by Steve Van Winkle
I am naturally contrarian. Show me something popular or riding the wave of fashion and at best I’m a late adopter; typically, I just mock it mercilessly. I like to think I’m an aficionado of classics.
Pet Rocks, one glove, mullets, alternative-anything and the Macarena have never been associated with my name. I told my daughters not to bother bringing home anyone wearing skinny jeans. Suspicion of anything loved by the crowd is hardwired into me and keeps me from having to hide pictures of myself from my kids.
While nothing has ever been “far out” to me and no jeans washed in acid have ever been found in my closet, my most intense loathing is reserved for fads of the “Christian” variety. The majority of these are something we all smile about after the fact, but, looking back, there have been plenty of them.
I was reminded of one after last Sunday’s service when Cheryl and I were getting ready to leave church and couldn’t find our 15-year-old son, Hayden. After a quick, fruitless search, I asked her, “He came with you, right?”
No. He did not. Cheryl thought I was bringing him and I thought he was already gone; welcome to our own personal “Home Alone” moment.
When we returned to the house, Hayden was waiting for us in the driveway, sporting sweats and a classic teenage bed head while holding a hand over his freshly opened eyes as a shield from the light of early afternoon. He looked like he had just awakened from a multi-decade cryogenic freeze.
He was also unhappy about missing church, and told us he thought we were either trying to teach him a lesson on oversleeping or he was the victim of an elaborate practical joke. When I explained it was nothing more sinister than a failure of communication, he just stared at me like I had dropkicked his puppy across the yard.
Probing Hayden’s thought process is always entertaining, so I asked him how he concluded this was a practical joke. It was elementary; seeing my Bible on the table and Cheryl’s teacher’s bag still in the house, he determined we couldn’t have been in church because we wouldn’t have left those things.
He said this to the pastor who forgot his son at home.
I have many Bibles and Cheryl wasn’t teaching, but the scene he described reminded me of the countless people who, seeing something similar, broke out in a cold sweat or called their pastor in the middle of the night to make sure they hadn’t been “left behind.” When I asked Hayden if he thought the Rapture had happened, he paused in horror and told me it hadn’t come to mind, but, from now on, that’d be the first thing he’d worry about.
I’m decidedly dispensational and believe in the Pre-Millennial return of Christ, but who doesn’t remember the eschatological fads of the late 70s early 80s? Starting with The Late Great Planet Earth through its spawn of Revelation-themed films, prophecy and end-times fanaticism has come and gone with each standard-issue Mid-East “crisis” or best-selling novel on the subject.
Anyone still have a WWJD bracelet? Is there a t-shirt with a smiling vegetable in your drawer? Anyone know a single Christian in America who was able to resist slapping a Jabez plaque on their wall encouraging the reader to “enlarge their territory”? The crass commercialism of Christian fads is shameless, but there is also no shortage of believers willing to fund the enterprise.
The majority of Christian phenoms are harmless and eventually whimper away to their final resting place in the 99.9-percent-off bin of Christian book stores. Yet, there has also been a substantial list of fleeting fads that have cast much larger shadows.
I saw it first in the mid 90s when scores of men made pilgrimages to Boulder, CO. Sitting in a football stadium, they took in men’s-themed talks, made promises, and committed to breaking down barriers of all kinds. After, they came home to their congregations with glazed eyeballs, preaching the gospel of the Seven Promises.
Finally, they declared, revival would come to America through “sacred assemblies” of guys. We were told this movement would turn a generation of men around, heal racial divides, and finally rid Christianity of the scourge of denominationalism that has divided churches for millennia.
It was basically an afterthought by 2000. While it still hobbles along, it just faded away.
But, Promise Keepers became a national sensation and swept through churches across America, often with a vehemence that unsettled pastors and congregations. The “Promises” were everywhere, and despite concerns about doctrinal integrity on some points, the movement frequently overshadowed the work of local congregations.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a PK basher. I say this to point out that no matter what it was, what it was predicted to become, or the good left in its wake, it has gone from filling stadiums and “Million Man Marches” to struggling to fill a large church auditorium. I dare anyone to find a Promise Keeper book on a store’s shelf these days.
It’s not alone, either. The “Weigh Down Workshop,” and all things “Purpose Driven,” or enjoined for “40 Days” fit the profile. They capture interest, are hailed as the missing link to vibrant Christianity, and then are dumped in used bookstore donation bins by the truckload because of market-fatigue or heresy.
Each time another fad rises, someone pens the epitaph for the local church as antiquated and displaced. My bookshelf has plenty of titles warning that the local congregation may have had its day, but today it has become irrelevant and tired by comparison with the ubiquity and vibrancy surrounding the current “next big thing.” One ominous warning was consistent through them all: Time will pass by the local church unless it adapts or changes.
Yet, no one remembers the brainchild behind the Christian diet fad. The Prayer of Jabez was countered by the book The Cult of Jabez and other scathing criticisms. WWJD has been so thoroughly lampooned it can’t be uttered with a straight face. National movements and ministries for men, women, and family have risen and fallen.
But the local church, the visible body of Christ, remains. It remains no matter how popular an occasional Christian movement becomes; it remains no matter how many times George Barna mines statistics pointing to its demise. It remains.
Why? I imagine there is a host of reasons, but I read something a couple years ago that I believe encapsulates the spirit of every possible answer. It was a retweet from Baptist pastor John Piper who said succinctly: “When you’re sick in the hospital, your favorite podcast pastor will not visit you. Love the guy laboring for you in person.”
This is the indomitable spirit that sustains the local church: It is primarily and uniquely personal. What many prognosticators or enthusiastic devotees of fads rarely factor into their predictions of doom is that the local church is buoyed above the parade of pretenders because it is uniquely human.
The local church is architected by its Founder to throw people into a caring, accountable community with the energy of a supercollider. Their under-shepherd is called to be a member of that same community so he can know and be known, so he can tailor the teaching and messages to the people under his care, and so he can be observed and emulated by those he seeks to mature.
It’s so he can be there, as Piper’s retweet reminded me.
Try getting your favorite mega-church pastor to come and organize a vacation Bible school or to make a meal for someone in your church recovering from surgery. When someone is hurt or lonely, a group of people from the national ministry’s marketing headquarters is not going to come and listen or pray. It’s the local, visible church that lovingly supports its people and community with immediacy and consistency.
Ministry is so very human, so very there.
The lowest face-value ticket price to this year’s Super Bowl was $800, and that bought the worst seat in the stadium. A friend in church watched the Final Four this year from a row that required several sherpas and a tank of oxygen to reach. In 1990, I watched Nebraska beat Oklahoma at Memorial Stadium wearing a garbage sack to protect against the driving sleet and icy, gale-force winds. I loved every minute of it.
Why do people pay obscene amounts of money to sit in the seat farthest away from the game in miserable weather when they could watch the exact same event with their friends in a much more comfortable chair, viewing a much better picture, while enjoying stereo sound with the ability to rewind the TV in their living room?
Because, being there is different. Being there is better; being there is human.
Humanity is the unappreciated quality God built into the local church. It’s up close; it’s there. It’s Paul reminding Titus the people in his church are prone to laziness (Titus 1:12) and not to entrust ministry to anyone without observing them for a time (1Timothy 5:22). It’s the sterling testimony of Phoebe as a servant in her congregation being recommended to the church in Rome (Romans 16:1) and the record of Epaphras’s fervent prayers for the Colossians as “one of their own” (Colossians 4:12).
Whether it’s Peter coming to his church family first after his divinely-aided liberation, or the human warmth of the hands laid on Timothy upon his separation to ministry, or Paul customizing his message to the too-religious philosophers after actually being on Mars Hill, the humanity of ministry is woven throughout the New Testament. Biblical ministry cannot be digitized or only empowered annually from scattered venues charging fees.
Rest assured, when the next “Christian” book blaming the local church for emotional tyranny or the next Hollywood feature with a Christian message monopolizes the evangelistic fervor of believers everywhere, the local church will plod on, continuing to do what it has always done: Be there.
It’s not that the occasional fad does no good; they can and do. Sometimes they awaken us to a demographic with unmet needs, or they get a necessary conversation started. Yet, long after the paperback novellas are yellowed and Hollywood producers no longer find profit in niche films, the local church will continue its march through history, just as God designed it to do.
The local church: Sometimes weak, sometimes strong, sometimes flush, and sometimes wrong, but always … there.