Books that Rock

When you think about Compassion, what or who comes to mind?

With the next - I don't know - how many posts I want to interact with a book entitled The Shaping of Things to Come by Michael Frost and Allan Hirsch. It is a thoughtful, scholarly and readable book about where God is taking the church. It ought to be required reading for all Bible school and seminary students, and especially for anyone involved in training people for missions. I've decided to interact with this book bit by bit rather than all at once. This is more for my benefit, than yours (assuming someone might actually read this blog), and I want to make it clear that, although I am including many quotes from the book, my interaction with the material may not - likely will not reflect the opinions of the authors. In other words, don't blame them for my misinterpretations and distortions.

Part one: The Shape We're In

Christendom: The Shaping of Things to Come begins with a discussion of Christendom. The authors describe it thusly:

"Christendom is the name given to the sacred culture that has dominated European society from around the 11th century until the end of the 20th... in some countries, the king or queen actually became the head of the church. Overall, Christianity move from being a dynamic, revolutionary, social, and spiritual movement to being a religious institution with its attendant structures, priesthood and sacraments."

Page 8

Think of Christendom as your current church culture. In the US, church is done in a certain way. My home church sits in a theatre like auditorium, is led by a well rehearsed semi-pro worship team, and our taught almost every week by one man, our senior pastor. There are ushers, Sunday School teachers, youth workers, etc. This local church culture is supported by Christian publishing houses, Christian bookstores, music download sites, etc. This is the "face of Christendom" in the US. To the non-Christian most of it seems pretty odd, and not very relevant. (Please don't construe this as a criticism of my home church. I'm just making some observations).

Which brings me to the question: "Does the fish see the fishbowl?" Not usually. Because this is our church culture, in which we were raised, we don't usually see it. This culture has been spread by Western missionaries (inadvertently, and God, in his sovereignty allowed it to be so) so that around the world, many churches share this specific culture. I can say with certainty, that a believer from one of our Hong Kong churches would feel right at home in an American church. And, I might add, I think there is something wrong with that. The gospel has not been indigenized, clothed in local culture, but rather transplanted. How much of what we do on any given Sunday is really essential to what we call "church"? How much has been passed down to us and accepted without evaluation? What are the basics, the essentials that you must have in order to have "church"?

I once went to an Indian museum (Warm Springs ?) in central Oregon. During my tour the elders of the now dying tribe, shared how their people believed in God and thanked him for his provisions in special harvest ceremonies (the woman gathering the harvest were not allowed to eat one nibble until the entire tribe had held a thanksgiving service to God). Then the white man came, took their land and pushed them onto a reservation. After moving to the reservation the missionaries came and set up a school for the children. The children, however, didn't change fast enough, but clung to their Indian culture, so the missionaries with the government's support, took the children from their families and made them live in a boarding school. They were forced to wear white man's clothes, cut their hair and speak the white man's language. Rather than being allowed to follow Jesus as an Indian, they had to essentially become an Anglo- European to become a Christian. This is Christendom.

Apostolic and post-apostolic mode A. D. 32 to 313	Advance and triumph of Christendom mode (313 to present)	Emerging national mode (past 10 years)
No dedicated sacral buildings, often underground and persecuted.	Buildings becomes central to the experience of church	Rejects the concern and need for dedicated church buildings
Leadership operating with a fivefold Ministry leadership ethos (See Eph. 4:11-12)	Leadership by institutionally ordained clergy	Pioneering innovative leadership, a fivefold Ministry leadership ethos
Grassroots decentralized movement	Institutional and hierarchical	Grassroots decentralized movements
Communion celebrated as sacralized community meal	Grace comes through the sacraments	Re-sacralized and ritualized the new symbols and events including the meal
Church on the margins of society or underground	Church is perceived as central to society	Church once again on the fringes of society and culture
Missionary incarnational sending church	Attractional and extractional based	National incarnational sending church

Charts are always simplified and thus tend to simply issues into black and white. The authors say there is a new kind of church emerging now (I don't know anything about the Emergent Church movement, so please don't overreact to their use of the word "emerging". They are solidly evangelical and declare in the beginning of their book their commitment to the fundamentals of the faith).

Well that is all I am going to say in this post.

Think about it: How is Christendom different from following Jesus? Can I be a fully devoted follower of Jesus, without taking on all the trappings of Christendom?

Labels: books, change, Christiandom, church leadership

Shame and Grace by Lewis B. Smedes

If you've ever felt worthless or unworthy of God's love, I highly recommend this book. In Shame and Grace Lewis Smedes explores the human experience of shame, especially as it relates to our relationship with God. His writing is incisive and liberating.

This book begins by describing the feeling of shame, and distinguishing it from other feelings, such as embarrassment, guilt, discouragement, depression and frustration. He says, "shame is a very heavy feeling. It is a feeling that we do not measure up and maybe never will". I have had that feeling many times in my life - when I hear how God is blessing other people's ministries, while mine is progressing slowly; when I do something to hurt another and the accuser begins reminding me about "what a loser" I am. Shame comes in many forms and guises.

"We feel guilty for what we do. We feel shame for what we are." Page 9

"The shame equation is this: one wrong act equals one bad person." page 17

In chapter four Dr. Smedes carefully distinguishes between healthy and unhealthy shame. Regarding healthy shame he says: "Only a very noble being can feel shame." page 31 Healthy shame is a voice from our true self. "Shame may be a symptom of something going wrong." "Shame protects us from our falseness." When "we probe our shame, we may discover a great deal about ourselves that is worth knowing."

On the other hand he says, "All unhealthy shame is rooted in deceit of one sort or another.", page 38 "Unhealthy shame exaggerates our faults and often pervades our whole being." This unhealthy, social shame is "to be disgraceful is to be weighed and found unacceptable for those who we need most to accept us." To quote a line from "Knight Tales" "You have been weighed, you have been measured, and you have been found wanting." Do you know this feeling?

• "We are shamed when someone looks on us as if we were things and not persons."
  
• "We are shamed when our own people reject us."
• "We are shamed what our group is despised by another group." (Chapter 7)

The worst shame is public shame. Public shames sends people to the tops of buildings and bridges. The author distinguishes between secrets and privacy. Shaming someone is often a public act, which deeply hurts. "We keep secrets to conceal facts; we need privacy to conceal ourselves. People love secrecy, the Bible says, because their deeds were evil, but people love privacy if their deeds are honorable." Page 62 In Matthew 18, Jesus instructs the disciples to go to great lengths to avoid public shaming someone.

"We are ashamed to be exposed in public. We long to expose ourselves in trusting love." Page 63 We all want to know and be known by some people. No one wants to be a phony, but fear of rejection causes us to build giant facades.

"We want people around us when we die, we trusted with our mysteries while we lived; we want family, trusted friends, children, parents, nobody else around us when we enter the dark passage." Page 64

Sources of Shame

Sources of shame include parents, church, others, ourselves. A parent shame a child when they do not own their child, i.e., they disown him/her. To own a child does not mean to possess the child. "if we own a person, we give her our commitment of an unconditional love and thereby tell her that she will never be disowned, never rejected, never despised." Page 70 Owning a child means at least three things:

Taking responsibility (to be there for them, to unconditionally love and accept them), feeling pride in them, finding joy in them.

Feeling owned tells me:

• I am someone who is loved from the beginning by the person who gave me life.
• I am someone to whom someone else made in an unconditional commitment from the beginning.
• I am someone whose parents consider me worthy of the love they give me.
• I have the power to own myself: I take responsibility for my life, I am proud to be who I am, and I have joy in being myself.
  

Feeling owned, I contend, is lovely way to immunize a child against shame." Page 71

Churches are also a source of shame. In church we often hear three voices: the voice of duty -- God requires me to be perfect before I can be acceptable; the voice of failure -- I am worse than imperfect - a totally unacceptable, human being; the voice of grace by the grace of God: "I can be forgiven for my failure."

We also shame ourselves; "shame prone people translate criticism of what they do into judgment of what they are." page 86

"shame prone people read their own shame into other peoples minds."

Wrong ways to deal with shame include: lowering our ideals to the level of our abilities to meet them. Making ourselves acceptable enough to satisfy the ideals we already have. Persuading ourselves that we are just fine the way we are. Chapter 13

In the chapter entitled "Singing Amazing Grace without feeling like a 'wretch'" the author says: "A grace that makes us feel worse for having it is an ungracious grace and therefore not really grace at all. If grace heals our shame, it must be a grace that tells us we are worthy to have it. We need, I believe, to recognize that we are accepted not only in spite of our undeserving but because of our worth." Page 119

This (above) is an exceptional statement. Can I, at the same time, be both worthy of and undeserving of grace? The author contends that though we are undeserving of God's grace, because we are his creation we have the image of God, and we are worthy of his grace. It is important to distinguish between deserving and being worthy of grace. We can never deserve or earn grace, but God deemed us worthy of his grace or he wouldn't have given it to us. The idea he is trying to get across is that we were "worth it" to God. Jesus for the "joy set before him, endured the cross". It gives me the idea that God gladly rather than reluctantly saves us. He values me.

Chapter 17 deals with coming to terms with our shamers. We cannot undo what was done to us. "If we think we have forgotten, we are probably only stuffing the memory beneath our consciousness to fester there as the poisonous source of assorted other pains. Besides, something should never be forgotten."

"The first and often the only person to be healed by forgiveness is the person who does the forgiving." Forgiveness is a personal drama with five scenes.

Scene one: we blame the shamer.
Scene two: we surrender our right to get even.
Scene three: we revise our caricature of the person who shamed us.
Scene four: we revise our feelings.
Scene five: we accept the person who made us feel unacceptable.

The authors suggest that we do not be too hasty to forgive, but also don't wait too long. Be concrete in our forgiving: "we should forgive in verbs, not in nouns. Forgive people for what they do, not for what they are." He admonishes us to not wait for the shame or to repent, but do not forgive out of a sense of duty. Try "pretending if you need to, and settle for a silent forgiving if you must.

Accepting ourselves: "what we forgive ourselves, we heal our guilt; when we accept ourselves, we heal or shame." (Page 143) What we accept ourselves we acknowledge our depths: "many of us have pressed our feelings down beneath the surface away like the trash compactors that compress our garbage behind her kitchen cupboards. We cannot shoo our shadows away by denying them: they trail along with us like the tail on a lizard." Page 148

There is,..., a healthy pride that comes with grace." "I see it in a child who has just tied her shoestring for the first time or turned a somersault: "mommy, mommy, look! Watch me. No, mother, stop talking, and come look." She feels, I suppose, like the creator felt after he made himself a fine world. When he saw how well he had done, he created some people who could share the world he was so proud of having made. Excellence cries for applause." Page 150

"Unhealthy shame is like a hardshell that we need to crack in order to find the beauty within us." Page 154

"Critics are terror to people with unhealthy shame... Grace-based people take their critics lightly." Page 156

"The secret? It comes in Paul's punchline: "the only thing that really matters is what the Lord thinks of me.""

The author concludes by saying that those who learn to deal with unhealthy shame,, and also with healthy shame, will rediscover joy. This joy is a gift from God. "The fact is that I paid nothing for the breath I am taking at this moment. Or the mysterious energy that is kept my heart pumping 10 million times without missing a beat. I did not pay a cent for the time I have of my hands. Or the touch of that woman's soft finger on the back of my hand. Not a penny for Mozart." Page 162

"Joy in a world that does not work right must be a generous joy. Joy is always, always in spite of the fact that the whole world was groaning while it waits for its redemption." Page 164

There is much more in this book and I recommend that you buy it, read it and pass it along.

Labels: shame grace parents church

This summer or I read Waking the Dead by John Eldredge. In this book the author focuses on the importance of the heart. It is almost as if this book grew out of a word study on "heart". Proverbs 4:23 says "watch over your heart with all diligence, for out of it come the streams of life." John Eldredge uses this book to teach us again how to live with our heart.

The idea that helped me the most was his explanation of what it means to have a broken heart. I've always thought of a broken heart as having hurt feelings, disappointment or pain over some relationship or something which happened in the past. The author points out, however, that a broken heart is much more than that. The things that hurt us often also "break" us. In other words these unhappy experiences damage us and damage our hearts, making it impossible for our hearts to function as God intended. When Jesus stated his mission in Luke chapter 4, one significant aspect is that he came to "heal the brokenhearted".

When I read Waking the Dead, for the first time I realized that my heart was damaged or broken. Some things that have happened in my childhood causes damage to my heart and have made it difficult for me in my adult life and also in my walk with the Lord. As I prayed, God brought to my mind incidents that I had long forgotten. The memories were vivid and I could clearly see how they had "broken" my heart. I asked God to heal my broken heart, and I believe that he has.

Mr. Eldredge teaches that there are four streams which need to come together into a great river, if we are to experience the abundant life that Jesus intended for us. The first stream is the stream of discipleship, learning to follow Jesus. The second stream is the stream of counseling, whereby we uncover the areas in our life that are broken. The third stream is a stream of healing, where we bring these broken areas to Jesus and allow him to heal us. The fourth stream is the stream of spiritual warfare, whereby we continue to stand in the victory that we have in Christ, and daily experience the fullness of the Holy Spirit, appropriating all the blessing God has bestowed on us in Christ Jesus.

I agree with the author, and wholeheartedly believe that these four elements are crucial to experiencing the abundant life Jesus has promised to us. It is impossible to experience the fullness of Jesus, or live the Christian life if you have a lot of broken areas in your life. It is difficult for most people to uncover the causes of their brokenness, without counseling of some sort. I believe that a small group of sensitive believers is probably all the counseling that most people need. In such an intimate community people have the safety to explore their past and discover their brokenness. A Christ centered group will support them, but will also call on Jesus for healing and expect that he will bring wholeness into their lives. Learning to follow Jesus, discipleship, is then much more fruitful because you are not constantly dealing with sin caused by brokenness in the life.

Many churches I know now include "New Life camps" in the discipling process. New people are invited and encouraged to attend weekend retreats, where they can explore and discover brokenness in their life and ask God for healing. Unholy agreements or bonds are discovered and dealt with, and the work of Christ in his death, resurrection and ascension are clearly taught and applied to the lives of the believers. Uncovering this brokenness and experiencing healing prepares new people for the discipleship process, and their spiritual growth is usually rapid. Part of that discipleship training would also include teaching them how to stand in Christ and resist the evil one who wants to destroy their life and walk with the Lord. People who go through a process like this are born "running" and do not seem to have the constant "up and down" struggle that many other Christians experience.

This book has impacted my life and I'm very grateful for it. I highly recommend it and encourage you to get a copy and read it.

You can purchase Waking the Dead here.