Last week I had the opportunity to attend an Acts 29 church planting conference (they call these conferences “boot camps”, but I live in a military community, and as such can’t bring myself to call sitting in a church listening to lectures for two days “boot camp”). Church planting certainly is not in my immediate future, but I thought this would be a great opportunity to get some good training that will hopefully make me more effective for the Kingdom wherever God leads Christie and me next.
During the conference Matt Chandler told a story that I can’t shake. I’ve been thinking about ever since and I will recap it here (some of the details may be a bit fuzzy, but you’ll get the gist of it).
To give you some context, he was talking about the pressure that exists today for preachers to give messages that are “practical”. There is indeed quite a lot of pressure to emphasize practicality in sermons, and the unfortunate reality is that often our emphasis on practicality can cause us to deemphasize the gospel (my words, not his, but I doubt he would disagree). He told a story about a time fairly recently when a three year old child of a family in his church suddenly had an awful seizure. His parents took him to the hospital in a panic, and immediately he was examined by doctors, who were not able to give good news. The child had an enormous tumor that was going to require surgery immediately. Even with surgery the doctors were not sure that they were going to be able to save the boy’s life. One thing they did tell his parents was that they would likely have to remove part of his brain, and as a result there was a possibility that when the child woke up from the surgery his personality, memory, cognition, etc. would be effected. I am not a parent, and I cannot pretend to understand how devastating that would be to hear as a parent.
This family was close to the Chandlers, so as soon as Matt heard about it he went to the emergency room to see the family. As soon as Matt entered the emergency room, the boy’s mother hugged him. As she hugged him she whispered these words: “Thank you, thank you, thank you, for teaching me about God, because I don’t know how I would do this if I didn’t know about God.” As Chandler was speaking in front of us last week in San Diego he added, “pragmatism burns away when life gets crazy, the transcendent, holy, God holds you up.”
Wow.
The fact is, in the intense storms of life we don’t need seven reasons why debt is dumb or five steps to raising good kids. We need God. We need an accurate view of the God of the Bible. That is what transforms us, and that is what holds us up.
I will be the first to admit that being pragmatic doesn’t necessarily mean you can’t preach the gospel and vice versa. The two are not mutually exclusive. I’ll even say that pragmatism, in and of itself is fine. But not when it turns Christian worship into idol worship. Not when it turns Jesus into the means rather than the end. Not when it causes us church folk to sell out in order to draw a bigger crowd (The Acts29 folks had some stuff to say about that). The idolatry inherent in that sort of approach is another topic for another post.
I was talking with a friend recently and he was expressing some frustration with the content of the preaching that he had seen at some church services he had been at recently. In his view they were heavy on pragmatism. Then he said, “I just don’t think we need all of that, we need to know and live the gospel. It seems to me that if we knew and lived the gospel then this other stuff would fall into place.”
I couldn’t disagree. We don’t need pragmatism, we don’t need life enhancement, we don’t need religion, we don’t need morality, we don’t even need goofy evangelicalism. We need the gospel. We need the cross of Christ.
As I continue to learn and progress in my young ministerial career, it is my prayer that no church service I am a part of would never emphasize pragmatism over the gospel. As I pray that, I am realizing more and more how much repenting I have to do. I am realizing many of my past failures in ministry to this point can be traced directly to a failure to properly emphasize and proclaim the gospel. And I’m thankful for guys like Matt Chandler that are helping me to re-learn the necessity of gospel-centered preaching.
4 Comments
May 14, 2009 at 12:35 am
good thoughts.
some push-back that is actually still in agreement with this post though- I really believe that today’s emphasis on pragmatism is rooted in backlash towards a gospel that is simply “orthodoxy” without any “orthopraxis” as nt wright would put it.
However, you are correct when you say that pragmatism is a dangerous extreme to lean on. The danger in new emergent christianity is an orthopraxis without a core of orthodoxy. The future of this kind of one-sidedness can be seen today with movements such as YMCA and Salvation Army, which hardly have the looks of a Christian organization anymore, but were backlashes as well to a Christianity without application.
Perhaps the gospel becomes damaged when we compartmentalize the understanding and the action of the gospel. Who God *is* must dictate what we do, but if we have no knowledge of who our God is, our actions are empty shells. At the same time, an understanding of who God is and what the gospel is without a practical application into our lives is simply… hypocrisy.
It’s still a hard line to toe… between purposeless action and hypocrisy, between an ivory tower of ideas and pharasaic, heartless pragmatism. Somehow… somehow the gospel is in between those where a deep knowledge of God and His purposes drives us irresistibly to an application of the gospel in our lives. It only goes in one direction though- the lifestyle does not define God, but God defines the lifestyle (as my prof loved to say… the “unidirectional anological predication”. ha.)
oh wow. this response ended up being 4 paragraphs longer than intended. sorry about blogposting in a comment.
May 14, 2009 at 7:11 am
Brian,
Thanks for this; I totally agree with you. We exist as Christians because of the Gospel, not the other way around. If we fail to see,preach, and live that, and instead become another cultural form of “self help” we are just as lost as any other false religion.
Rick
May 14, 2009 at 10:52 pm
Thanks for your comments, Rick and Daniel. I very much agree with both of you. Daniel, I would argue that orthodoxy that does not lead to orthopraxy is not orthodoxy at all, and I imagine you would agree with that. Good stuff guys.
September 28, 2009 at 7:45 am
[...] whole sermon reminded me of something I heard Matt Chandler teach at a conference a few months ago. I’ve blogged about it previously, but to summarize, he told a story of rushing to the hospital after being told that a young child [...]