Group) titled You Lost Me: Why Young Christians Are Leaving Church…and Rethinking Faith.19 Even if we do not believe the first two reflect our congregations, all of these observations let us know something about the storm raging outside. I recommend this book for several reasons:
1 It is based on research over a period of four years with thousands of young people ages eighteen to twenty-nine. (This age represents the black hole of church attendance. Kinnaman calls this age segment the “missing in action” from most congregations.)
2 There are many charts throughout the book labeled “In Their Own Words.” Every congregation with which I have worked as an interim minister wants desperately to reach this group but most have done little or nothing