So You Want to Save the World? Eugene Cho and the "both/and."

Surveys tell us that this 'rising' generation, more so than the one previous, wants to be involved in making the world a better place.

But what price (if any) are we willing to pay to do it? Do we genuinely want to be thought of as countercultural activists...but only if we don't have to leave our couch?

This is a question that has changed the life of Eugene Cho, a pastor (Quest Church), activist (One Day's Wages), and author (Overrated). He sat down recently with Biola Hour host Mike Ahn to discuss how to not only love the idea of changing the world, but how to actually do it. For Cho, one way Christianity is countercultural is that it embraces "downward mobility," rather than the "upward mobility" that has become engrained in much Western culture.

But what is "downward mobility"? Is it embracing a life of poverty, forsaking all belongings? Cho says it's more nuanced than that: "It's asking the question: Why do we constantly have to be in this race to upgrade everything? For me, downward mobility is to embrace a life of contentment...to proclaim that Jesus is enough, in a culture that says, 'You don't have enough!'"

However, saying that Christians ought to be activist about justice and economics and social and political structures is reopening an argument that's already over a century old: Should we be about justice and making this world better, or about evangelism, and calling people to the next world? For Cho, the Gospel involves both, not either/or: "As we read the Scriptures, I think bothof these are very apparent. So it concerns me when, in the church, particularly among young people, we abandon one for the sake of the other. Both are so essential."

For Cho, the question is implicit yet inescapable: If not us, then who? If not now, then when? “We live in a world right now, where 663 million people don't have access to clean water... approximately 40 million people are in some form of economic or sexual slavery... I can't fix it all, but I know that I can impact the life of someone."

Want to learn more, from somebody who's out there doing it?

The Sound of Silence: Reclaiming your right to be quiet.

When we were first married, I gave my wife a Bible verse: Psalm 46:10; more specifically (because when proof-texting, it's important to be precise!) Psalm 46:10a. And I thought it appropriate, because my wife was (and often still is) in near-constant motion, working and helping and learning and doing. And as her less-active, less-energized, less-busy husband, I thought it wise to point out that stillness was a quality to be valued.

Except I was a total hypocrite. There was no silence, no solitude, no real stillness in my life. I was not in constant motion, like my wife...but I was in constant 'input mode.' Either my TV or my radio or my stereo was always on. I went to bed with earbuds in, listening to sports radio or BBC news or old-time radio programs. The power button on my car stereo was broken, so that whenever you put the key in, the stereo came on; I didn't fix it...I didn't think it was a problem!

And then, when Al Gore invented the internet (!) and I could get an endless, bottomless stream of stimulation...well, I knew that (contra Brian Wilson), I was made precisely for these times.

Because in these times, silence is not valued... not in our public culture, or, honestly, not in our church culture.

And there is a cost to not having it. Blogger Andrew Sullivan has written a powerful post about the price he paid for forsaking silence.

Sullivan cites Canadian Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor, who has studied the decline of religion in western culture, and Taylor argues that we didn’t go from faith to secularism in one fell swoop. Instead, certain ideas and practices made other ideas and practices not so much false, as just...less relevant. The modern world slowly weakened spirituality, in favor of commerce; it downplayed silence and merely "being," in favor of noise and constantly "doing". As Taylor sees it, the reason we live in a culture increasingly without faith is not because science has somehow "disproved the unprovable," but because the endless white noise of our culture has drowned out the stillness in which faith is born...the quiet in which faith lives.

See, a life of faith requires a healthy dose of stillness, of solitude, of silence.

But where to start, to build more silence into our lives? Here's a surprising place to look: The Harvard Business Review has 4 "practical ideas" for cultivating periods of sustained silence, in "The Busier You Are, the More You Need Quiet Time." Take a few minutes and check it out.

In Bread For The Journey: A Daybook of Wisdom and Faith, Henri Nouwen wrote,

Many voices ask for our attention. There is a voice that says, "Prove that you are a good person." Another voice says, "You'd better be ashamed of yourself." There also is a voice that says, "Nobody really cares about you," and one that says, "Be sure to become successful, popular, and powerful." But underneath all these often-very-noisy voices is a still, small voice that says, "You are my Beloved...My favor rests on you." That's the voice we need most of all to hear.

But we need to have quiet to hear it.

The Thrill is Gone: Sean McDowell on happiness vs. blessedness.

Maybe you've felt it before; that odd feeling when something you used to enjoy just isn't so much fun anymore. It could be anything, from bodysurfing to a hot fudge sundae to a new episode of your favorite show...it's hard to say why, but the thrill is gone. You need something new to give you that same rush.

Many of our consumerist tendencies are attempts to respond to this loss of thrill. Phone not fun anymore? Buy a new one. Car doesn't thrill you anymore? Buy a new one. Your partner doesn't give you a rush anymore? Get a new one.

But, to misquote Shakespeare, what if "the fault is not in our stuff, but in ourselves"? What if we've settled for the adrenalin/dopamine/endorphine rush of "happy" instead of the deeper, abiding "blessed" which only comes by focusing on others, not ourselves?

In this post from Talbot's "The Good Book Blog," Apologetics prof (and Biola alum) Sean McDowell explains the confusion between happinessand blessedness, and how our expectations about one can affect the other. "The paradox of happiness is that if we seek it, we won’t find it," says McDowell. "True happiness comes when we stop focusing our own feelings, and lovingly seek the best for others."

So take the 3 minutes to read it...for the sake of someone else in your life.

Learning to Cry: Surviving and learning from grief.

"Believe me, every heart has its secret sorrows, which the world knows not, and oftentimes we call a man cold, when he is only sad.” -Longfellow.

Most of us don't get taught how to grieve. Maybe it's not something that can be taught; maybe it's something you have to go through to really get. But hearing someone else's story can go a long way.

Author/speaker Brooke Mardell nearly lost her husband Jason to a heart attack a few years ago, and she came to Biola to talk about what grief is like and what she learned.

Most importantly, grief is real life; there is no Biblical guarantee that we will avoid grief (in fact, we seem to be promised the exact opposite).

And if we don't talk about it before it touches our lives (because it will), it can push us deep into ourselves, and cause us to put on fake smiles and Christian "happy talk." And because we've never talked about it, when it happens it feels strange and abnormal and causes us to question God's goodness and trustworthiness and even His existence...questions we might be afraid to say out loud at a place like Biola.

But for Mardell, despite her fear, "I wasn't going to hear the answers until I was willing to ask the questions."

"In some ways, there's no 'getting over' griefs that come into your life," says Mardell. In some things, grief is for a lifetime; loss is real. As Anne Lamott said, "It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly – that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp.”

But can good that comes out of grief? For Mardell, grief has been a chance to see herself and God differently, in a more honest and genuine way. Grief is a "massive rainstorm that comes and washes away the pretense of who we are, and maybe the pretense of who we think God is."

She also offers practical wisdom about allowing for mystery and unanswerable questions and rawness, about how to avoid unhelpful advice and quick fixes, how to use the lament Psalms to turn complaint to adoration, and how to be a safe person for others who are grieving, whether believers or unbelievers.

Grief will indeed find all of us...here's 26 minutes of wisdom on how to live with it.

True Love...Dates? Why dating at a Christian college is so weird (Pt. 2).

In Part Two of this CMR podcast (Part One is here) about Christians and dating, guest Debra Fileta* focuses on where our own lives should be, before we think about starting a relationship with someone else. The discussion also steers into the contentious area of "roles" in marriage, and concludes with some wisdom about both physical and emotional intimacy.

For Debra, the framework that all dating questions fit is "Am I engaging in healthy relationships? Am I a healthy person? Do I have a healthy relationship with God? Those are the three central questions that I'm trying to get people to zoom out and answer....Christians are good at the cliché of saying, "Oh Christ is the center of our relationship." What does that really mean? How do you break that down and make it a practical thing?"

Are Christians waiting too long to get married, and thus causing themselves problems? Debra finds that there is no 'best age' to get married: "It does take maturity, and maturity comes from different things....maturity comes from life experience, maturity comes from the people that you're exposed to, maturity comes from the Holy Spirit and the depth of your relationship with the Lord. What it comes down to truly isn't necessarily a number."

Chris, Tim, and Debra also get into whether men and women are as different as we've been led to believe. Are men really from Venus and women from Mars? "I feel like we put [on] these negative stereotypes and we sort of make them bigger than they are," says Debra. "When I look at scripture, I don't see much of that going on. I see Christ calling us to the same kinds of things...at the end of the day we're all called to health and wholeness in Christ.”

What about emotional intimacy? We've been told to set clear boundaries with physical intimacy, but surely emotional and spiritual intimacy is a positive thing, right? Be wise, says Debra: "I think sometimes we take spiritual intimacy and we introduce it into a dating relationship far too early...before trust has even been earned, before commitment has even been discussed and we end up with a broken heart and a broken spirit....We want to connect as fast as we can, but nothing will ever replace your intimacy with God and that's what's going to give you more and more wisdom and more and more answers along the way."

Want to hear the whole thing? It's 26 minutes of real wisdom.

Listen to the whole podcast here

* Debra Fileta is a professional counselor, national speaker, and creator of TrueLoveDates.com where she reaches over 2 million people a year with the message that "healthy people make healthy relationships." She's also the author of the book True Love Dates: Your Indispensable Guide to Finding the Love of Your Life, where she writes candidly about dating, relationships, and how to find true love. You may also recognize her from her 200+ articles at Relevant Magazine, Crosswalk.com, and all over the web.

True Love...Dates? Why dating at a Christian college is so weird (Pt. 1).

In a culture that condones and even encourages the hookup, dating for young Christians is often a taboo subject; it's either avoided completely, or only acceptable with a person you're "intending to marry."

This makes living around hundreds of other young single people at college a very confusing and anxiety-producing thing. 

But, of course, it's too weird to talk about.

So, of course, Drs. Chris Grace and Tim Muehlhoff will talk about it. In this edition of the CMR podcast, they sit down with Debra Fileta, author of True Love Dates: Your Indispensable Guide To Finding the Love of Your Life, to discuss why dating doesn't happen on Christian campuses, who can initiate, having realistic expectations, working on your own baggage, and spotting red flags.

After 11 years at Biola, Tim has observed something that nearly every undergrad already knows, that "...the way modern Christian college students navigate this is, there is virtually nodating that happens on campus. And what little dating that doeshappen goes from zero to a hundred in a heartbeat."

Why? As Debra sees it, given the excesses of the culture around us, "there's this fear of even interactingwith the opposite sex....We want to honor God, we want to do what's right, but really deep deep down, I think there's also a fear of failure. We don't want to mess this up..."

Another of Debra's observations concerns a loss of perspective: "I think we elevate dating to the level of marriage. We take it just as seriously, and asking someone out for coffee becomes equivalent to a marriage proposal: "I have to take this seriously," even though it's really just coffee. I think we've lost the art of having relationships in a healthy way with the opposite sex that aren't even romantic."

And we haven't even gotten to the part about who can (should?) initiate, how social media affects our expectations and standards, and how becoming an emotionally healthy person is key to having a healthy relationship. It's worth the 27 minutes (and after that, Part Two is here).

Listen to the whole podcast here

Debra Fileta is a professional counselor, national speaker, and creator of TrueLoveDates.com where she reaches over 2 million people a year with the message that "healthy people make healthy relationships." She's also the author of the book "True Love Dates: Your Indispensable Guide to Finding the Love of Your Life," where she writes candidly about dating, relationships, and how to find true love. You may also recognize her from her 200+ articles at Relevant Magazine, Crosswalk.com, and all over the web.

Fred Sanders on The Trinity and "The Shack": Does it matter what we believe (as long as we're sincere)?

It matters what we believe, not just that we believe; our faith certainly involves commitment, love, and other "matters of the heart," but it is not a faith without content. Nearly every church has a "Doctrinal Statement" or something similar. The early history of the Church is a history of church councils, creeds, and statements...all attempts to lay out doctrine about God; what is true, what is false.

And while it is a book of fiction, The Shack has no shortage of preaching and doctrine, though the book itself would call "doctrine" a bad word.

The Shack was one of the best-selling novels of 2008, and has recently been released as a motion picture. It's the story of a man who has suffered a catastrophic loss, and in the midst of his anger and bitterness gets a mysterious note from an unknown "Papa," which leads to a prolonged face-to-face encounter with God in trinitarian form. Author William Paul Youngpresents God in very winsome but often unexpected ways; God the Father is cast as a warm-hearted African-American woman who calls herself "Papa," Jesus is a middle-eastern carpenter (no surprise there!), and the Holy Spirit is seen as an Asian woman named Sarayu.

The central concern of The Shack seems to be how to make God relatable in the midst of suffering. Dr. Fred Sanders, Mike Ahn's guest on The Biola Hour, believes that Young's key concern as an author was, "In order to deal with the problem of suffering, what kind of message about the Trinity would I need to bring?"

"For people who haven't focused any attention on the tri-unity of God," says Sanders, "[The Shack] is a strong prompt to do so. But what you get [is] a serious reduction of what Scripture is trying to tell us about who God is. It goes so far in the direction of wanting to have a relatable Trinity that you don't have a worship-able Trinity."

Want to see more, both about the book/movie and about the magnificent mystery that is the Trinity? Here's Sanders and Ahn, from March 3, 2017:

Social Justice: Either/Or or Both/And?

Joseph Loconte

My friend Joe sent me a link [http://www.opinionjournal.com/taste/?id=110010062] the other day, asking me what I thought about the whole idea of the ‘social gospel.’ The link is a WSJ article by Joseph Loconte of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, discussing the legacy of the ‘founder’ of the social gospel, Walter Rauschenbusch. I will not attempt to recap, other than to say that it is a remarkably precise analysis of the weaknesses of Rauschenbusch’s work. I have great affection for the brothers (Campolo, Wallis, Hauerwas) cited as lauding Rauschenbusch, but I suspect they are more familiar with his legacy than his actual writing. 

Walter Rauschenbusch

As Loconte points out, Christianity does not have to be distorted in order to produce works of social justice; indeed, it cannot produce anything if it is eviscerated: “The Christian confession of faith, by itself, offers no guarantee that either individuals or societies will be transformed. But, for believers, not even the smallest steps forward can be taken without it.” This echoes my favorite Dallas Willard quote; in responding to Rodney King’s mid-L.A.-riot plea of “Can’t we just all get along?”, Willard replied, firmly but perhaps wistfully, “No, we can’t… not until we become the kind of people who can get along.” Social change will not occur without personal, spiritual change.

The typical response of the evangelical church today to that last statement, however, makes the lionizing of Rauschenbusch understandable. While it might make them uncomfortable to admit it, for most evangelicals, social change is not only secondary, it is unimportant or even the wrong direction. Any time or resources spent on justice, reform, or economic efforts would be better spent on evangelism. 

John Wesley

These are not new concerns; they surfaced even in the time of John Wesley, and he had a stinging reply, in reacting to the questions that Matthew 25:31ff raised. When asked “what does it avail to feed or clothe men’s bodies, if they are just dropping into everlasting fire?”, Wesley would respond, “whether they will finally be lost or saved, you are expressly commanded to feed the hungry, and clothe the naked. If you can, and do not, then whatever becomes of them, you shall go away into everlasting fire.” It is not evangelism or social action, it is evangelism and social action. I am encouraged that this generation of college students seems less tied up with either/or statements, and are willing to embrace the both/and, because the Christian work in this world is clearly a both/and.

Who Is This God, Anyway?

I’ve been reading through the book of 1st John recently. I don’t need too many more complications in my life, and this is a very uncomplicated book, with a very uncomplicated message: God is love.

Henri Nouwen says that “knowing God means to consistently, radically, and very concretely announce and reveal that God is love and only love... and that every time fear, isolation, or despair begin to invade the human soul, this is not something that comes from God. This sounds very simple and maybe even trite, but very few people know that they are loved without any conditions or limits. This unconditional, unlimited love is what John calls God’s first love: Let us love, because God loved us first.”  

God’s love is first; human love came second. And Nouwen notes that human love often leaves us “doubtful, frustrated, angry, and resentful... there is always the chance of rejection, withdrawal, punishment, blackmail, violence, and even hatred... these are all the shadow side of this second [human] love... [flawed by] the darkness that never completely leaves the human heart... The radical good news is that this second love is only a broken reflection of the first love, and that the first love is offered to us by a God in whom there are no shadows...”

Henri Nouwen

Dallas Willard

Dallas Willard is one of the truly wise souls in our world today... and this is his take on who this God is, this God that asks for nothing less than all we are: 

 “The acid test for any teaching about God is this: Is the God presented one that can be loved—heart, soul, mind and strength? If the thoughtful, honest answer is “not really,” then we need to look elsewhere or deeper. It does not really matter how intellectually or doctrinally sophisticated our approach is. If it fails to set a lovable God—a radiant, happy, friendly, accessible, and totally competent being—before ordinary people, we have gone wrong. We should not keep going in the same direction, but turn around and take another road.”  Our journey, then, is on the road to learning more about that God.

If God is love, how should God’s family live? How is that shown among us? There is a story told about John the Apostle, the writer of this letter, very very old now, so old that he had to be carried into the meeting place... and once there, all he would say, every week, was “Children, love one another.” Finally, one of his students asked, “Master, why do you say this same thing, week after week?” John smiled. “Because,” he whispered, “it is the Lord’s command... and if you do this and only this, it is enough.”

1 John is one of my three favorite books in the Bible... Galatians, because it talks so powerfully about grace; Ephesians, because of the incredible and beautiful picture of the church, the body of Christ... and this book, because it takes me right to the main thing. The main thing is love. Jesus had 2 commandments; love God, love each other.  

Because (and I’ll let you in on a little secret), for all the talking we seminary grads do, the Christian life is very very simple; not easy, but simple. It’s love. It’s that little U2 riff... “and you give yourself away... and you give yourself away... and you give yourself away...” If we’re not doing that, not much else that we do matters.