It’s Thursday, which means I’m poring over background information and historical analysis of the Scripture I’ll be preaching from this Sunday. Thursday has quickly become my favorite day of the week because the entire day is dedicated to one of the things I enjoy most in life: studying the Bible.

 

I’m sitting here at the breakfast table looking out my kitchen window and suddenly I notice that it starts to hail. Little pea-sized pellets of hail. I don’t understand why, but hail is incredibly fascinating to me. Maybe it’s because it’s ice falling out of the sky in 65-degree weather. Or maybe because it’s impossible to predict and it’s for that reason that your auto insurance agent can sell you the most unimaginable coverage available. Or maybe it’s because it makes me realize I should’ve been an insurance agent.

 

Anyway, when we left Paul in the third chapter of Second Corinthians in the last blog post (apologetically, three weeks ago) we found him dealing with the issue of freedom and its role in the local church. Not only was he preaching the profound necessity and reality of freedom in a New Testament church, but he was also educating people on the effects that freedom would have if it were exercised in accordance with the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Living a life of freedom in the church would in turn produce sanctification as those living freely sought to engage the surrounding culture and redeem it (and its people) with the transforming power of the gospel.

 

Sadly, as Paul found out—and as we continue to discover in the church today—living a life of freedom is not that easy, particularly when there are those who feel that “freedom” is a synonym for “worldliness”. But even in the face of such disagreement—which is fine, according to appeal for overall unity by Paul in Ephesians 4—he manages to be confident. “Having this ministry by the mercy of God, we do not lose heart,” Paul says (4:1 ESV). “But,” he continues, “we have renounced disgraceful, underhanded ways. We refused to practice cunning or to tamper with God’s word, but by the open statement of truth we would commend ourselves to everyone’s conscience in the sight of God” (4:2). What I like about this statement is that it combines the act of giving comfort and encouragement to those trying to live according to freedom with the firm hand of a pastor seeking to put to rest the grumbling and bickering of those who don’t yet understand what this “freedom” is supposed to mean for them. He doesn’t command everyone to get on the same page; he simply illustrates the proper way to live according to freedom and then throws the qualities of a life lived outside this freedom into a couple of catch-all junk drawers (“disgraceful, underhanded ways”…cunning…tampering with the word).

 

What it basically came down to was the approach to Scripture that you brought to the table. The same issue is alive and well today in any church you might visit. Living with the freedom of the Spirit (3:17) in mind means understanding that the New Testament purposefully leaves some things up for debate. For example, you have the mention of elders guiding a local church but there is no mention of their structure or the exact process by which they are chosen. Why is this? Because God—in His influencing of the writers—knew that issues like that would need to be interpreted according to the culture in which a church was located. The same thing goes for music. We don’t find a list of acceptable worship styles, songs, or methods because what works in one place doesn’t necessarily work in another. Organs and choirs probably don’t fit too well in an urban, Generation X context or in a house church in the jungles of Indonesia. Likewise, a band like Skillet would be run out of town if they tried to hold a concert in the church my wife was raised in. But that’s fine…because that’s what freedom is for.

 

Paul goes on to give one of the most powerful illustrations in the entire canon of Scripture. “We have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us” (4:7). This freedom is precious and holy because it is available due to the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in individual believers and in their corporate gathering as the church. That freedom is to be a vehicle by which we worship and praise God, not something that we lift up as the product of our own attitudes or personalities. We are “always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies” (4:10). Because we recognize the uncontrollable nature of the Holy Spirit and the freedom it provides in ministry, we in turn recognize our temporal status as ministers in the church. By acknowledging our weakness and the lack of any ability to manipulate the work of the Holy Spirit, all praise flows to Jesus Christ who is, after all, the one building the church (4:11).

 

And whether or not we ever fully grasp the concept of this freedom is not the issue. While Christ longs for us to experience His fullness and the liberation He offers through a life lived according to grace, whether or not we experience that doesn’t change the ultimate reality of an eternity lived in the presence of Christ. “Since we have the same spirit of faith according to what has been written…the Lord Jesus will raise us also with Jesus and bring us with you into his presence” (4:13-14). The Holy Spirit makes this freedom to minister according to context both available and known to us all as believers. However—as Paul illustrated in the previous chapter—our sanctification progresses according to the responsibility we accept for spreading the gospel. And because we are called to make disciples of all nations, we are—at some point—going to be faced with the choice of taking the gospel to new people in unfamiliar cultures and contexts. The choice we then make—will we try to discern what freedom means and how to use it or will we stick with what’s comfortable?—has bearing on both our own Christian experience and the effect of the gospel on the lives of the lost. So even if the prospect of discovering the role of the Holy Spirit in the guidance of your life as a follower of Christ scares you to death, you must still—if you truly are a believer and a follower—face the choice at some point. Ignoring it in the hopes that the opportunity goes away is no good either, as that is nothing more than the admission that we’ve seen reality and want nothing to do with it. But accepting the challenge in the hopes that the Holy Spirit will be there at your beckon call is the sin of the other extreme. Finding the balance of freedom in your culture, context, and community is the Rubik’s cube of Christianity.

 

“So we do not lose heart,” Paul says. “Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day” (4:16-17). I never knew the truth of these words until recently. Pastoring a church is tough business. Figuring out how the freedom of the Spirit works in our context is an issue we have yet to fully address. But even figuring that out is often a secondary issue. Things like music styles, bulletin font, and the location of the pulpit continue to be matters of great concern. And it’s not that these concerns are unimportant, but they are unimportant in comparison to concerns like a baptism rate that doesn’t trend with population growth or teenagers leaving the church in droves after graduation from high school. What’s funny is that it’s these types of battles I find myself losing on a consistent basis, yet I wake up each morning more energized than the day before. Prayer has gone from being an essential to a necessity. I find myself praying when I walk between buildings at our church or when I’m hanging a picture in my daughter’s bedroom. Putting everything in perspective definitely helps. “We look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen” (4:16). Viewing the battles of a pastor through this lens helps me remember that the church wasn’t built in a day, and we certainly aren’t going to sort out all its various issues in a day either. But the hope is still there. Every Sunday I eat breakfast with my Sunday School class hoping that someone new is in the room. I shake hands hoping I’ll meet someone who hasn’t been to our church before and that they’ll want to come back next week. And I preach hoping that someone begins to feel the work of the Holy Spirit in his or her life.

 

That’s all any of us can do. We just do what we can and pray that Christ can find some use in what we contribute. And living a life where the burden to build the church rests not on us but in Christ is the most liberating freedom there is.

 

I'm sitting here reading one of my favorite ministry blogs (www.mondaymorninginsight.com), and I'm looking at something very disturbing.  By the year 2050, says this article, only 10 percent of Americans will be in a church somewhere on any given Sunday. Now 2050 may seem like a time when DeLoreans fly and Soylent Green is the snack of choice, but that’s just forty years away. For those of you dreading next year because you were born in 1970, you now can grasp the immediacy of the problem.

 

If I haven’t mentioned it either in this blog somewhere or in conversation with you at some point, I have a somewhat jaded view of the American church. I am what the American Protestant church would proudly hold up as a product: I attend church, I give to the church, I even pastor a church. Based on that, the church has done a pretty good job with me, hasn’t it?

 

In the words of Lee Corso, “Not so fast, my friend.”

 

In the third chapter of Second Corinthians, we find Paul combating pride and self-righteousness in the church. And in an answer to his critics who want him to produce some proof that his ministry has been fruitful, he says, in a nutshell, “Don’t look at the numbers…look at the changed lives.”

 

For a very long time now the American church has been boasting of its numbers. The Southern Baptist Convention, for instance, has somewhere in the neighborhood of 17 million people on the membership rolls of its local churches, making it the largest Christian denomination the country. The flipside of that lofty statistic is that there are only around 7 million people in SBC churches on any given Sunday.

 

But to repeat Paul, let’s not look at the numbers. Let’s look at the changed lives.

 

Where are they?

 

This is the big struggle for the 21st century church, in my opinion. The gospel doesn’t hold up numbers to prove its case; it points to the changed lives it has produced. Take Paul himself, for example. A veritable serial killer of Christians ends up changed by Jesus Christ to become the movement’s staunchest advocate. He even dies for the cause. That’s what the church is missing: people who are willing to die for the cause.

 

Of course, I don’t mean for us to go throwing ourselves into traffic for the sake of the gospel. But it would probably help if we started throwing ourselves into our cultures and communities in ways that people haven’t seen before. Jesus’ call to take up our cross and follow Him isn’t some clever, pithy quote to go on a cross-stitch made by grandma to hang in the bathroom. It’s serious business.

 

What we have in many cases, though, is the same problem Paul describes in chapter three, verses seven through eighteen. There was a sway of the Christian movement back to adherence to Jewish Law, which Jesus had clearly stated that He had come to fulfill. But because the Law was easier to understand—and didn’t require someone to think—it became the failsafe. Christians who couldn’t deal with the constant change happening in the New Testament Church went back to what they knew, which was the Law.

 

The only problem, Paul says, is that there is no life in the Law. “For what was glorious has no glory now in comparison with the surpassing glory” (3:10). In other words, once you’ve seen the Grand Canyon in person, pictures don’t do it justice any more. The gospel is a diamond; the Law is cubic zirconium. The gospel is the New England Patriots; the Law is the Detroit Lions. (I think you get the point by now.)

 

Yet even with those comparisons, many churches have become lifeless outposts, like abandoned stops on a forgotten stagecoach route. Our minds “are made dull” (3:14) because instead of thinking about what it’s going to take to continue changing lives, we tend to retreat into the past because the past is where the success is. It’s one end of a dangerous spectrum of worldliness that, as Mark Driscoll describes, puts us in a position where we convince ourselves that only by going back to 1950 or forward to 2020 are we going to see any fruit come of our labor. But the harsh reality is that it isn’t 1950 and it isn’t 2020. It’s 2009, and the question we have to ask ourselves is the same question Paul was asking himself in the 50s (the original 50s): what does it take to reach people here and now?

 

The great thing about trying to figure this out is the great freedom we have in Christ to do this. “Now the Lord is Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom” (3:17). But exercising this freedom is frightening and threatening sometimes. It’s frightening because there’s no guarantee what we try will work and it’s threatening because it often means abandoning some of the programs and ideas of the past. However, when we approach the gospel with the faith and hope that it really can change lives, we should be changed ourselves. To deny the reality that the gospel both requires and produces change is to deny that it ever changed us at all.

 

When we reflect the glory of the gospel—in its present reality in our community and not in its past accomplishments according to our numbers—we experience the miracle of sanctification in our own lives (3:18). We are “transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory” and therefore become the agent the Holy Spirit uses to spread the gospel, which is what we were created and called to do in the first place.

 

So I can claim to be a great product of the church and the church can claim to have produced a faithful product in me, but do the claims match the realities? Has my changed life produced change in others by virtue of me living out the gospel? When we can answer these questions honestly we’ll begin to solve the problem of why so many teenagers and young people scatter from the church like a burning building the minute they graduate from high school. Are we really creating churches where the gospel is alive and well and not just something you read about in a quarterly on Sunday mornings? Do these young people view the gospel as something life-changing or is it just a decision we made when we were kids?

 

If they don’t see constant change in the lives of their friends, why should they hang around after adolescence? But more importantly, if they don’t see constant change in the lives of those who are leading churches, why should they believe the gospel has any power at all?

 

See, we don’t hold just the future of the church in the palm of our hands but we hold the Resurrection itself. A refusal to adapt to what it takes to reach the lost, change lives, and change our communities is the near equivalent of stripping the Resurrection of Christ down to nothing more than a footnote in history. “If Christ has not been raised,” Paul says, “your faith is futile” (1 Corinthians 15:17).

 

But take heart. Pray continually. Be joyful. Hold on to the good. And when we stand before God at the end of this life, let us not be able to say that we didn’t reach our kids, grandkids, and great-grandkids and all of their friends because we were afraid. Fear has been conquered. “And having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross” (Colossians 2:15).