The Pearl Harbor mistake, and a lesson for Mission

I don't usually post on this sort of thing, but the Pearl Harbor attack 75 years ago today offers an excellent analogy for a danger that lurks in our most sincere mission efforts. As we honor those today who lost their lives while in service to their country, let us also reflect on the important lesson the Pearl Harbor attack contains for those of us involved in gospel ministry.

1. Background: The Attack

On the morning of Dec 7, 1941, "a date which will live in infamy," over 350 Japanese planes suddenly attacked the Pearl Harbor naval base in Hawaii. The surprise raid led to devastating losses for the US Pacific Fleet. The U.S. temporarily lost all 8 battleships in the Pacific Fleet, and nearly 200 airplanes, in exchange for fewer than 30 Japanese aircraft downed in the attack.

It was a violently successful raid, which by its very success led to strategic danger and eventual defeat for Japan. For most missionaries, if we achieved a "dramatically successful" ministry, we would write to our supporters in excitement. But how much thought would we put into how whether that success translates into long-term strength for the gospel and local church in a given area?

Whether through over-eagerness, by the desire to "see something happening," the decision to capitalize on a current situation, or simply wanting to bring all the resources we have to bear on a given gospel challenge, it's easy to only think of the tactical aspects, the details in how to successfully do a given ministry or activity, and not think past it to the strategic level, the longer-term or wider implications of what we're doing.

2. Tactics vs. Strategy

The Pearl harbor attacks were an excellent example of how great tactics can be poor strategy. In the short term, the surprise attack was a crushing success which severely crippled the US in the Pacific. In the long term, however, it was the event which brought the US into World War II, and led to the defeat of Japan and the other Axis powers.

Admiral Yamamoto, architect of the raid, had strongly opposed the war effort, stating:

“Anyone who has seen the auto factories in Detroit and the oil fields in Texas, knows that Japan lacks the national power for a naval race with America.”

As Yamamoto himself admitted, planning the attack was an act of desperation against a powerful nation with a greater industrial base, which he believed would eventually overwhelm Japan. The attack on Pearl Harbor was a tactical strike made in hopes to somehow achieve a strategic victory, to demoralize the U.S. or "end the war before it starts." On that front it utterly failed, however. While America's fighting capabilities in the Pacific were temporarily halted, the vast U.S. industrial capability was now focused into the war effort. As new Allied forces poured into the Pacific, Japan was not able to hold on to all the new territory it had conquered, and was forced back, to eventually surrender after nuclear strikes on the home islands.

It's impossible to know in hindsight, but it is widely suggested that Japan's chances of holding on to much of its captured territory would have been significantly greater if it had done everything possible to prevent or delay war with the U.S., rather than fiercely striking out at U.S. naval forces at their own base, an action sure to infuriate America and maximize popular support for entering the war.

From a strategic perspective, the longer Japan had controlled its conquered territories, the more resources it could have obtained from them, and the more industrial capability it could have developed across its nascent empire. If a direct confrontation with the U.S. eventually occurred, the Japanese could have fought back from a position of much greater strength with a widely distributed and deeper industrial base to support the effort.

3. The Lesson for Great Commission Efforts:

One Ministry's Strategic Failure in Taiwan

A book I once read by a former Taiwan missionary (whose name sadly escapes me, the book is back in the States), recounted a disappointing instance in the efforts to evangelize Taiwan. A large gospel operation was planned, and dozens of local young people were trained in sharing the gospel and sent out into Taiwan's countryside, reaching thousands of people. Hundreds indicated they were interested in following Christ, and it seemed the outreach had been a great success.

Some time later, however, when missionaries returned to those areas to see how things were going, they were only able to find a single person still following Christ. Everyone else, lacking any spiritual support and surrounded by the idolatry that had been all they ever knew, were absorbed back into Chinese folk religious practices. Like the seed in Jesus' parable, the gospel had been snatched away by the Enemy, or else quickly choked out by the weeds of idolatry which flourish so thickly in the Taiwanese countryside.

"Perhaps we should have planned less and prayed more." the missionary sadly concluded, contending that the spiritual darkness of Taiwan was not to be lifted by well-planned efforts alone, but by spiritual battles which had yet to be won at that time. (My own observations here suggest spiritual battles for the soul of Taiwan are still waiting to be fought by Christians and missionaries willing to rise up and fight)

The apparent failure of that effort, and many smaller ones like it, are one reason Taiwan has trouble retaining missionaries. It is a gospel field full of thorny weeds, thin and rocky soil, and watchful birds. I rejoice at the frequent news of the harvest being reaped a few hundred miles to my West, in cities across China. May we see similar things happen on this side of the Strait in days to come. But for now, one labors for years to build relational context, establish trust, understand the complicated variations which run through the subcultures of Taiwanese metaculture, etc. 

Things that work in other places often fail here; there is a spiritual bondage yet to be broken, but also Taiwan is just a complicated place. You have to love it, and possibly be a little crazy, to come dive headlong into the Chinese language and figure out how to share the gospel in an effective way when the majority of people consider ritual more important than truth, tradition more important than logic, and success in prosperity possibly more important than any of the above. Many incoming missionaries begin with enthusiasm, but after struggling to really connect with people spiritually, eventually move on to areas where people are more open to the gospel.

"Why Spend so much Time? Just Preach the Word"

"So then, why spend so much time trying to perfectly understand where people are?" you might ask (and others have asked, in my hearing). "Let's not waste time with all this, we're here to preach the Word, let's just preach it." 

It's true that hesitation or lack of initiative can hinder the work of the gospel, but the ability to "just preach it" in a way that is effective usually comes after the efforts of many other workers and ministers, and it also depends on the people to whom you're preaching having had their hearts readied to receive the truth, and understand the basic concepts you are communicating.

As Acts 14 recounts, Even Paul and Barnabas, going a bit off the beaten track when escaping from Iconium, did not start an instant gospel movement in Lystra with their preaching and even a miracle of healing, but were instead believed by the provincials to be Zeus and Hermes, and sacrifices were almost made in their honor. "Just preaching the word" didn't work for them; there must be spiritual willingness and some measure of basic understanding, both things which the Spirit can provide suddenly in a gospel movement, but often chooses to accomplish through years of labor by kingdom-minded believers in a given area.

Tactics vs. Strategy... Ministries vs. the Local Church

I only have a few years of experience in Taiwan thus far, and I'm sure there was an era in which higher-level strategic efforts were made by mission boards and organizations separately and together to see fruit for the gospel in Taiwan. 

Now, at least, I don't see a lot of thinking at the strategic level; most missionaries are focused on their individual ministries, which as I well know are absorbing enough to occupy all of your time and energy and then some, especially if new missionaries are not coming or staying. At that ground-level, tactics seem to be at the forefront by default, because it's hard to think of anything else.

For missionaries wanting to really have an impact for the gospel, however, strategy can't be ignored to focus purely on tactics; we can't just focus on the impact of our individual ministries without considering the wider effect on the local Church. Just like Japan lost partially by too quickly goading America into the War, whereas waiting would have let them strengthen their industrial base and presence in their new territory, when we seek to capitalize on our own mission opportunities in the short term but do not strengthen the local church by them in the long-term, we have not achieved a strategic success, and may even have made mistakes which will weaken the local church in the long term.

Perhaps you do work directly with the local church, so it seems like this shouldn't be a problem. But are your activities equipping that church to reach its locale and cooperate with other churches for the kingdom over the long term? We should always be investing our efforts in that direction when possible.

Good questions to ask ourselves might look like the following:

"For this new ministry we want to do, are local workers going to interested in continuing it after we leave?" 

"If we come in and make lots of things happen with our resources and motivated foreign missionaries, will this be reproducible for local believers? 

"What will this church we're planting be doing in 10 years? Have we built in a foundation of discipleship and mission from the beginning?"

"If we push to evangelize and disciple based on what we're used to, before we understand the local culture, will future gospel efforts be stunted here by having taught locals to do mission in an American way that's unnatural for them and the culture?" 

"How can we develop partnerships with existing churches to have a greater impact and also give them experience in this kind of ministry?" 

"Is pouring all our efforts into this one church helping the local Church overall?"

Or maybe more localized questions that combine tactics and strategy, like:

"For this meeting, if we do an invitation we might get some people to raise their hands. But by doing at the very beginning will we alienate more people who are just figuring out who we are in this community? Do we know what decision they consider themselves to be making?" 

"If we invite short-termers to get a big boost in the activities we can do, are we able to follow up well on that for long-term benefits to our local effort? Will we create false expectations in the people we're trying to reach with the gospel?"

It's not always possible to consider all that, and having considered it, it may not be possible to always act in a strategically productive way. But asking ourselves questions like this will help keep strategy on the radar, and Lord willing, prevent us from spending years with our heads down in labor, only to look up later and find little long-term progress can be seen after all our work.

There is no Sacred-Secular Divide in your Convictions (Election Series - Part 2)

Hello everyone. While the 2016 U.S. general election is technically not over yet (the electors have yet to cast their votes), we have all already been through the experience of the past year and especially these past few months together. Amidst the celebrating or mourning that is following the surprise (to many) victory of Donald Trump in the election, I can admit that I've closely followed this election with a certain amount of fascination. Today I'll continue my loose series of entries (here is the first) which reflect the many hours of observation and thought that have come out of the unprecedented spectacle of the 2016 elections.

As I have mentioned, I have greatly appreciated one specific thing about the turmoil and stress of these months, as divisive as the season has been, for the reason that it didn't give people a lazy choice (although some, not all, of the third party voters were definitely taking a moral shortcut). People had to actually rouse themselves up and rethink their positions, the dormant, deep-grooved tracks of decades of political thought were broken up and people began skidding around on the rapidly cooling obsidian surface of volcanic upheaval. Some of them fell and hurt themselves, others found their feet after years of lethargy and gained new inspiration.

The Church may never recover in some senses, and I believe it may be a very good thing. Those situations which cannot be sustained must end, and the untenable position the American Church had found itself in-- longing hopelessly that a culture formerly amenable to or at least respectful of scriptural truth could remain so and act like it long after this was no longer the case, and placing that hopeless hope in politicians to "take us back" when most of the country has no desire to do so--is collapsing like a deck of cards in the wake of Trump's election. There is no looking back to half-imagined glory days, Post-Trump. There is only looking ahead to what the Church can do in the future, and that is fertile ground for the Kingdom.

But over the course of the election itself, I watched carefully as friends and acquaintances revealed the ways their political and religious convictions intertwined, often without realizing how they'd gotten them all mixed together. Some were sincere Christians who had, through a process I described in that previous post, learned to look at the world in a secular humanist way, and remained oblivious to the underlying contradictions this produced with some of their other convictions.

But that way political and religious conviction tend to intertwine in one's worldview is something that really came out strongly during this election, and that's what I want to focus on today:

1. Convictions are Convictions

We are taught from an early age to think of our religious convictions as belonging in a separate, sacred category, distinct from secular beliefs we hold important, for example the superiority of capitalism to communism (or vice versa). Over the course of this election, however, I observed numerous people lamenting, or accusing, that this was in fact not the case at all, and people were idolizing politics, putting it in the place of religious conviction.

They were correct, of course, that people were doing this, but misguided in thinking it was only a few people or their opponents that were entangling their convictions in this way. Your convictions all give rise to and are derived from your complex worldview (in a self-sustaining cycle which can evolve over time, either concreting in place or migrating to very different views about the world over time, based on one's experiences and influences), are all held together, and there is no automatic sorting of most to least important going on, though there is a lot of unconscious sorting.

Jumbled all together are your sincere beliefs that Jesus is Lord, that the Green Bay Packers are the best football team, that good people don't dress like that, that smoking is a sin or merely an unhealthy habit, that we ought to love and be loyal to the nation we grew up in (or not), that men ought to treat women in a certain way, that The System is basically fair or basically rigged, and et cetera ad infinitum.

The idea that, as Christians, since we agree on the divine convictions, division with regards to the others is to some extent surface level and not bound up in our identity, sounds very positive and exhortative but doesn't reflect reality. Not because people are just that stubborn and refuse to honor God first, but because of how your convictions don't sort themselves out automatically.

It takes constant effort to raise some convictions to the top, and push others down, especially in the presence of outside influence. You may rationally know that "Jesus is Lord" is infinitely more important than "The Green Bay Packers are the best football team," but on certain big game Sundays you may feel quite conflicted. That doesn't mean you're a terrible person or a lousy Christian, it just means you've relied on the rational importance of a conviction to make it outweigh all the others, when actually the ads you've been seeing, the fond memories of game/buffalo wing nights past, the water cooler conversations, etc, have all slowly promoted that conviction and not others. As the Mark Twain quote at the beginning suggests, you may not really know how that conviction and others became your own, but absorbed them unconsciously from other people or outside influences.

Put simply, however, the way you know which convictions are really on top, is how excited you are about them. Granted, a well-disciplined person can force himself to follow his rational ordering of his convictions, e.g. dragging himself to church when he'd rather be at the football game (but not admitting that to himself, since it feels like a sinful sort of cognitive dissonance). A less well-disciplined person will simply go to the football game and perhaps feel some guilt mixed in with the fun, but probably not so much that he can't ignore or rationalize it to himself.

On the other hand, someone who is truly excited about meeting God together with the saints, that literally would not rather be anywhere else, should he choose for whatever reason to go to the football game instead, will probably not feel guilty about having fun there. He knows the enthusiasm for his convictions matches the order he thinks they ought to be in, and indeed much of the chronic guilt we feel as believers comes from knowing that not to be the case, and some of the cynicism we accumulate is an attempt to justify that it is not, and also perhaps a way to stop short of resenting those for whom it is. On the whole, rather than hate them as living reminders that we lack the conviction we ought to have, we'd prefer to imply they're exceptions we don't need to emulate and live with the cognitive dissonance of knowing deep down it's not true, like smokers who know they should throw the pack away but instead light up one more with slow deliberation, drawn into introspective silence by the paradox of their own actions.

2. Political Convictions

While convictions about sports vs. church attendance are a sort of gentle object lesson for most people to whom they apply, something we can joke about while pondering seriously, the gloves come off when it comes to politics. No one's taxes are going to change as the result of a football match. Bills on abortion and gay marriage do not become law or not based on who wins the World Series. Some lives may indeed hang in the balance based on the results of a big soccer match, but not nearly so many as in a big change to U.S. foreign policy. In a sense, political convictions are the mortal-world version of spiritual convictions; you can't watch where someone goes after they die, but you can watch what happens to the country after an election. The higher the perceived stakes, the more intense the conviction.

Of course many people, not seeing how such things affect their day to day life, do not hold political convictions strongly, or only with regards to certain issues. The stakes do not seem high to them, either through apathy, distance, or even cynicism. On the other hand, those people who perceive the stakes to be very high are often quite willing to jump into verbal wars or personal action with a ferocity which would do credit to any dual-wielding, woad-painted berserker.

And that's important to recognize. It's the duty of every Christian to consciously promote the convictions of our faith until they occupy the highest place, but how high political convictions fall on the scale will vary. It's easy for someone who is very cynical or very apathetic about politics to criticize those who are tempted to make an idol out of them, just as it's easy for me, able to sometimes enjoy a game night but not a follower of sports in general, to criticize those who are tempted to idolize sports.

But since in political struggles the outcome really does touch on geopolitical realities, affecting the lives of people in every part of our world, convictions can be held very closely. With the ravages of communism, the pre-natal death toll of abortion, the observable suffering of communities affected by unfair laws (or the debate on whether they are or not) all a matter of historical record and/or currently ongoing situations, these convictions very easily take on a religious fervor, and become closely intertwined with one's convictions on spiritual matters in a natural way.

3. Politico-Spiritual Worldview - Who Influences You?

It's important to understand that this is indeed a natural and constant process. One's concern for other people may be grounded in a spiritual conviction that they are created in the image of God and ought to be loved, but all it takes is the observation, correct or not (usually both, on some levels), that politics going one way or another will significantly affect the plight of many of those people one is concerned about loving. Immediately, the spiritual and political conviction began to be bound together. One's spiritual conviction about loving others becomes intrinsically linked to one's political convictions about what policies will affect them, and after that it's not very helpful to warn about idolizing politics, because that's not exactly what has happened. It's not idolatry to worry about the outcome of an election that will harm people you care about, except in a few very subtle senses, and accusations on this front rarely get into those subtleties.

Of course, how you end up linking these spiritual and political convictions will depend on who you are allowing to influence your thinking on the matter, just like with any other convictions. If you are a believer who hangs out on Leftist political blogs, you're probably going to link your political convictions to your spiritual ones in a way that has you endorsing Leftist thought and causes with a spiritual fervor, maybe to the point of becoming a social justice warrior. If on the Far Right, you may start thinking in terms of Christendom and wishing we could go back to the good old days of God, King, and Country, even if that meant first kicking out everyone who didn't fit that paradigm.
And your argument may be "factually correct" as far as it goes. Post-modernism is not wrong about everything, and it's true that, from within your worldview and mental framework, with the facts presented to you from sources you consider trustworthy, you may be acting in good faith based on reality as you perceive it.

I studied some linguistic theory while getting my Masters degree, and one important idea we discussed is that when I say "school" and you say "school," we may be talking about fairly different things. Broadly the same of course, so basic communication doesn't fail, but individually quite distinct, leading to hidden misunderstandings, based on our different educational experiences and varying exposure to academic environments. So two people saying respectively "public schools are failing and must be significantly reformed" and "public schools are basically fine, teachers just need more support" may both be speaking correctly from their own experience. There's nothing to argue profitably about (not that that stops anyone!), except to what extent one's individual experience differs from reality in the general sense.

This is one reason why, although I jumped into the fray a few times, over the months of arguing on social media I mostly managed to stay out of things. I recognized that without addressing deeper worldview issues, the foundations that someone's political views were built on, all you're going to do is argue until someone gets tired or people get too angry to keep going. You are trying to convince someone to shift their tower over to your castle without recognizing the true depth of the moat in between.

4. When Convictions Are Challenged

All this is how, sadly, Christians both cultural and genuine have managed to fight and kill each other throughout much of the Church's history, a fact people surprised that the Church could be divided over political candidates seem to miss. There is no careful line isolating "earthly" convictions from "spiritual" ones, with the greatest fervor given to the latter. They are all intertwined, something which happens very naturally and perhaps even inevitably on the political level, and whether in our own time that has happened Rightly or Leftly can not only put people of the same faith convictions on opposing sides of an argument, it can leave them barely able to effectively communicate as their worldviews are shifted further apart.

Seen in the light of this, some of what many found baffling during this election becomes quite clear. How could men like Franklin Graham or Wayne Grudem come out in support of a man like Trump? Because enough convictions were linked together for them, rightly or wrongly, that there was a domino effect: Voting for Hillary led directly or indirectly to an assault on more and more deeply-held convictions than voting for Trump did, and the bigger, more urgent mass of convictions under assault justified risking an adverse effect on some others.

That's how it worked for every #never_____ voter, really, but one special confusion and stressful aspect of this election was that Trump's candidacy did not keep within the familiar boundaries at all. Many Christians on the Right and Left respectively had arrived at similar and comfortable politico-religious convictions, what we'd call "camps" or certain political demographics, and Trump came barging in diagonally and messed it all up. People were forced to rethink and even sever and reattach previously linked religious and political convictions, and the speed and degree to which some did so brought accusations of hypocrisy. ("How come such-and-such an issue was such a big deal for you people in previous elections, but now you don't seem to care at all?")

5. Why the Rise of Ideological Thinking is Dangerous

While it's natural for people to link their convictions in ways where involving one drags in others, ideological thinking greatly exacerbates this tendency. Much more than in someone who merely identifies on the "side" of one major party or the other, an ideology weaves many convictions together in a certain pattern, seemingly more and more of them, so that attacking one more or less means attacking them all. There are no issues to be considered separately, and by the end there are no innocuous comments or actions that are not a statement of some kind. This has been on the rise in America for decades, but especially in recent years. In this situation, a Christian under the influence (knowingly or not) of progressive ideology may respond to a non-religious assertion, for example suggesting a month ago that Trump is the best option in this election, with a degree of moral outrage more like you have attacked the assertion that Jesus is Lord, because in a sense for them you have. The ideology has knotted all those convictions together; the political and spiritual are intertwined, and more and more of the rest has become political as well. Many other people will not respond quite so strongly, but will still feel sad, frustrated, or angry that you've "chosen the wrong side" as a Christian.

So when some Americans blew up in destructive hysteria at a Trump win, as if the world was ending, it is because for them it does seem like that. They have been converged, drawn deeply into a particular ideology, and those convictions they perceived Trump to actively threaten, based on their trusted sources of information, are woven together with all their other most deeply held convictions. For them, a Trump victory comes as an assault not on a few, but on the entire interlinked mass of these convictions. It's an attack on their entire worldview from which little is spared.

Ideology, then, takes all the breathing room out of the culture wars. Whereas before one could agree to disagree on arguments that didn't touch on deeper convictions, now there is less and less that doesn't. C.S.Lewis observed in That Hideous Strength (the final volume in his amazing Space Trilogy) that there is a sense in which heaven and hell are always eating into our world from both sides, leaving less and less room in the middle. People who didn't want to fight on any side, didn't want to fight at all, soon find there is no such thing as not fighting on a side. We are getting to that point in America, which is worrisome: when your opponent is not merely wrong but evil (as anyone who attacks all your deeply held convictions must be), then there is less and less that is not justified in stopping them. Democracy becomes difficult to sustain when what had been a political struggle now increasingly turns into a moral and spiritual one. Whether the conclusion of this election will see things calming down or ramping up remains to be seen. (To be sure, we trust God in the darkest of times, but we also do not hope for them.)

6. What Should Our Response Be?

Jesus brilliantly responded to those who tried to trap Him in a politico-spiritual conundrum, that we should render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and unto God what is God's. Among other things (the invalidation of dominion theology, for example), this to me is a reminder to reject ideological thinking, and to be actively and carefully engaged in the process of testing and promoting my spiritual convictions at the expense of the rest. (and those spiritual convictions should be ordered as well--core dogma, necessary doctrine, helpful but flexible tradition, personal opinion, etc. lest churches split over comparatively minor issues that have become unjustifiably crucial convictions to them) In short, with regards to my convictions, He must become greater, they must become less. That does not mean they disappear (one should never ignore one's convictions), but He must reign undisputed. If I see evidence that this is not yet the case, I must continue to lay those other convictions at His feet.

Convictions are tricky things, however. One claim I commonly saw these past few months was that people one disagreed with politically were not putting Christ first over politics (because then of course they'd agree with -your- political views, which were all obviously Christ-sanctioned).
So I think we need to not primarily stress the idea of carefully severing political or other deeply held convictions from spiritual ones, as this is so difficult for we humans and the worldviews we accumulate from our travels and travails in this world. We can't really do it without stepping away from our own worldview, which is not like taking off glasses but trying to remove one's eyes, even when looking for the truth of scripture. If we think we've succeeded, we've probably just blinded ourselves to our deepest convictions, not isolated them.

Rather, we must continually exalt Christ as King, and always recognize that every biblical teacher has their own worldview, their own thicket of convictions grown up together. We can't simply allow our convictions to automatically mirror those of this or that teacher, no matter how sound and godly. When John Piper says God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him, we may profit much from reflection on that idea. When John Piper says, as I once heard him say, that sky diving is sinful because it's a pointless risk with no gospel purpose, then he is speaking from a conviction that is linked to a spiritual one, but not one with which I am obligated to agree (and I disagree with him in that particular case).

Let us strive to be not conformed to the pattern of this world, whatever ideological pattern, social gospel, or secular morality, that entails, but be transformed by the renewing of our mind. Then by testing (carefully and wisely, not from this or that blog or famous figure) we may discern what is the will of God; good, acceptable, and perfect.

President Trump, and How the Evangelical Church Could Regain Lost Millennials

[This is the first of at least two blogs I'd like to do on the recent election, which was unlike any we've experienced before, and which revealed many interesting things about America and the Church in the process.]

Many have just been finding out the news: The 2016 U.S. Presidential Election ended in a significant electoral win for Trump, while Hillary retained a slight edge in the overall popular vote. My Facebook wall is covered with people in the various stages of grief, mostly Christian millennials.

Why do millennial evangelicals break so sharply with their elders, who voted overwhelmingly for Trump, in not only not refusing to support him but finding it repugnant that any evangelicals could?

I believe there is a very natural answer, and in exploring it we also discover one of the primary reasons churches have had such difficulty attracting or keeping millennials. Let's take a look:

1. How do we "do" our Christian Identity in an Election Year?

As Christians we recognize that our political identity, if we are to have one at all, must be subservient to and interpreted in the light of our Christian identity. We are not voiceless in a democracy as Christians were in the Roman Empire, but are blessed to each have a tiny part and responsibility in self-governance. But without any clear examples in scripture of being a Christian in a post-Christian political climate, there is no roadmap on how to do this. Many people end up with an unsatisfying hybrid that seems open to guilt attacks from both sides.

On the one hand you might hear, "How come you seem to love your version of America more enthusiastically than the Jesus?" and on the other, "If you have the chance to stand against aggressively anti-God forces in our culture, how can you be a Christian and not do that?" My Facebook wall has been full of both sentiments.

2016 has been very eye-opening for me in this regard. I have watched a wide range of people, many with a firm grasp of scripture, promoting opinions and ideas that stem from a secular humanist worldview utterly at odds with that of scripture itself. They do this with the best of intentions and without perceiving anything paradoxical, and indeed often regarding themselves as the prophetic voice of moral authority and justice, crying out in a wilderness of idolatrous patriotism and cold-hearted preference for order rather than chaos.

There are multiple reasons for this unconscious dichotomy, but a primary one begins, I submit, with the unfortunate reality that when it comes to "doing life as a Christian," evangelicalism tends towards the very abstract. A focus on sound doctrine and careful theology attracts abstract thinkers, and without an intentional effort to provide a rich and thorough Christian life, courageous obedience lived out in the flesh and not merely the mind, the whole thing perpetuates itself as a series of propositions. We might have very sound doctrine, but struggle to make that sound compelling to those who prefer to sleep in on Sunday mornings.

2. Leadership: The Vital Missing Element

To avoid the problem above and flesh the Christian life out in a concrete and not merely abstract sense (or really to tackle any difficult task in the world) people need leaders who set examples to follow. So, in a healthy church, younger Christians are led by older Christians, new believers are discipled by spiritually mature and godly men and women, and in this way the Way of Christ is not merely explained but demonstrated to a new generation.

Generally speaking, it can be seen that Millennials especially tend to choose their leaders based on Causes, on shared burdens and passions. When they find leaders setting the pace to address causes dear to them, they follow. Having become followers, how they "do" their faith and how other convictions are ranked will follow the example of those leaders too. Here's an example to show what I mean:

Suffering
It has become widely recognized in recent years that the Church in America lacks any coherent theology of suffering. For generations now, Americans have viewed suffering as inherently wrong and unnatural, vs. a natural and unavoidable part of life in this sin-corrupted world, and indeed something to be bravely embraced on some level by Christians (2 Tim 2:3). Americans on the whole are so suffering-averse, however, that many people consider infanticide by abortion a reasonable decision based on even a high probability that a child's life on earth might involve lots of suffering, or if having the child would result in too much emotional suffering on the part of the mother.
The message is clear: avoiding suffering is considered more important than life itself.

The extreme desire to avoid suffering is a truth of the human condition, of course, not specifically an American problem; a major world religion (Buddhism) is based largely around how to utterly escape it. So one can't expect Americans--who find themselves born into a nation where suffering is remarkably absent, historically speaking--to suddenly rush to embrace it. In 2016 no one can be unaware of just how much suffering there is in the wider world, however, so the question of what to do about it is still urgent and pressing.

Like any generation, Millennials want an enemy to conquer. Born into comparative ease, peace, and plenty, many have noticed all do not equally share in these riches, and have chosen injustice as their adversary. But young Christians in the US who are passionate about alleviating suffering and injustice didn't find much in traditional churches on that topic. Seeking to better educate themselves and get involved in the ministry of alleviation of suffering, they quickly found that the Left 'owns' this topic, though they typically don't think of it as "the Left," only "those voices speaking up about suffering and justice." And especially for younger people, those voices who speak in a way that resonates with their passion on this subject will soon come to have authority for them on other matters as well.

3. Millennial Convictions

So on the political side of things, that's how you suddenly have a generation of young Christians who, for example, largely don't see what the big deal is about socialism. Why should they believe you about the long-term dangers of a particular economic approach, a topic they don't know much about, when you don't speak out for the causes they do care about?
Yet when they find that the people who speak with passion about the things they too are passionate about, also promote socialism, globalism, and other pet topics of the Left, parents and conservatives in general foolishly believe that will then discredit those leaders in their eyes. That is very much not the case, as many people found to their surprise in the 2008 election (where attempting to discredit Obama by explaining his socialist leanings, they were met with a response of "Sounds great, why would free education be a bad thing?").
Passion may initially spring from a child's inherited worldview and education, but the natural teen/tween rebellion against the worldview imposed by parents is augmented and crystallized if they are guided by leaders who raise their voices to support that person's passion in directions away from the traditional values they grew up with.

If the Cause of Christ is Not Exemplified... (Then the World has many Compelling Ones to Choose From)

Some millennials are well-meaning and passionate to a degree that older people have trouble believing. We really want to change the world, in fact we were taught it's our responsibility to do so, to the extent that if we, individually, cannot see that we've significantly impacted the world in some way to make it a better place, we feel like a failure. Like the generation of the American cultural revolution, we're a generation in search of a Cause, but now with the internet there are a plethora of worthy causes clamoring for our time, efforts, and sympathies. When previous generations in the Church failed to present the Cause of Christ in a compelling way--a call to action and not merely assent to carefully worded intellectual propositions that were understood to imply action but somehow tended not to get around to it--then millennials went to find their Causes in other places, and Cause is the native language of the Secular Humanist Left, and now, many Millennials too.

It's truly a tragedy that the Church lost most of a generation who were all geared up to pour themselves into the work of the gospel, because it largely lacked anyone with the maturity, intensity, and willingness to lead them. Outside the Church, this could be blamed on generational tendencies (The materialism of Boomers and cynicism of Gen-Xers were ill-equipped to guide the self-sacrificing passion of millennials), but with an enduring mission from Christ to reach the world, the Church doesn't have that excuse.

Either way, many millennials found that passion and drive to sacrifice oneself to a greater cause in the ideological Left, and that's where most of them have found their worldview home. It's a view that will lead them further and further from the scriptural truth they still cling to simultaneously, and my Facebook wall is a testament to how some will choose scripture and slowly mature out of progressive ideology while keeping its strong points and thereby nourishing the church, while others will slowly take leave of one biblical principle after another to embrace more radical leftism.

For now, they are very much Christians, but they're also very much plugged into Causes under the leadership of both Christian and secular bloggers, thought leaders, and communities, and the local church is always going to fall short of what the combined efforts of online movements can provide. The internet also provides the illusion of impressive perpetual progress, whereas actual people in the concrete world just don't seem to cooperate, a fact I'm all too aware of as I invest tough years of gospel work in a local community.

4. Trump, the Earthquake which Revealed the Fault Line

With a generation of Christians passionate about social justice and understanding that topic from a mix of good biblical admonitions and bad secular humanist ideology, that older evangelical church leaders would support the candidacy of someone like Donald Trump seems less problematic than utterly absurd and repulsive. The reaction is not logical but visceral, an instinctive aversion born simultaneously from Christian-moral disapproval over his legacy of prideful worldliness and from Popular-moral disgust over his white, male, one-percenter entitledness. This hybrid of the latest crowd-sourced morality and unchanging moral standards of scripture is where many millennials are caught, and Trump is the living symbol of everything this hybrid worldview detests and condemns. When they compare Trump to Hitler, that is what they mean: he is not merely wrong, not merely sinful, but he unabashedly commits precisely those biases and sins which are most morally fashionable to hate just now, making him an pariah in their eyes, deplorable and indefensible.

To ally yourself with such a bully-pariah, in their minds, can only result in the destruction of your witness and the grief if not anger of Christ. That Trump is the subject of many grateful testimonies from "the least of these" is totally ignored, along with any other evidence that goes against the narrative about him. Part of this is politics as usual. In an election, all people have voices they listen to, websites they frequent, and narratives that align with their worldview, and are not usually open to persuasion on that front.  (Witness how Wayne Grudem, a good man and respected theologian who wrote a reasonable--if insufficiently articulate and excessively partisan--argument that voting for Trump could be morally acceptable if it were done with certain facts in mind, was absolutely castigated. I rarely saw anyone tackling his arguments, merely the idea that he could align himself with the person their trusted sources told them Trump was disqualified him in their eyes.)

People who seek Causes to which to sacrifice themselves have a weakness in this direction, a tendency toward revolutionary or even fanatical thinking. All for the Cause, We for the Cause, Nothing as important as the Cause. Older evangelicals and traditional churches, weighed in these scales, will be found very wanting.
If discipleship and mentoring relationships been established earlier in the lives of more millennials, there would at least be a deeper level of trust and respect for authority present. The anger toward evangelicalism would be something more like frustration and confusion, which indeed one sees in many millennials as well. A productive conversation between the old, perhaps too cynical or too politically-influenced, and the young, inexperienced in life and dogmatic in the direction of their passion, could have taken place, for the enriching of the Church.

Yet this is not what has happened, instead we see something closer to a schism emerging.

Q: So, What Should Churches Do?

How to get millennials back? I submit the best way is not, at this late hour, trying to belatedly jump onto the bandwagon of Social Justice, as I see churches and christian groups doing now. The American Church is forever missing these big cultural shifts, finding itself several steps behind, resisting, then apologizing profusely and trying to catch up, meanwhile missing the next big shift.

Social Justice as the cause de jour overlaps with commands we already have in scripture, to remember the oppressed, show loving-kindness to the downtrodden, etc. We don't need the Church to join the social justice movement, led by worldly academics and, often, those who profit from the disorder wreaked in the name of justice by well-intentioned but naive young people, but we do need to be the Church to the world, and part of that always involves Christian charity (in the older, broader sense of the word).

In other words, if we do the Christian Life as instructed by Scripture, social justice will result naturally from that. Bringing the Church into a secular movement or being instructed by it will simply give moral authority to those outside the Church. (Much could be written on that particular topic, but this blog is already too long...)

A: Fill the Leadership Vacuum

There is often a statement made in the context of egalitarian vs. complementarian views on marriage, to the effect that someone has to lead in a marriage, and if the man can't or won't, the woman can't be blamed for trying.

Not commenting on that here, I nevertheless think the situation with Millennials, Causes (particularly Social Justice), and the Church is very similar. If the Church is being the Church--which means not merely assent to rightly-constructed theological propositions and proper inductive Bible study methods, but also being the Hands and Feet of Christ--then to whatever extent the social justice movement has biblical elements, they will be happening already. If they don't at all, one can't blame millennials for joining a movement which is providing the secular moral equivalent of that, and simultaneously trying to understand it in light of Biblical truth, which is exactly what we see happening from youth groups to famous seminaries.

But how much better would it be if the Church, like Paul, emphasized discipleship and leadership. I believe trying to bring back disillusioned millennials by appearing to belately embrace their Causes will not produce the results hoped for in any long term or satisfying way. However, if we begin training a generation of leaders, starting with ourselves, to proactively love and disciple students and young believers, then we'll have a generation who will tend not to leave the church.

Speaking from my own experience, growing up attending a number of churches, there was no intentional system of discipleship or Christian leadership training in place at any church I've ever attended. Only two men ever put effort into discipling me, even in an informal sense. (for which I remain grateful to this day)

Changing that massive leadership vacuum would be the biggest step towards preventing the "vanishing millennial" problem from continuing and worsening. As Trump's rise to the presidency has so effectively demonstrated, there is a quiet but widespread thirst for bold leadership in America. Trump won, partly, because he is an effective leader; he is bold, confident, persuasive, not easily daunted, able to cast a vision people want to be a part of, and recruit people to his banner. Many people want to follow such a man.

Few would suggest, however, that he is a model of Christian, servant-hearted leadership. Perhaps one day he will be. Stranger miracles of grace have happened. But that specific kind of Christ-like leadership many Christians were saddened to find lacking in Trump can't be found outside the Church. Christ-likeness can only be had from Christ.

So rather than venturing belatedly into the world of Social Justice or other Causes dear to the hearts of millennials, I submit evangelical churches should begin to train in and practice courageous Christian leadership, and recommit to a culture of discipleship, and see what happens when that leadership is not merely put to use in the business world, as is too often the case, but invested back into the Church. New ministries. Proactive work for the Kingdom. A Cause to be passionate about: the Cause of Christ, not merely as an idea but modeled by leaders who train leaders who know how to reproduce themselves too. Christians of every age, millennials very much included, would come to be a part of that.

And I think we might all be surprised and give glory to God at what would result.

Help First, Cry Later

Imagine a dangerous apartment fire, perpetrated by an arson ring. Some residents have fled but others are still trapped inside, screaming for help, as the flames slowly spread throughout the complex. Several fire trucks rush to the scene, sirens blaring, and a crowd of firefighters approach the inferno, staring grimly into the twisting flames. The situation is dire, but it's still possible to bring the fire under control.

Then, one by one, they gather into a circle and begin to weep.

"I am responsible for this fire,"one whispers, tossing aside her gas mask.
Several firefighters nod and repeat her words, like a mantra.
"It's my fault." "I am just as responsible as the arson." "I am an arson."

"Why must these tragedies happen?" another says, helplessly letting the fire hose fall from his numb hands. "I am consumed with sorrow."

"Again," one mourns. "When did this start happening? When will it end?"

"I am broken," says another. "I feel no anger at the fire, only brokenness."

The emergency response captain nods approvingly. "Stopping fires begins with the recognition that we are just as guilty as the arson, and our attempts to help may be just as destructive as the fire itself, because we too are fascinated by fire. Let us now join our cries with those of the victims, to demonstrate that we are no better off than them, that we don't claim to have the answers either, that we weep with them and feel their pain."

Their voices are then lifted up in perplexed sadness, a cry of confused sorrow, until the screams from inside the apartment are cut off suddenly as a large portion of the building collapses, spreading the flames to the adjoining complex as well.

Seeing the inferno begin to spread, the fire department cries harder, unused high pressure water hoses dampened by their tears.

Later, the arson ring explains to the local news that it would be unjust for them to be held responsible for starting fires, since they were traumatized by fire fighters as children, but the fire department's response falls far short of what they would need for real recovery. "We expect to start a lot more fires before our pain is understood and healing can begin."

The fire department promises to cry more sincerely more next time.

. . .

Real firefighters, unlike those in this story, run into harm's way first; they save lives and do their jobs, and deal with the very real emotional consequences later. As the Church, we are called to weep with those who weep, but a Church emotionally traumatized by tragedy, as if suffering were an unnatural oddity by which to be stunned into inaction and confusion, is not a Church equipped to bless the world. The world is and has always been full of evil, sorrow, and suffering. That's the world the Bible is written to, and the world we're called to love and serve in.

Emotions are part of who we are, but so is logic, and so is action. There is work to be done, plans to be made, victims to assist and workers of evil and chaos to bring to justice. The problems we see on the news every day recently didn't crop up overnight, they're the result of tough long-term problems that require tough long-term solutions, if any exist.

And many solutions don't exist; you can't solve Human Sin with good intentions or even good action, let alone by "raising awareness" on social media. You are stuck in a world with no solution.
That's why the gospel is the good news and not some good news for when your faith in the goodness of humanity falters. (a non-biblical conception if I ever heard one)

But rather than recoiling in stunned helplessness, or navel-gazing and turning the world's problems into fodder for indulging our own guilt complexes, let's roll up our sleeves and engage the world with the Truth that changes minds and the Love that changes hearts. The world can't be saved, but many souls can, and the responsibility of bringing life-saving truth to them is yours and mine. There will be time for tears along the way, but first let's get moving.

Bit by Bit - Language Unlocks (Culture)

(Bit by Bit is a series that seeks to better understand timeless truth through gaming metaphors. The title refers to our progressive sanctification. And, you know, 1's and 0's)

Haven't done one of these in months, but I continue to be impressed with how gaming metaphors apply to unchanging truths and principles of life. Today's entry is related to my overseas work. It's not meant to discourage anyone who feels they can't learn languages well, but to encourage everyone to keep going.

The Struggle to Connect 

Language is one of the biggest barriers to ministry in East Asia. The difficulty of languages like Japanese, with three writing systems mixed together and complicated grammar, and Mandarin, with lots of similar-sounding words distinguished tonally and thousands of characters to memorize, is something most people are aware of.

When I say language is a huge barrier to ministry, I don't mean that one must be impressively fluent to do ministry over here. English teaching is always a way to help and meet people, and one can train many local pastors through a translator and accomplish important long-term kingdom work without spending years trying to get fluent in their language.

The problem, rather, is the relational issue: to connect with the average local person who does not speak your language, you need to speak their language well enough to do so, and while there are exceptions, most ministry that will not evaporate fairly quickly after you leave depends on that kind of connection. Without the language, you're also permanently separated from the culture; you can learn about it, but you'll always be missing a huge part of everything, a black box into which you rely on other people to look inside for you.

Language learning is tough, but that difficulty can be over-hyped too; there are some people who do struggle to learn any new language, but for most people with most languages it's a simple question of learning correctly (the right content studied in the right way) and investing enough time and effort to pound it into your brain until you make new neural pathways for it.

That means to learn a new language is to re-wire your own brain, so it only makes sense it would be a challenge. The attitude I condemn is neither the fear that one cannot do a good job in learning a new language due to its difficulty, nor the natural frustration that comes after much effort put into learning with seemingly little result; it's the attitude that says "language learning is hard, how little can I get by with and still serve?"

For me, as a Christian living overseas hoping to share my faith with as many people as possible in my community, language is a constantly present, relevant, and exhausting challenge. Most of my day-to-day communication here is done in Mandarin, and the more used to speaking it I become, the more obvious it becomes that it's not adequate. That doesn't mean I can't do what I do now with the language level I have now, it means I can see opportunities that lie beyond my reach because my language abilities aren't up to them yet. I want the language keys that open those doors.

There are discouraging days, where I feel like I should just give up and use English, and there are encouraging days where I can turn and see that, although the mountain ahead seems ever higher, I'm looking from a vantage point far above the plains below where I started.

But one of the most motivating things about the process of learning a new language, whether you've just started or over the long term, is that with every new useful phrase or word you learn, you are opening up new conversational or even social possibilities. This exciting process of slowly increasing your ability to function effectively in a new place and culture, at the same time greatly expanding your versatility and flexibility in ministry, is very similar to learning the rules and techniques of a new game.

Let's compare that process to an old classic:

Super Mario World

This is one of my favorite old games of all time. I think the designers hit a perfect balance of great art and level design; fresh and varying content and enemies so the levels don't get boring; memorable music themes, sound effects and cues; and secrets hidden everywhere. And yes, nostalgia may play a part; we did not have a SNES growing up, but I spent many hours playing it at friends' or cousins' houses.

One of my favorite parts of Super Mario World was how many secrets there were to unlock if you knew how. Whether flying above the screen in the Ghost House to unlock a secret level that gives you infinite lives (basically the secret to beating the game), or going to Star Road and finding all the different colored Yoshis, even the secret levels sometimes had their own secrets.

Secrets within secrets...

One of the more fun secrets to unlock in SMW are Switch Palaces. Everyone knows Mario games involve jumping under lots of blocks; Super Mario World introduced the innovation of several different colors of "exclamation point blocks" [ ! ], which must be "switched on" at the hidden switch palaces. (Only the first palace, Yellow, is in plain sight, the others must be found by discovering secrets in various levels) Until you find and activate the correspondingly-colored switch palace, these colored blocks are shown only as dotted outlines, showing where the blocks will be.

Early in the game, you had probably switched on the yellow blocks (further levels became fairly ridiculous if you didn't), but not yet the green, red, or blue ones, and every so often you saw a weird little area where you knew there was something going on, but only had the outlines of the potential colored blocks, so you wouldn't be able to reach the secret there without finding the switch palace of that color first.

Our family tradition was to run, jump, then switch directions exactly as he landed

Correct me if I am wrong, dear readers, but if memory serves, it is possible to finish the game with only the yellow blocks switched on. You don't need to unlock the secrets to finish it, you can make your way through and achieve the main goal of beating Bowser in his castle, which after everything it takes to get there is actually not terribly difficult.

However, that is not "really" beating the game. There is a way, by beating secret levels in the right way, to actually permanently change the in-game graphics from Spring/Summer to Autumn. The enemy designs change, the color palette changes, it's a victory which accomplishes much more than simply defeating the last boss and watching the credits.

Again, if memory serves, one cannot beat the final secret level and cause this change without the presence of the different colored blocks which you need to switch on at the hidden switch palaces. In other words, you can beat the final boss 100 times and the game won't change, but by switching on the missing blocks and unlocking the secret levels, you can affect the game itself.

Unlocking a Culture, Block by Block

Language is like that. Living in a new culture, in a new language environment, you start out with few things you can do. "Survival" language skills give you what is necessary to keep living there in the basic sense; you can get done the very basic things that must get done without finding someone that speaks your first language or someone to translate. You could continue in this way for a very long time, and many people do. 

But you won't even know what you don't know. You'll never have the conversations that could have opened up new doors, never get to know that local who can't speak English at all, but who is very influential in their own context, or can encourage you or be encouraged by you. You can set goals, ministry or otherwise, and reach them, and even "beat the game," by accomplishing everything you set out to do in a given time period.

What you set out to do might not be the best or most effective thing you could be doing, however. Missions is fraught with examples of people doing what they thought was a good idea and actually causing serious problems. But on a less extreme level, how many times have I read about and personally witnessed people who worked very hard, yet somehow found the long-term fruit from a given ministry was surprisingly absent?

That's not to denigrate their effort; God rewards our motive, not the outcome, which we are never totally in control of anyway. (sometimes not at all) But if your goal is to be as effective as you can, without enough language to get deeper into the culture, to understand the lives of the people you are ministering to, you won't know whether you're working in ways that make sense for the culture or not. I have been in the situation more than once of being present for someone ministering in English while listening to the attendees speaking Chinese, and realizing the attendees' assumption of what was happening and that of the person leading were wildly different.

I wonder how many times that has happened to me in the past, when I had no way of knowing.

Like the colored block outlines mentioned above, you might become aware that there are opportunities eluding you, but until you unlock the next level of your language abilities, you simply won't have access to them. That's not to say they're automatically open to you at that point. The secret levels are typically especially difficult or confusing, and have their own secrets. But knowing they exist gives you a whole new set of goals to strive for.

The Final Word

So if you are headed towards, or already work/minister in a multi-lingual context, my advice is this: To avoid burning out, make your default language goal whatever is enough to accomplish the goals you or your organization or ministry or team currently have--following our Super Mario World analogy, unlock those Yellow Blocks, then go ahead and set out to defeat your Bowser.

But set another goal too, which is that along the way you will keep trying to find those Switch Palaces and unlock new blocks to help you get into new areas. Then use the opportunities those new language abilities provide to go places and do things you couldn't before. Maybe the Star Road is where you'll find that breakthrough you've been praying for.

Stranger than Fiction: Strange Faith for a Strange Reality

Black Hole Sun: Life is Weird Sometimes

10 weeks ago, I was flying back to the US for a mission conference. I was exhausted before I left, but found myself unable to sleep more than a few minutes at a time on the 14-hour flight, and tried to pass the time with in-flight movies. The plane was a 787 "Dreamliner," impressively new with a well-designed interior and auto-dimming windows. Those windows turned into a problem when they didn't dim quite enough, and the sun just happened to rise directly outside my window. I was at first confused at the alien, blue sun which rose, until I realized the windows had auto-dimmed and the manual controls were disabled. The best I could do to avoid this piercing cyan orb, dimmer than it would have been but still painful to tired eyes, was to shift in my seat and pull my hat down low. I had already watched a couple of movies and nothing looked interesting, but an old classic-era movie about Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel caught my eye, partly because it starred both Rex Harrison and Charlton Heston. (Title: The Agony and the Ecstasy)

I don't remember if I watched Total Recall before or after that one.
Either way, Ginger Ale is the best choice on flights, always.

Growing up on old movies, I knew both of these men tended to play strong-willed protagonists, and thought perhaps the two of them theatrically butting heads would be entertaining in a way that yet another trope-filled recent Hollywood production would not be. The movie itself was quite unique, beginning with a long introduction about Michelangelo and his art (which brought back memories of Francis Schaeffer's old but legit video series – with his impressively non-ironic goatee and knickerbockers), before moving into the story of how a warrior pope got a capricious sculptor to spend years painting a ceiling on his back, and how the perfectionist artist convinced the tight-fisted pope to keep extending the project until he was finished.

It occurred to me what a weird, existential sort of moment this was—flying in thousands of feet over Alaska, awash in the weird, blue glow of an auto-dimmed sun, watching an old technicolor period film about Michelangelo and Pope Julius II starring the Professor from My Fair Lady and also Moses/the NRA guy, while eating Japanese snack mix.

Life is full of these weird, surreal moments, and they strengthen my faith.

They strengthen it because recognizing those weird moments is a defense against a subtle but strong temptation to doubt, which is that believing the Bible explicitly and worshiping the God it describes in 2016 can sometimes feel a little weird, a little unreal.

The Strangeness of Faith (Mirrors the Strangeness of Life)

Maybe you have never felt this particular temptation, but I often have. "This is the era of instantaneous global communication, of metamaterials, of Facebook, of satire-as-news and social upheaval. Isn't bowing over your Chinese dumplings to thank a 1^st Century Jewish Savior-King a little... weird?"

Let's be honest with ourselves, from the world's perspective, it's quaint at best. It doesn't always feel weird to us, of course: belief in God can feel entirely natural while we can see answers to prayer, the testimony of changed lives, those times we especially feel God's presence, etc. Rationally the evidence for God is there as well, both historically and logically. So it's right and good that our faith should seem as real and instinctive to us as it often does.

It's obvious, however, that there is much about believing the contents of a canon of books closed almost 2000 years ago and making life decisions based on the will of God, the Creator of our universe that we cannot ever directly observe, that will necessarily seem weird in a culture that calls movies that came out 10 years ago "old," and which struggles to explain even the obvious existence of the human soul or mind. To our modern, cynical world, sincere faith is weird.

But—real life is weird. Even if you've chosen to stay inside a zone of life that has become comfortable and familiar, there are those really bizarre moments where you just have to shake your head. For those of us who have left what was comfortable and familiar, those moments occur much more frequently.

So when your faith seems weird, remember that reality is weird too. In some ways, in this modern era where we live immersed in fiction—TV shows, movies, books, etc.--we come to expect reality, contrasted to all that fiction, shouldn't have that weird feeling. But that's a little misguided, because fiction is usually strange in a way that makes sense to people, a consistent weird, if you will, because it's coming from the minds of people. Most fiction is either seeking a balance of fictional but plausible events, or occurs in an alternate world where nothing has to conform to our perception of what normal is.

But reality is both real and yet also stranger than human-devised fiction. Things happen in real life that no one would find plausible in a novel or movie. One of those things is that, once, among a people who for hundreds of years had expected a Messiah from God, a man declared he was that Messiah, and furthermore the Son of God, and that the proof of this was that He would be killed, and then be raised back to life again. He was in fact executed by the colonial government, yet on the third day the tomb was empty and he was seen alive by hundreds of people, and those who knew him and wrote about it suggested that if you didn't believe them, you could ask any of those people. A very falsifiable claim, then, yet instead of being proved false, its proponents willingly went to their deaths for the sake of it, and the faith spread across the entire world. Clearly something happened which cannot be accounted for by the banal theories of skeptics, and for those of us who have experienced God in our lives, there is no reason to doubt the Biblical account, as we have encountered the One of whom it speaks.

Messy Reality vs. Fragile Atheism

So then, for believers in God, a weird world makes sense.
There are rules by which things are supposed to work, to be sure: the laws of physics are the equations that describe God's order. He called it good, and He doesn't randomly violate them. There are commonsense laws about our world as well. (I love the poem by Rudyard Kipling called "The Gods of the Copybook Headings" which cleverly illustrates how the basic principles of humanity, society, and life don't change, even when we manage to convince ourselves we've finally escaped them.)

But believers are free to acknowledge that, at times, weird things happen, which cannot be explained via the laws which explain how things operate by default, and we have an exception, what we call a supernatural event. If God is real, this makes perfect sense: that the One who set up the system and pronounced it good could still occasionally choose to make changes here or there as the situation requires, or in answer to the fervent requests of His people.

Materialists are forced to either explain away every single inexplicable event by natural means, or else shrug (Sometimes Christians forget.. under modernism you were forced to answer, but postmodernism lets you shrug. It's a nihilistic shrug, though). The only other way out is to deny the inexplicable thing happened at all, regardless of whatever evidence exists (as an atheist once said/unconciously admitted to me: Of course that couldn't be true. If it were, there would have to be a God) and at other times they simply come up with some other complicated explanation which they claim is much simpler or less crazy than "invoking a divine being" as the explanation (because they have already rejected that explanation for personal reasons) as if disbelief is the default normal (actually belief in God is by far the historical norm). It is as if color-blind people insisted color did not exist, and claimed any other explanation for people's claims of seeing color was preferable to the crazy, outmoded idea that things had a magical property they couldn't personally observe.

But preferring a very complicated explanation which does not involve God to one that does involve God is merely a sign that one has made up one's mind regardless of the evidence. If you don't want to believe in God, you'll find other explanations more appealing. If you already believe in God, whether weird things turn out to be less-common application of natural laws, or something more, it's equally reasonable in both cases.

In other words, Theists have much the less fragile position. Atheists tend to rebuff all challenges to their position with indignation and/or mockery, because without turning the burden of proof back on the other person, it becomes apparent just how narrow is the ledge to which they cling. (Polite atheists certainly do exist, but they typically will not debate the question either.)

Stranger than Fiction: The Implausibly Real God

In the end, a view of our world that excludes the strange and inexplicable is insufficiently broad to describe the real world. So when you are tempted to find the truths of scripture, the concept of God, or any aspects of our faith to be fundamentally strange (and if you haven't ever thought that, you might have a different problem...), don't feel bad about it, but recognize that it is because they are not plausible fiction, but part of messy reality. If the animals on an alphabet chart were hypothetical, I would consider U's unicorn to be quite plausible, but E's elephant to be a bizarre fantasy (Tusks coming out of its face on both sides of a skinny hose-like trunk and fan-like ears, all stuck on the front of a fat, bulky body? What was this artist smoking?). Yet the elephant is real and the unicorn is mythical. So there is no point in insisting that reality conform to what is theoretically plausible, in fact one of the marks of reality is that it never fits neatly into its own apparent cliches, and goes in directions we couldn't have expected if we were allowed to guess first.

We see this in our own walks of faith: Hypothetical faith is a nice pleasing continuity; real faith has odd corners and rough patches, even bits that seem missing. Fictional God is plausible: Allah—a simple, inexorable Unity, or the million specialized gods of Hinduism, one for everything. The Biblical God is not something we'd have ever imagined: One, but Triune; internally diverse in a way that defies human description, a Divine being who starts on the edge of what we can grasp conceptually and goes far past it. Prophets are more or less plausible—specially chosen people to communicate the ideas of Heaven to mortal men—but a suffering Messiah is so implausible that His own disciples didn't see Him happening under their own noses.

As C.S.Lewis has famously stated, a real God would be something we couldn't guess, versus something humans would come up with themselves. Reality is stranger and more wonderful than fiction, and that makes perfect sense in a Christian worldview (because reality is what the mind of God has come up with, whereas fiction is what the minds of humans come up with), unlike overly simplistic materialist explanations. Christianity is the one faith that can accommodate rigorous logic and inexplicable miracles, that doesn't only make claims to mysterious and inaccessible truth, but actually introduces concepts of reality that you can grasp at but not succeed in comprehending, that are grounded in the concrete and not merely mystical hand-waving, yet range far into the mystical realm in that they exceed our ability to comprehend and have no perfect analogues in the material world.

All this is exactly as it should be, and clashes with our expectations yet "rings true" with reality in exactly the way that real things do. So, rather than retreating to fictional conceptions that are less mentally tiring, that seem to make more sense precisely because they were conceived by humans for human consumption, let's continue to forge ahead into the weirdness of reality, and of our faith, and be comforted that the mutual correspondence between the two is simply more evidence that our faith is indeed real.