A Closing Window of Opportunity?: Bringing Millennials and Gen Z into the Great Commission

(Hello everyone. I've been traveling a lot this summer, and have been able to spend a few weeks in the US for the first time in 3 years. My post today is on a topic which I feel is important for the North American Church, and very relevant to the future of Global Missions from this part of the world.  While there has been great concern over how younger generations now have largely stopped attending church, I submit that this is because attendance was indeed the issue of concern when leadership and ownership should have been. You may disagree with my analysis of how we got here, but we are here. I believe we don't have to stay here, however.)

Don’t Get Them Confused: Millennials vs. Gen Z

Every couple of decades, a new generational cohort comes along, with a fresh outlook and worldview, and sometimes very different assumptions and expectations from those of their predecessors. Millennials were the hot topic for years, with their marked differences from previous generations and defiance of many long-standing US cultural institutions. No longer now the college kids frequently targeted for criticism by their elders, even the youngest Gen Y/Millennials are already getting past their mid-20’s. The college students of today are not Millennials but Generation Z, who have already been exerting their own unique influence on society for years now, albeit to less media fanfare.

People tend to break down the generational differences between Millennial and Gen Z in certain ways: Typically Millennials are regarded as idealistic and concerned with the great events and causes of their time, while Gen Z are seen as more pragmatic and focused on their own day-to-day lives. Millennials have been slower at setting up their own households and pursuing a stable income compared to previous generations, preferring to invest their time and resources in other areas. By contrast Gen Z seem more interested in achieving financial independence, and even starting their own businesses. Most Millennials had the internet from a young age, with smart phones coming later, while Gen Z are mobile device natives who have grown up regarding wifi as a basic resource.

Some more comparisons of Millennials and Gen Z.
This chart was a better summary than most I found.

Rather than compare these stereotypes against each other positively or negatively ("Gen Z are harder workers" "Millennials are more relational"), I believe it’s more helpful to understand them as natural preferences developed at different periods of recent history:

Millennials were the first generation to have access to the online social world at their disposal from a young age, and so there is an innate desire to connect and unite. Inherited material resources and optimism from the Baby Boomer days also provided a context where society seemed to moving forward; Millennials understood their responsibility was to keep that going and make the world a better place, and a great many feel that this is indeed the purpose of their lives.

By contrast, Gen Z grew up in the post-9/11 era, more destabilized, pessimistic, and less prosperous. They feel the stress of financial anxiety more keenly and don’t consider society to be progressing forward. Thus rather than worrying about making the world a better place, they tend to focus on achieving personal security in the midst of uncertain times.

Personally I have experienced the sense that a certain large block of people used to have a voice and influence in the way society as a whole runs, but that it's a sort of privileged group that requires a certain level of social integration and sufficient personal resources, and as society fragments, that group has shrunk drastically and no longer speaks for the majority of society. (Although many senior Americans still imagine that this consensus exists, and try to fight political battles to regain control over it)

Growing up with mostly Boomer parents, many Millennials could at least have witness this world by proxy, and infer that top-down influence was the most effective way to steer society in a better direction. (An increasingly leftist progressive media also assume this as a first principle and communicate accordingly) By contrast, I submit that Gen Z, with mostly Gen X parents who were increasingly outsiders (both inadvertently and by their own jaded and system-weary choice) to that broadly influential social club of "people whose opinion matters". Gen Z also grew up in an increasingly fragmented society, and have little conception of that kind of social integration and inherited influence which existed in the past. Thus the idea of top-down influence obtained by collective process makes less and less sense; they are growing up in an un-integrated society, and each goes their own way as seems best to them. We have arrived at situation described at the very end of the book of Judges: 

"At that time the Israelites left that place and went home to their tribes and clans, each to his own inheritance. In those days Israel had no king; everyone did as they saw fit." - Judges 21:24-25

A Missed Opportunity: Unled Millennials

That may be the condition of society, but let us shift our focus specifically to the Church and Global Missions and how they could be blessed by these new generations: Millennials seek to work in community to bless the world, and they understand the great value of mentoring. Meanwhile Gen Z are focused workers who aren’t afraid to start building amidst uncertainty. These are not only both valuable mindsets for the mission field, but the two are also naturally complementary.

It would be a pity if current leadership in the Church and mission sending agencies missed out on these God-given strengths, but sadly for the Millennial generation this has already happened. The passionate but often naive idealism of Millennials met a prosperity-addled Church in love with its comfort zone, with leaders focused on maintaining an acceptable status quo or still fighting the culture wars of previous decades.

It has been widely observed that Millennials are all but unanimous in their desire to make a difference in the world. Yet, at church they often encountered a lazily fatalistic mentality which insisted things will simply get worse until Jesus comes, simultaneously conflating social and spiritual authority, and thus was increasingly disengaging from the world as popular culture drifted further and further from Bible-belt culture. Few leaders actively recruited maturing students into the great work Christ left us to do, but expected loyal attendance without any undue boat-rocking or change-making, or simply gave over spiritual responsibility for tomorrow's elders and deacons entirely to youth groups, so the adults could continue in their accustomed ways undisturbed. It’s not surprising then that when secular voices told Millennials a more optimistic and empowering tale--that change was coming and necessary, and by working together students like them could indeed make a better and more just world than that of their elders--Millennials allied themselves excitedly to those causes instead, and abandoned church attendance en masse.

For Millennials who did find their way into missions, surveys showed an interest in innovation and teamwork, and their highest priority was to find a seasoned missionary to connect with relationally and be mentored by. Yet arriving on the field they frequently ran into entrenched and outdated ideas and methods which had persisted less due to any bad motives than simple inertia. A sink-or-swim/hands-off mentality often prevailed over missionary mentoring, leading to widespread discouragement and burn-out.

Millennials only partly deserve their reputations as snowflakes.
As always, there is also some projection in those accusations...

It’s Not Too Late: Bringing Millennials into the Fold

Millennials are already changing global missions by their relational and technological focus (and willingness to totally reject defunct narratives and systems) but churches and sending agencies need to find more ways to channel their passion and desire to make a difference. Mentoring, mentioned above, is an urgent and crucial need. Millennials deeply desire to be mentored and led into ministry by people they respect, and then work hard to make a difference there; whether in the workplace or full-time ministry, they have consistently refused to be treated merely as the next batch of workers with an obligation to show up and maintain status quo. Mature believers who have been working actively for the kingdom of God should reach out to Millennial singles and couples and guide them into obedient service, not wait for them to appear.

As a generational cohort, Millennials are often criticized for delaying traditional milestones of adulthood, but that also means they are less tied down than previous generations at this point in their lives. This means it’s late but not too late to bring them back into churches and onto the mission field. The fact that they haven’t shown up doesn’t mean they never will, but it will take relationship building and invested leadership, not expectations of immediate changes in habits or ideological leanings as a sign of spiritual development. As Millennials have children and settle down, they won’t lose their desire to make a difference in the world, and families serving together can be uniquely effective on the mission field too. (Especially in the supportive and relational ministry environment in which Millennials seek to serve).

Coming and Already Here: The Challenge of Gen Z

With all the media focus up till now on Millennials, it’s important to recognize Gen Z are not a hypothetical future challenge, but an opportunity facing us today—they are already graduating college and beginning to enter the workforce. Having initially dropped the ball with Millennials, how can the Church and sending agencies avoid doing the same for another generation?

Fortunately, some lessons learned with Millennials will benefit Gen Z as well:

• The connectivity of the digital age is now increasingly an integral part of operations.
• In recent years many sending organizations have scrambled to catch up to the 21st century and are now moving into better and more flexible positions to work with modern missionaries.
• A mentality shift from waiting for qualified workers, to active recruiting and guidance.

All these things will help reach Gen Z, who will present new challenges to missionary recruiters. They tend to lack the deep Millennial passion to see change in the world, and also increasingly lack background understanding of the legacy of the Church and the missionary task. They are focused on working hard to reach personal goals in a fragmenting society. For them it may often be necessary to start from the beginning and explain why missions is important, why we do it, and what spiritual growth and other benefits they will personally experience as a result of obedient service. ("What's in it for me" is a self-centric question, but a very human one that the Bible anticipates and teaches us to grow beyond)

Gen Z missionary candidates will probably be less likely to come in with a Millennial-style crusading ideological stance on issues of gender, privilege, etc. but will be accustomed to that language and have a live-and-let-live approach; again it will be important for someone with a deep understanding of scriptural (and not merely "conservative christian") teaching on these topics to explain via authentic dialogue (not a long monologue) why a doctrinal or faith statement, etc., has certain firm language on these topics, or why it's absent. (Be sure to include informative graphics and not only text in the explanation)

It is probably also best to share real examples of kingdom opportunities and give them a clear picture of what they’ll be doing (The “it’s complicated, just show up with a willing heart and figure it out” mentality makes a lot less sense to digital natives who may prefer to simply video chat with their future coworkers in the field and get some answers directly), and explain what skills would be helpful to acquire before going in. Lastly, Gen Z members seem not to expect as much hand-holding as Millennials, but they need mentoring and discipling just as much whether they ask for it or not--and they shouldn't need to ask to receive it. In a healthy church culture, it should be the default.

We Millennials and Gen Z are the experienced kingdom workers of the future, but still largely the unrealized opportunity of the present. May we submit ourselves to Christ as obedient servants of His gospel, and may the Church rise up and embrace the opportunity to establish a healthy generational relationship of mature believers actively discipling and guiding their younger brothers and sisters in Christ!

The Unseen World - Part 1: The Past Darkness

1. The Reality of the Unseen World

"For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places."

[Ephesians 6:12] 

As a kid, I was always interested in and drawn to things like traditional superstitions of the Old South, stories about my great aunt who lived in a haunted house, even that weird feeling you sometimes get walking alone in the woods, that you've silently entered something else's domain. These always seemed like little doors or invitations into a wider reality, yet one that seemed both confirming of, and not allowed by, my faith. If the Bible is true, and God is real, then for a Westerner it seems like any evidence for the existence of the supernatural is evidence for faith. (A point we'll return to later) Yet at the same time, pursuing knowledge of the more darkly mysterious side of reality seemed to lead quickly in unwise directions, and felt like a kind of secretive lure away from God.

Many years later, after coming to live in Taiwan, I have slowly realized that for the majority of people here, the unseen world was not a mysterious possibility but a part of their daily life. They were surrounded by reminders and habits that displayed this. Spending my youth in the rural American South had prepared me for this perhaps better than most Westerners, but still I had not experienced anything on this level: Daoist trigram mirrors over doors, fear over picking up dropped money that could be a lure for ghost-marriage, incense sticks offered not only at temples but at the front doors of apartment buildings, people burning paper money on street corners in ubiquitous metal cans designed specifically for that purpose, gnarly-rooted sacred trees encircled with red cords, pendants and amulets worn around the necks of both adults and children.

These tables loaded with snacks, incense, and spirit money are an offering
to appease any harmful ancestral spirits which may be in the area 

And this is not some kind of remote tribal area. Taiwan is a technologically advanced island nation with more smartphones than people, with convenience stores where you can pay your bills and buy concert tickets and send packages and pay for it all with a metro card, and where green energy and smart cities are becoming a reality more quickly than for most of the United States.
Life in Taiwan has taught me that the unseen world does not flee just because technology progresses.

Yet most Americans do not consider an unseen world in their day to day life. The excluded middle, the part of reality which touches the spirit world yet remains connect to our own as well, is something many traditional cultures fear and give great importance to, yet remains ignored if not disbelieved in by most Westerners. There are various philosophical reasons for why the West moved away from this, cartesian dualism being one, and others will be discussed below.
But it's a worldview-level difference, which is true for most conservative evangelicals. (Charismatic or Pentacostal churches would be a halfway exception) We leap from our visible surroundings to God on His throne and rarely consider that anything lies in between, and find more or less all parts of the Bible that mention non-scientific phenomenon to be something that has to be taken on faith, as evidence for the unseen world is not exactly a common phenomenon (Not like it is in some parts of the world. When spiritual fear would drive people to Church, the Enemy pretends not to exist. When spiritual fear drives people to ally with darkness, the Enemy is quite active).

For most Westerners, though, with no context of or seemingly much evidence for a supernatural world we inhabit prior to death, our faith becomes focused on a supernatural world which exists after death, but our Christian life in the meantime becomes very intellectualized, a set of propositions to which we give assent and which we defend from attack by means of logic and reasoned debate and the principles of God's revelation to us. Which is good, and necessary, but it leaves out a whole giant piece of reality, which many other cultures are quite concerned about, and which local religions exist to deal with. When we bump into people from those religions, we find that they are not interested in our logical and reasoned debate, since religion for them is a matter of the unseen reality that affects their lives, yet they find Christians have little to say about this.

To be sure, many Americans have inherited, or brought with them from their family's origin countries, certain beliefs or superstitions, perhaps reduced to a rote family tradition, which harken back to an older time. And the older, geographically-established American subcultures, places like rural New England or the Appalachians, have their own local folk culture. Folk culture always knows about the unseen world. It may have confused, exaggerated, or purely fanciful explanations for it, but there is a tacit acknowledgment there that puts them ahead of we moderns who think ourselves clever for disbelieving in evil spirits but talking about "bad vibes."

(Ironically, despite disbelieving in this "middle world," the American church still struggles to avoid a Christian folk religion mentality, for which this article is a decent introduction)

2. The Unseen World vs. Fantasy vs. Folk Tradition, for Christians

A close reading of the Bible shows us that this unseen world is both acknowledged and treated critically as well. We have both acknowledgments that behind idols are spiritual forces of darkness, and sarcasm about how an idol is nothing but the other half of the wood the idol maker cooked his food with. (Interestingly, my purely subjective experience in Taiwan has the same dichotomy--some temples feel dark and disturbing on the spiritual level, others like a scam to fool sincere people)

I am not suggesting that Christians are supposed to accept wholesale the claims of various cultures regarding the unseen reality around us. From selkies frolicking in an Irish cove while keeping an eye on their seal skins to the gates of Chinese hell that are thought to open at the beginning of Ghost Month, there are innumerable beliefs about the unseen world across human culture. We don't need to give specific credence to any of them in particular, but we should recognize that the idea of an unseen reality in this life has been something humans always knew, and that every culture likes to make up stories about it does not mean it's not real any more than sci-fi proves that space travel never really happened.

So why did Christendom seem to move away from all this interest in the unseen world? How did Christians follow along with this idea of a material world yet retain a belief in high heaven and God on His throne? Part of the reason may be that the Bible's take on the unseen world is much darker than much of what we find in popular folk culture, or perhaps we could say it is less balanced.

We don't find any mention in scripture of unseen forces doing what C.S.Lewis once called "minding their own business." There are no little sprites or fairies just doing their own thing. If anything like the vast number of folk culture entities and creatures have ever existed, Genesis is almost entirely silent about them (the Nephilim being a sort of intriguing exception), yet it speaks of angels and demons quite straightforwardly. The part of reality that scripture is concerned with, visible or invisible, is a conflict between God and the enemies of God, and how God's redemptive plan plays out from the beginning to end of human history. Lewis and some of his friends actually seemed to mourn this fact, as expressed in his novel That Hideous Strength by Dr. Dimble at one point, that all of reality was getting caught up into the all-encompassing battle between Good and Evil. The old "elf land" or that part of the unseen world which seemed to be an almost neutral territory, was passing away, or had already done so, and now everything was drawing near to the final cosmic battle of Good and Evil; everything had to take a side, in the end. (Current and prolific author John C. Wright's Moth and Cobweb series deals with this as well--his "twilight world" characters begin to find themselves caught up in a war between light and darkness, and it becomes obvious that there is no middle ground to hesitate on for long)

As a tradition, however, even elves--which Tolkien sort of baptized into the noble Eldar--were thought of in a somewhat darker fashion before Tolkien wrote about High Elves, filled with the light of Valinor, and it became a new archetype. Before then elves and other creatures of the "middle world" had been mostly thought of as capricious beings, prone to stealing from people and playing tricks on them; if not fully bent on evil, yet also the sorts of beings which could not endure the sound of a church bell. There is a whole realm of fantasy, derived from folk traditions, of creatures which could not stay in "Old England" after the Church arrived and became established. Rudyard Kipling portrays this with a sort of nostalgic wistfulness in the story Dymchurch Flit, showing that same desire of Lewis, that what of that old world could not baptized need not be entirely banished. (But while I can feel their wistfulness strongly as expressed in their writings, I suspect it's a very sneaky form of temptation that certain well-educated people are susceptible to, rather like our "pet sins" like narrowly-focused gluttony that are so hard to confess and get rid of because they seem innocuous)

Due to this complicated idea present in English-speaking culture (I think the West in general, but I have not studied the question in other languages) that the "grey area" or twilight world, the Old things, must go away when the light of the gospel has arrived, we can see one way that the Church wasn't putting up much of a fight to retain a biblical concept of the unseen world. The entire folk tradition was relegated to anthropological studies as both the advent of the Church and the industrial revolution made it both unrighteous and increasingly irrelevant. Thus in the West, we stopped thinking about the world in terms of even having this unseen "middle" realm. 

In Taiwan, the same thing is happening in churches to a problematic degree--people either want to turn off that side of reality which represents their old spiritual bondage, or they found it more natural to become Christians because they never put much stock in traditional religion to begin with. That makes it challenging for many Taiwanese believers to share their faith incarnationally with other Taiwanese who still follow the old traditions.

3. The Unseen World in Scripture: Earth as Enemy-Occupied Territory

When we look at scripture's portrayal of the unseen world, which possesses not an ounce of the (possibly wrongful) sense of nostalgia we find in the authors I mentioned above, we learn that we live in a wider, and darker, world than we have typically been willing to recognize. The Bible was written by people who lived in that world and knew it, and it is full of commands to stop serving those unseen powers and worship God alone. Every idol and pagan altar--and even those "high places and spreading trees" I didn't understand about before I lived in Taiwan, with its divine trees and temples or shrines at every picturesque elevated spot--was a portal to that unseen world which affected all areas of life, and still is considered to do so in many parts of the Old World where traditional folk culture survives.

As I mentioned above, the world peopled lived in was all the folk world, once upon a time, usually before the gospel had been there long. Grimm's Fairy Tales, at least in their original conception, harken back to a time when Germans considered the forest to be full of portals to the unseen world--with its dark silent valleys, mysterious rings of mushrooms, ominous standing stones, and hollow halls beneath the fells. For Celtic peoples, the original feasting and rituals at the end of Autumn, which have partially continued and partially re-emerged as Halloween, were originally an open recognition of the dark side of that other world, and a simultaneous attempt to rebuff and appease it. (That doesn't necessarily mean holidays with an original pre-christian influence are harmful, as I wrote about Christmas a while back)

Once, that dark unseen world reigned supreme on earth. G.K.Chesterton has written powerfully in the Everlasting Man about that Old World, which he identifies with Carthage, the Canaanite superpower finally utterly defeated by Rome (Carthago Delenda Est!) 140 years before the coming of Christ. With its dark rituals and infant sacrifices to Moloch lying underneath all the trading and sea voyaging, Chesterton argues, Carthage was the final culmination of a kind of hellish pragmatism which was happy to cooperate with dark powers of the unseen world to any level of depravity, so long as it achieved the desired results. (This article is a decent brief summary of Chesterton's take on what was hanging in the balance with Rome vs Carthage, and draws a tragic parallel between infant sacrifice and the abortion industry)

We can catch a glimpse of that darker world here and there throughout scripture, often in verses we gloss over or find confusing as modern Americans. One chilling example is 2 Kings 3:27, when Israel's armies have defeated and cornered a pagan king, who in desperation performs a ritualistic sacrifice of his own firstborn son, and summons wrath against Israel, who retreat and head back home.

When the king of Moab saw that the battle was too fierce for him, he took with him 700 men who drew swords, to break through to the king of Edom; but they could not. Then he took his oldest son who was to reign in his place, and offered him as a burnt offering on the wall. And there came great wrath against Israel, and they departed from him and returned to their own land. [2 Kings 3:26-27]

Some well-meaning commentators trying to make sense of the account miss the point and say that since it seems impossible that it could be God's great wrath against Israel, it must have been human wrath, either the Moabites being roused to angry desperation, or even that the invading army was disgusted at the display and changed their minds about attacking. Some translations use different wording on the assumption that this is the case. (I am using the NASB above). Yet this word wrath is associated with divine wrath and not human indignation when used elsewhere in scripture. At least one commentator concludes, as seems the most straightforward interpretation to me, that the sacrifice was a "success" and demonic wrath was summoned against the invading army, who departed as a result. I have heard enough testimonies when learning about spiritual warfare at seminary, and much more so from Taiwanese people about temple healings and exorcisms, and other demonically-motivated "helpful" results, to know that the Enemy will "play by the rules" and offer help on their own terms if it keeps people in spiritual bondage.

That is the spiritual darkness that Israel was surrounded by, and repeatedly ensnared by and plunged into, until God would send such severe punishment that they nationally repented and tore down the altars and high places, only to succumb to the lure of darkness once again. To understand the conquest of Canaan and ongoing fighting between Israel and the surrounding nations, one must understand that Canaanites did not merely fear the dark unseen world and try to appease it, but were outright worshiping and allying with it, especially against Israel. Canaan combined advanced cultural achievements, like iron weapons and the precursor to the alphabet we still use today, with dark rites and whatever aid from the unseen world they could muster, whether imaginary or real. (Witness their confusion as they call upon different powers to aid them in their battles, and understand that God was in a sense proclaiming Himself to them as He shattered their armies, as He shattered Egypt and their dark spiritual traditions generations earlier)

That was in the time of Moses, and the generations that followed. Even as Moses led Israel through the desert, they continued to practice rituals to appease the unseen spirit world. The book of Leviticus commands the Israelites to stop making sacrifices to demons of the desert, as they had been prone to do. (Leviticus 17:7)

Going back even earlier, Genesis suggests that the pre-flood world was yet more deeply under the influence of evil, and the unseen world was in fact dominating the world in a rather visible fashion. Evil spirits walked among men and, depending on your interpretation, even took human women to be their wives, and gave birth to men of unearthly power (the Nephilim mentioned above), a crime for which some spirits were imprisoned permanently in "chains of darkness" to await final judgment, referred to in passing in 2 Peter 2.
Noah's flood cleaned the world in more than one sense, then, yet in particular evil locales, enclaves, and time periods of history, wicked people have repeatedly tried to bring back that deeper darkness. Much interesting fiction has been based around the struggle to stop this kind of thing (bad group of people try to make an alliance with evil powers, good guys have to go stop them), and when we feel that somehow it's a true picture of the world even though we ourselves never seem to encounter it, we are subconsciously resonating with a truth about this world, just one that we've never been taught to see with the eyes of a biblical worldview. Yet that is the world we live in; one in which unseen evil power strives against the people of God, against the truth of the gospel, and seeks to keep lost people lost, and draw them more deeply into darkness.

3.5 Note: I am not being dark for dark's sake

I hope the reader will not misunderstand. I am not trying to be lurid or provocative in this post. Living in the spiritually darker environment of Taiwan has helped me to notice that the Bible is pretty straightforward about the darkness of the unseen part of the world we live in. It's easier to miss in some translations which seem to obscure it by choice of wording due to an unconscious cultural bias on the part of some translators or commentators which the writers of scripture did not possess.

It has also made me more sensitive to false and misleading portrayals of evil. When one has experienced the cruel hatefulness of the Enemy, the ruined lives and pain caused by satanic deception and bondage, you realize that whatever somber yet stylish aesthetic the forces of darkness are often portrayed with in Hollywood is a lie. Real evil is fearful and twisted and sickeningly ugly. At best it can temporarily pretend not to be so, but it does not love the beauty or even the intelligence it must use as tools of deception until it has enough control over its victims to drop the pretense.

I live and work in a place where that darkness is less deep than it was generations ago but has still not been effectively lifted, as it once had been in most of the West (as we continue into post-christianity it will eventually return, unless a major revival happens), and that is a burden of doing ministry here. Spiritual darkness is neither an esoteric, "best not to go there" topic to be nervously avoided, nor is it anything to be inquiring too eagerly into. It's just a bitter fact of life for many people in the world, something the freedom of Christ can deliver them from, breaking the sometimes multi-generational chains of fear and misunderstanding that bind them. It's also a reality of ministry, especially in certain parts of the world.

So my goal is not to creep anyone out, much less leave you with a morbid fascination, but to point out that the supernatural world is not something you only experience after you die, you live in it now, even if you close your eyes to it. And remember the Bible nowhere says that the devil is on a throne down in hell, that is not a scriptural teaching. (The lake of fire after judgment is punishment for Satan too.) He was cast down to earth, not to some volcanic inferno realm of Dante, and remains here, and wherever people live in spiritual bondage and serve the unseen world by following its rules, evil is behind it. When you see news articles about about weird and disturbing stuff that powerful people are caught doing, that's all part of it too.

4. But now...

We do not live in the same era as the the old Canaanite alliances with evil. Something has happened. A light has shined in the darkness, and it became our light. Our King has come, and conquered.

When the Son was born into this world as a human, he was coming to be a sacrifice for sin, but in the doing of it He was also literally invading the world, both seen and unseen. Demons were terrified of Jesus for a reason, then, and the legion possessing the Gerasene man begging not to be sent into the abyss make sense in this context. They had not expected this kind of divine invasion, not before the judgment that they knew was eventually coming. Satan seems to have more or less panicked and tried everything he could think of to stop Jesus: temptations, slander, and eventually betrayal and murder, though of course he only succeeded in doing exactly what God had already intended from the beginning. (Check and mate, God wins.) And when Christ died and rose again, He proclaimed victory over death, and over the powers of darkness in the unseen world, and His name now carries the ultimate authority:

9 

Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations... [Matthew 18:18-19a]

Sometimes we skip over or rush through verse 18 to get to the "missions part." But verse 18 is what predicates the Great Commission that follows. We can carry on the mission of disciple making and kingdom growing because Jesus initiated it and it proceeds on his authority. We can take the gospel as a light into dark places, because the darkness still has strength and malice, but its authority has been taken away. Christ has won, and now His kingdom advances. And we are the servants of His kingdom, with His authority.

Let us be not oblivious to the unseen world, nor overly fearful, nor pridefully incautious, but go forth and shine in dark places, that unseen chains shall be broken and those who have dwelt in darkness may see a great light.

(Thanks for reading. We'll continue this discussion of Christ's victory and the unseen world in the Church Age later in Part II)

The Church Abides

The Nonexistent "Good Old Days"

As I have previously written, our convictions on political or other questions may seem like they must be a different category from our faith convictions, but that's not automatically true. Our convictions are naturally intertwined and jumbled together, and if we aren't constantly being intentional about acting on those convictions we know rationally are most important, other convictions will instinctively rise to the top of the heap and become the guiding principles which really determine our behavior, regardless of what we'd claim.

One of my hobbies is geopolitics, and I'm fascinated by how abstract issues like metacultural worldview interplay with practical realities like the geographical distribution of valuable resources. (Without oil dollars, would Islam have continued to secularize after the Ottoman Empire dissolved?)

Given how all these phenomena are interdependent, it's not surprising that one can find parallels to some problems in the way we think about church, in the way we think about politics. In the U.S. I grew up in a conservative environment, and a constant refrain among Conservatives in those days was "getting back" to the good days when America was free, patriotic, prosperous, morally upright, God-honoring, etc. etc. (My own current views on this sort of thing aren't the point of this post, but suffice to say I am neither in lockstep with nor in rebellion against that upbringing. Mostly I think conservatism as a movement is an entirely ineffective way to accomplish the goals of conservatives, like trying to steer a car via the brakes.)

However, while one can point to specific ways in which each of those cultural qualities may have been more true at given times and given places in the past as compared to now (few would dispute that things have gotten pretty chaotic in recent years), at the same time, being intellectually honest requires admitting that there has never been a time when one could describe all of America in glowingly positive terms. There have always been unacceptable problems and rampaging controversies. There weren't any good old days, just different good things in those days vs. the good things we have now. Whether you prefer that good to this good may be an interesting and profitable discussion, but it's not only misguided to simply assume "everything was better before," even the Bible weighs in and says to hush.

Never Getting it Right

The same is true of the Church. The Church has never operated with safety wheels on or guard rails up. In the earliest era of the Church, congregations planted by apostles themselves openly engaged in behavior that would shock the sensibilities of not only any church but any decent person. (They did this partly because they confused what it meant to be counter-cultural, thinking basic human moral rules no longer applied to them now that they had a new identity in Christ.) Tradition states that in 325AD, Old Saint Nick found it necessary to impart the the loving hand of correction upside Arius' lying head at a church council. We laugh and meme about it now, but imagine if we managed to hold a church-wide ecumenical council now and it was interrupted by one pastor striking another in the face. The World would laugh for weeks and concern-bloggers would extrapolate every possible aspect in which this revealed the Church's deep failings.

Observe the technique: Grasp the left hand of heresy and counter with your right.

There is some evidence to suggest the Arias-punching story is entirely apocryphal, but certainly deep controversies have wracked the Church from its earliest days, and in later times when the Church had accrued much political power to itself, wars followed. Like the fallacy of the elusive glory days of free and virtuous America, the Church has been getting serious things wrong for as long as it's been a Church, but to suggest that this delegitimizes the Church demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of human nature. Humanity is fallen and sinful. Anything we remain involved with over the centuries is partly a trainwreck in historically slow motion, we just like to pretend the brief moments of clarity or smoothness are the norm, like a poor athlete who has one great game and convinces himself it reflects his true average skill.

Today, seeing so many problems with the Church, many hasten to express their particular brand of condemnation. Older believers fear the Church won't survive being inherited by these tradition-eschewing millennials. Young believers believe the Church may not escape the non-leadership of their inauthentic and dispassionate elders. Right-leaning believers fear the Church will confuse social justice for the gospel, Left-leaning believers fear the Church has irrevocably tied itself to the Republican party. You could go into any Christian subculture and find people convinced the Church is headed in the wrong direction for exactly those reasons that are celebrated by some other subculture.

Whether well-intentioned or simply virtue-signalling, these concerned commenters all seem to forget that the Church survived the early heresies and persecutions, the Fall of Rome (at the time, truly the end of the world as far as much of the Church was concerned), the Great Schism, the Reformation (another even greater schism), Modernist reinterpretations, prosperity preachers and false prophets, etc. In every age, the Church has been beset by dangers any particular one of which could have destroyed it. Except, of course, that Christ already promised Peter that the Gates of Hell would not overcome the Church. God does not keep the Church from error, but He keeps it.

The Church through the Eyes of Sauron

Obviously, a local church or the Church in an area can be more, or less, healthy. Every believer must seek to maintain the health of their own spiritual life, and we seek it corporately as well, as individual members of one body. If the cells of a body are unhealthy, the body will be unhealthy, and on the other hand a body with healthy cells can harm them en masse by engaging in unhealthy behaviors. There is a micro and macro scale from which we can consider the health of the church.

Recently I noticed an impassioned and occasionally profane article in which the writer suggested that American Christianity has wandered so far that the Church just needs to die and be resurrected. ("I'm excited the North American church is dying.") because they feel it's too far gone to be redeemed, too confused with cultural elements, etc. This, for the article writer, is somehow connected to Supreme Court decisions and how we're not like those awesome Christians of 165AD who buried pagan people too, not only their own, but instead we judge people on social media. Or something. (It's an impassioned but somewhat disjointed and not entirely coherent piece of writing)

This kind of zealous self-flagellation springing from a comparison of the sad modern church we can actually look at vs. certain high points of church history has some basis in simple ignorance or naivety, like someone who compares themselves to someone else's social media profile and forgets there is a real, flawed person behind it. But there's also a kind of perfectionism or OCD that leads people to continually despair and condemn the Church and want to throw the whole thing out and start over, which is both impossible and undesirable. "If your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off" is a command to individuals in their pursuit of holiness, however, not to the Bride of Christ. Schisms are direly unfortunate amputations, not a healthy purging of specific or regional churches who were weighed in the scale (by whom?) and found wanting. We don't want pieces of the Church to die; we want them nursed back to health if necessary.

C.S.Lewis, in his incredibly insightful Screwtape Letters, mentions--via the sarcastic viewpoint of one demonic tempter advising another how to lead his human "patient" astray--how easy it is to be unimpressed by the Church manifested in a particular place and setting:

One of our great allies at present is the Church itself. Do not misunderstand me. I do not mean the Church as we see her spread out through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners. That, I confess, is a spectacle which makes our boldest tempters uneasy. But fortunately it is quite invisible to these humans. All your patient sees is the half-finished, sham Gothic erection on the new building estate. When he goes inside, he sees the local grocer with rather an oily expression on his face bustling up to offer him one shiny little book containing a liturgy which neither of them understands, and one shabby little book containing corrupt texts of a number of religious lyrics, mostly bad, and in very small print. When he gets to his pew and looks round him he sees just that selection of his neighbours whom he has hitherto avoided...

Lewis' description here, from the viewpoint of the Enemy, is accurate in its details (unimpressive aspects of a particular church service), the lie is in the attitude. It's not so much seeing wrongly, as seeing selectively and drawing selective conclusions. It's easy to do this when considering the Church.
At the risk of over-Inkling, an example from Tolkien's Lord of the Rings is apt here as well: there is a point where Denethor, the stoic leader of Gondor, is revealed to have been led astray by Sauron. He has been using a magic seeing-stone to spy on Sauron, who is unable to stop him but can influence what he sees to some extent. Sauron therefore guides Denethor to see Mordor's strongest armies and most impressive defenses, and prevents him from noticing any problems and weak points. This results in Denethor, though continuing to go through the motions of his duty, internally giving in to despair, convinced Sauron is too strong to ever be defeated.

What you see depends on where you look, or are persuaded to look

When, with the desire for a healthy Church, we consider the Church's many problems, the Enemy may not be able to deceive us entirely. But he can influence where our gaze falls, and he can undermine our attitude. 
Looking at an American Church which is taking the gospel all over the world, that feeds the homeless and helps the poor daily, that is constantly bringing the same truth to the world in new and creative ways (that is in fact of identity the Bride of Christ, flawed but redeemed), and concluding that the whole thing should die as soon as possible so "the real Church" can somehow emerge, based on your particular ideas of what that should look like, is to be looking at real problems but doing so with the attitude of the Enemy, who also wants the Church to die and doesn't mind if you think you have godly motives in agreeing with him.

Cultural Christianity is Good if the Church is Healthy

The "North American Church," the Church in general, should not die, and will not die. God will keep a remnant for Himself even in situations much direr than the onslaught of sloth, leaderlessness, personal distraction, and nihilism we face in 2017.

The Church doesn't handle peace and affluence well; the Church is Antifragile, growing mostly through testing and adversity. This has indeed led some people to understand growing hostility to the Church in American culture to be a blessing in some ways. But two important facts must be acknowledged here:

1) Times getting tough for the Church doesn't mean "Cultural Christianity" will die. Cultural Christianity is an unavoidable aspect of Post-Christian cultures, or even subcultures--Taiwan has a problem with Cultural Christianity even in its small and culturally marginal church. Cultural Christianity may eventually more or less die if America really moves very far away from its roots, but for a long time before that it will look like the culture calling something Christianity which is not. That's already been true for a while.

2) The decline of Cultural Christianity does not translate to a healthier Church. A culture that respects God is not a bad thing. Yes it's bad when people think they are Christians because they go to Church, but no church with strong biblical teaching and a healthy discipleship culture is going to have lots of its members thinking they are Christians simply because they show up.
Rather, it's a blessing to a culture to recognize God as the God they accept or reject, and a barrier to the gospel when that recognition is lost. "Do you believe in God" or "Does God Exist" is not a culturally meaningless question in America the way it is in Taiwan. God ought to be glorified, ought to receive respect, and even the lip service of the world is a recognition of His glory, though an unreliable one that does them no good unless they are in relationship with Him. Even the rocks will cry out, and in the presence of the Church, even a sinful worldly culture will testify to the truth by its specific refusal of it. (Like those Atheists who don't realize what they're really saying when they insist they don't believe in "God," meaning the God of the Bible)
The presence of the Water of Life will naturally begin to make the air humid, and then people will feel less thirsty when the air is less dry; it's an inevitable process that can be seen in the history of Great Commission efforts throughout the world.

The decline of Christianity in the culture means many things for the Church, but it does not follow that the Church will suddenly become more devout just because the culture stops recognizing God or knowing the basic terminology of the gospel in a cultural way. It's foolish to have less scriptural understanding in the culture as a hoped-for situation, let alone that the Church will implode somehow. The Church has always struggled, and it's always been bigger than you.

Don't celebrate desertification, overflow with water now.

Babylonian Cuneiform, Virtue Signalling, and Fungal Fake-Wheat

The other night I was preparing for a sermon, and got off on a whole rabbit trail which began with cuneiform and went all sorts of places. (The most fascinating intellectual inquiries always seem to pop up when one is trying to concentrate on preparing a sermon) What began as the discovering of some fascinating scholarship mixed with disappointingly juvenile conclusions about scripture, now continues as a question of how to get rid of the dirty bathwater but keep the baby, intellectually speaking.

1. Not Settling for the Bronze, Owning It

I had heard vague noises about a professor achieving momentary internet attention by deciphering an Akkadian cuneiform tablet only to discover it recounted a Babylonian flood account in which the ark was a massive upright cylinder, but discovered the man himself was actually quite fascinating. It turns out his name is Dr. Irving Finkel, he has a PhD in Assyriology, and a glorious beard to match.

I happened upon Dr. Finkel not via the "real noah's ark" controversy, but after a post one of my seminary professors shared on FB, of a Dr. Jeremiah Peterson doing cuneiform in the original fashion, on a circular, wet clay tablet with a square stylus. It's a beautiful thing. I can't link to his video but here is a screenshot. Apparently he makes these for sale as well, though a quick search didn't reveal any links to an online shop.

This piqued my interest (which is admittedly highly piquable), and headed me off in search of more information, the rabbit trail I mentioned at the beginning. Dr. Finkel turned up early in the process, due to his enviable position as Assistant Keeper for the part of the British Museum which houses 130,000 cuneiform tablets, which he gets to read and keep track of. I don't know who the primary Keeper of the Tablets is, perhaps the position is honorarily kept open for Ashurbanipal himself)

Dr. Finkel should be experienced by everyone, so here he is. Skip to 1 minute in to get past the perfunctory student intro before Dr. Finkel starts speaking.

(Bill Nye and Neil Degrasse Tyson, get on this guy's level)


I especially appreciated his asides on education (Babylonian cuneiform lessons involved a schoolmaster with a cudgel who would smack students on the head if they'd not been diligent, a practice Dr. Finkel believes should be brought back in modern schools "to make people learn something") and on cuneiform tablets as a superior method of information storage (in the far future everything from the digital age and indeed the age of print could conceivably be lost, being printed on perishable paper or stored electromagnetically, but in that distant future all the cuneiform tablets will be more or less exactly as they are today)

2. Avoiding both Scylla and Charybdis

Dr. Finkle is a gentleman and a scholar by all appearances, but in his lectures and writings he does lapse into unbeardsmanlike conduct. Celebrating his own discovery of a new Babylonian flood account (apparently the only one to mention the animals going in "two by two" as in the Biblical account) he ran straight into the same error so many secular scholars of antiquity fall into, that of discovering something with connections to the Biblical account and then immediately assuming he's figured out where the Bible writers got their ideas from and proclaiming it as the new definitive "real story behind the Bible." It happens pretty much every time. Anything people manage to discover from antiquity that agrees with the Bible on particular points is automatically regarded as the original, and the authors of scripture must have been copying it.

This kind of modernist intellectual arrogance is common among the more charismatic scientists and professors (I did not choose the examples of Bill Nye and NdgT at random, though much of their own sciencing is in fact Science cosplay), who being good modernists in a post-modern era have a religion of artifacts and lab coats and the distinguished trappings of old-school academia.

This "science is frickin' awesome" movement has been a loud and enthusiastic voice online against a scriptural worldview for years now, although I believe the Trump election is sort of a convenient social landmark which demonstrates the conclusion of that era and the beginning of a different phase, in which many people have finally realized people they used to view as ideologically neutral are actually all pitching narratives at us, and circle their respective wagons. (not necessarily a better situation, but a different and perhaps less naive one)

In general, educated people know better than either to listen to every single thing scientists say, or to refuse to believe any of it, but there's not much at stake either way. For Christians this process is complicated by the fact that we value science as a method of understanding creation, yet recognize that many doing the science come at the process with atheistic premises which clash with a scriptural worldview and both consciously and unconsciously promote these via their efforts. (The scientific method is a great tool for exploring and understanding our physical universe, and even has built in self-correcting mechanisms, but it's naive to pretend that any process which involves humans is not influenced by their premises coming in.)

So for believers there are two mistakes we can make at this point. The first is to throw out whole fields as "tainted" (something people might call fundamentalism, though everyone is doing it these days) or, convinced that sufficiently well-trained experts can successfully set aside their worldview premises and produce raw truth, try to "balance" our faith with these findings (the source of much liberalism in the church).

1. Virtue Signalling: "You have been Weighed on my Scale of what's Okay and what's Not Okay and found Wanting"

The first mistake arises very naturally from a prior mistake, which is to identify one's duty as a believer as finding reliable sources of information (websites, authors, pastors, etc) and passively absorbing them. Then, when a pastor says something wrong, or an author "goes liberal," or "gets too right-wing," people start viewing them with increased wariness, and will perhaps eventually throw them out, and look for someone who will hold fast to an ever-narrowing and more specific range of convictions espoused in certain ways.

Those who go about things in this way, and they are very numerous, often make statements or symbolic actions which have the primary purpose of communicating to other people where they stand on a particular issue. This is called "virtue signalling," in case you've heard the word thrown about recently. They may loudly condemn, or try to convince everyone to stop listening to, a pastor who takes a position with which they don't agree. But they won't write a book with sound theology, or usually even explain what specific things are invalid about the pastor's views and how they determine that. They just want to make sure they've expressed that they're a good person for publicly praising and condemning the appropriate things.

Of course, there are always lies being promoted, and plenty of pastors and books and sources of ideas which shouldn't be trusted. But in the world of ideas, there are a lot to go around. We don't want to narrow our minds to keep all unsafe ideas out, we want to be more discerning, knowing how to navigate the world of ideas safely and effectively, steered by a deep understanding of scripture. This takes time and effort, confidence and humility. But if our goal is to make ourselves more able to see and understand the underlying claims or premises of whatever information is being shared with us, whether through a book, or a TV show, or a sermon, or a scientific article online, rather than to decided if this is "good" or "bad" and then announce to everyone our acceptance or condemnation of it, we're probably on the right track to Jesus' command to be not only innocent as doves, but also wise as serpents.

2. Progressing from Scripture while trying to Bring it along too.

The second mistake may arise from a desire to avoid the first. Recognizing that the world of ideas is primarily not a bunch of atheistic professors trying to sarcast the faith out of their naive students, but often nice or at least very intelligent people on a quest for knowledge who have never accepted the premise of theism, many Christians want to somehow find a way to reconcile the fact that beloved teachers and/or impressive scholars teach that which cannot be reconciled with scripture, with their own conviction of the truth of scripture.

When these two convictions clash, however, it is very often scripture which is expected to conform. The basic (and nonscriptural) idea of progress or progressivism (using it loosely here), that humankind is moving forward from error to enlightenment, makes it tough to hold to any unchangeable standard, because for progressively-minded people such a standard, no matter how brilliant and true in its day, would necessarily be becoming slowly but inevitably outdated and untenable. Evolution is in many ways not merely a theory of the development of the biological life we see around us, but a whole worldview of itself; the idea that things can and will improve as they change over time, and that we all partake in this process not only biologically but societally, morally, etc.

Progressives with a more favorable view of Christianity's influence on the world may say things like "Christianity got so many things right, but we can do better," while others may view it more negatively, but either way the question is not of truth, but of progress. For them the question would be: Is Christianity getting us where we want to go? If not, we can move on from it.

Interestingly, the majority of American Christians seem to have ingested this worldview of progressivism to varying degrees growing up, usually more and more the younger they are, and it has led to a fascinating array of paradoxes in their own beliefs. I see many people trying to say morality is derived from God, while simultaneously updating their own moral sensibility according to secular trends (of the month), without noticing any contradictions. (An extreme example was one person telling me that if Jesus were to do the things He did in the gospels today, some of it would be sin, though it wasn't at the time because people didn't know any better.) This is of course untenable, both in terms of consistency of faith or even rational thought, but reason speaks calmly while trends shout enthusiastically.

3. One Solution: Look to the Wheat and the Tares

If we seek to avoid both of the preceding mistakes--living in a sort of perpetual Inquisition and virtue signalling our allegiance to the increasingly few sources of information which "can be trusted", or else trying to cram secular academia and moral philosophy into the throne alongside scripture and serve both masters--we must do what Odysseus could not, and find a way to avoid both Scylla and Charybdis. Like him, for most of us pragmatically speaking it may be a matter of veering closer to one or the other, with the goal of making it through as unharmed as possible.

Yet I think the concept of "the wheat and the tares" can be applied here to good effect.

Jesus tells a fascinating parable in Matthew 13:24-30: A man sows his field with good seed, but "an enemy" comes and sows "tares" in the field. Interestingly, this isn't noticed until the heads of grain start appearing. ("when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared also") This lends credence to the theory that the word translated as "tares" in the KJV (Simply "weeds" in the NIV and ESV) is a reference to a kind of plant called Darnel, which very closely resembles wheat until the grains ripen. (At least according to wikipedia, in the Roman Empire sowing Darnel in someone's field was illegal. So Jesus may have been referencing for His parable a destructive practice common enough to be banned, a scenario with which his listeners would have been familiar)  Darnel is susceptible to fungal infection, and the particular kind of fungus which infects darnel is toxic and causes drunken-like nausea, which can be fatal. Sowing darnel in someone's wheat field was literally small-scale biological warfare, and hard to remedy, though in this case the owner of the field has a wise solution.

(Note: Jesus Himself explains what He meant by the parable in the same chapter. I'm not suggesting this is an alternative meaning, this is just an application which I find helpful in my quest for wise discernment vs. either judgmental over-rejection or naive over-acceptance)

Wheat, top, vs Darnel, bottom. Once threshed, the grains are hard to tell apart.
Credit: http://the-biologist-is-in.blogspot.tw/2016/07/more-crop-mimics.html

Applying this parable to the world of ideas, the parallels immediately jump out. Truth is there for us to grasp, by observing the reality of God's creation and by accepting the special revelation of scripture. However, the Enemy has sown lies throughout the fields of human knowledge (and corresponding heretical ideas throughout the Church), lies which seem like truth--until they bear their false fruit, which leads to toxin-induced drunkenness and death.

What can we do to root out these dangerous untruths? The parable has the servants suggest that the false wheat can literally be uprooted--pulled out from among the true wheat. This is the first mistake mentioned above--over-zealousness in trying to keep ourselves from being in contact with any "tainted" sources of information. The master explains the problem with this in his reply--in doing so, you will throw out much real truth in the process. This is not the right stage for sorting them out, it's too early. But one does not simply accept this false wheat along with the true wheat, which would be the second mistake. Instead, having been taken in, now the wheat is sorted. True wheat is taken into the barn, fake wheat is burned to ashes.

This happens before the wheat is threshed. Thousands of tiny darnel and wheat grains look similar, and once mixed together can't be easily sorted out. But the clusters of grain look different on the different plants, as the picture above shows. Once you internalize ideas (I.e. "Once you take them into your barn," but as Spurgeon would say, there's no need to push a good metaphor/illustration to exhaustion), it can be quite difficult to figure out which ideas you got from what source. The process of distinguishing truth from falsehood does need to happen in the context of where you received the information. The facts, context, and situation all matter; there is no "hypothetical wheat." (And the task of discernment is greatly helped by recognizing how to reject false hypotheticals and "setting aside X" arguments where X is relevant.) If you do find that a certain field pretty much always produces false wheat, it makes sense not to spend most of your time searching for true wheat there.

(Though indeed it's not an entirely one-sided process; our Friend seems to delight in sowing real wheat seed in the night among what the Enemy considers a safe field of tares.)

In summary, the wheat and false-wheat are to be harvested together: we take the good and bad ideas together as they come. It can be tough to distinguish them at first, but we can tell them apart since their fruit is not the same. This is the role of discernment. Not to pull up and throw away anything that looks like a weed before any fruit is ripe, nor to internalize all ideas and try to sort them out later, but to know the difference between true and false wheat by the fruit they bear, and take what is true and discard what is false.

Psalm 119:66 - "Teach me good discernment and knowledge, for I believe in Your commandments."