From a sermon by Keith Bassham at the February 2013 BBFI National Meeting in Kennesaw, Georgia
I want to talk about our Fellowship, and I have titled the sermon this evening, the Baptist Bible Fellowship In Thin Air. My text will be taken from Amos 3:1-6, but I’m not quite ready to read it yet.
In early May 1996, 34 climbers began their ascent of Mount Everest. Eight of those climbers died in the attempt – 15 died during that season making it the deadliest year in Everest’s history….
Mountaineers began climbing Everest in 1922, but it took 31 years of effort before two men, Edmund Hillary and the Nepalese Sherpa Tenzing Norgay, actually reached the summit in 1953. Since then, Everest has attracted climbers from around the world, and in these last ten years, the climb has become nearly a tourist attraction.
In 1996, however, there was less accessibility. A typical climber would spend about $65,000 to get to the summit. He or she would be attached to 5-10 others in the same group plus guides and sherpas. Everest itself does not pose any unique technical difficulties in terms of terrain — like all tall mountains, it’s rock, and ice, and snow — except that the last few thousand feet of climb is above 25,000 feet where the wind, the cold, and the lack of air makes it the most difficult climb in the world. Thus, a climber will spend as many as 8 weeks getting acclimated, making several trips up and down the face of the mountain between the various camps higher and higher, until the day assigned to attempt the summit. It’s quite an investment of money and physical resources.
On the day of the actual ascent to the summit, climbers leave the highest camp, Camp 4, at nearly 26,000 feet. You have to allow about 18 hours to get up and back down. That means the first group leaves camp at about midnight, with the rest following in time intervals determined by the expedition guides. Near the top, on the area known as the Hillary Step, you have to follow a rope line laid out by the guides and the first climbers, and as each climber gets to the top he has to watch the time. The rule is if you don’t make it by at least 2:00 pm, turn back, or you will be climbing down in the darkness. As the experienced climbers say, “Darkness is not your friend.”
You also have to remember that at 25,000 feet, you are in what is considered the death zone. In that thinnest of air, your body begins to die very quickly. It’s nearly impossible to even eat since consuming food requires so much oxygen. Sleep is elusive. Your body cannibalizes itself, consuming three pounds of muscle daily as long as you are at that altitude. It will take you about 12 hours to traverse one mile. You breathe 80 to 90 times a minute, and even then you are only getting about one-third the oxygen you have at sea level.
On the 11th of May, 1996, about 30 climbers were trying to make the top, more at one time than at any time since Everest had been conquered in 1953. These days, that would be considered light traffic, but in 1996, it was far different, and there were problems right away with so many climbers. The first climbers found the ropes were not laid out where they were supposed to be. As they waited for the rope situation to be corrected, other climbers began to stack up behind them creating a logjam.
Also, some of the climbers who were supposed to have gone up later had left camp out of turn in a foolish quest to get there first. Finally, radios failed, and the delayed climbers began to run low on oxygen they were carrying. Some still had not reached the summit by 2:00 pm, but instead of turning back, they went on and had to look forward to making their entire descent in the dark. Miscommunication and bad decisions (can you make a good decision at 26,000 feet, I wonder?) created a cascade effect as the problems created more problems, and then a storm surprised the struggling climbers who were trying to make it back down. Stragglers were left behind. By days end, eight people on the mountain had died, and others were in severe danger of crippling frostbite and injuries.
Now, I’m no mountain climber, and I may be wrong, but having read some case studies on this expedition, I’m going to make a couple of safe assumptions about what happened in May 1996. When Edmund Hillary and his Sherpa made the climb to the summit in 1953, they were the first to do it. No one else would ever be first again. The goal for Everest climbers since then, as I see it, is to get to the top and back down safely. It is no longer a race to the top. Whether you are first or last in the line, making it to the top is the goal. My second assumption is that achieving that goal is far more likely when you do it in teams and groups looking out for one another. More healthy members can help stragglers. The experienced can assist those not as experienced. Oxygen can be passed around. Some can go for help. When the team idea broke down, disaster was sure to follow.
Outdoors writer Jon Krakauer was one of the climbers who survived, and he told the story in his book Into Thin Air. Three expeditions had planned to achieve the summit that day. To get everyone to the top and back down again safely, and that is the goal, they would need to work as teams. He and everyone else knew that, but Krakauer says they did not work that way. He in fact wrote, “We were a team in name only … We never really had this feeling we were in it together … we never coalesced as a team.”
Regarding the rules for climbing, such as the turn back at 2:00 pm rule, Krakauer writes, “ln order to succeed you must be exceedingly driven. but if you’re too driven you’re likely to die. Above 26,000 feet, moreover, the line between appropriate zeal and reckless summit fever becomes grievously thin. Thus the slopes of Everest are littered with corpses.”
Some of the climbers decided to do it their way, and ignored the turn back rule. Krakauer says of those who did follow the rule that they in effect had to leave their $70,000 and weeks of agonizing training on the table, “. . . and yet, faced with a tough decision, they were among the few who made the right choice that day.”
And so, there are lessons for those who want to do a case study of the 1996 Everest Expedition. Case studies tell us what went wrong and go on to try to tell us why they went wrong. It’s useful to do this, especially when you are dealing with large institutions like NASA and the shuttle disasters, or with the military say in the case of Blackhawk Down. Given enough time, we may even have enough information to determine what happened in Benghazi, Libya, last September and begin to see case studies about that event. It’s an embarrassing experience for institutions and organizations to do these studies; no one likes to admit mistakes, let alone admit to incompetence or worse, but if we don’t ask ourselves hard questions, we don’t learn.
In this sermon, I want to do a kind of a case study. And I begin that study with a passage from the prophecy of Amos, chapter 3.
1 Hear this word that the Lord hath spoken against you, O children of Israel, against the whole family which I brought up from the land of Egypt, saying,
2 You only have I known of all the families of the earth: therefore I will punish you for all your iniquities.
3 Can two walk together, except they be agreed?
4 Will a lion roar in the forest, when he hath no prey? will a young lion cry out of his den, if he have taken nothing?
5 Can a bird fall in a snare upon the earth, where no gin is for him? shall one take up a snare from the earth, and have taken nothing at all?
6 Shall a trumpet be blown in the city, and the people not be afraid? shall there be evil in a city, and the Lord hath not done it?
Amos’s message is simple enough. God had cared for his people. These were the only people of all the families on the earth that God had chosen to watch and to care for. And he cared enough about them that He could not stand idly by while they took His generous blessings but did not allow those blessings to influence their conduct. Therefore, God says, punishment is inevitable. There is a line of causality, a direct link, the Lord says, between their sin and His judgment.
And so, to make His point, God uses seven rhetorical questions to teach us that certain events are connected. The first is in verse 3. Two people do not walk together unless they have made certain agreements. The rest of the questions follow the pattern: a lion does not roar without attacking his prey, nor will a lion make noises of satisfaction in his den unless he has a meal there, nor can a bird be trapped without the trap being set and baited, nor does a trap spring if there is nothing there to make it snap shut. You get the picture. One event is directly correlated with another event.
The deaths on Everest provide an illustration of the principle. One event is directly related to another event. A lack of teamwork caused death. Failure to heed rules caused destruction. Poor communication caused great tragedies. There were direct links between these events.
However, my message for you and me and our Fellowship is not quite so dire. I just want to visit the first of Amos’s questions: “Can two walk together, except they be agreed,” and talk about the subject of agreement.
First I have to say, this text does not mean what many take it to mean. It does not mean that people have to have complete and perfect agreement when they walk together. A look at the various translations and commentaries will tell you that is not the idea conveyed in the text.
What the question really means is that there is a direct link between the direction two people are walking and their eventual destination. Two people walking together will arrive in roughly the same place. So there are only two essentials they have to agree upon: one is to agree to walk together, and two is to walk to their destination. Everything else is pretty much up for grabs. They can wear different colored clothes, take longer or shorter steps, and even look at different parts of the scenery along the way. They don’t even really have to like one another all that much: they just have to agree to go somewhere together.
Think what that that kind of thinking would have meant to those on Everest May 11, 1996. What if each of the climbers had adopted the mindset, “We are all going to work to get everyone to the top and back down safely. Nothing else matters.”
I wonder what that type of singleness of mind would look like applied to the Baptist Bible Fellowship, to those who remain active, to those who wander in and out, to those who are on the periphery, and to those who have separated themselves from the Fellowship over the past 20 years or so. If we were to do a case study, what would we discover about the Baptist Bible Fellowship in thin air?
Jim Collins, the author of superb management books like Good to Great and Built to Last, wrote another book in 2009, How the Mighty Fall about once great organizations, how some of them failed, and how some of them came back. I was interested mostly in his outline of the five steps on the downward slope. As I read a few of them think about our Fellowship, and our case study.
First step down: Hubris Born of Success. It’s what happens when an organization has a lot of success very quickly. When your churches are in the top 10 or top 100 largest or fastest growing, as ours were in the 1970s. What you are doing is working, and you believe it will keep on working, and we are so smart, and so innovative, and so amazing, nothing will stop us now. I think the Bible has something to say to those who exhibit that kind of pride.
I don’t have time to go through Mr. Collins’s entire downward spiral, but it has to do with organizations leaving what they’re good at and getting involved with things they are not so good at, and with leaders in the wrong places, and personal egoes, and ignoring danger signs. His fourth stage gripped me. He calls Stage 4, Grasping for Salvation. Looking for a savior, some charismatic leader, or a blockbuster idea, or some other type of silver bullet solution. Fear and frantic reaction takes the place of calm clearheadedness. And then comes Stage 5: Irrelevance or Death.
If we were using Mr. Collins’s work as a lens for our study tonight, I think I would have to say we are certainly in Stage 4, Seeking a Savior, and perhaps even on the outskirts of Stage 5, Irrelevance or Death. I’m sorry, it is the truth, and only by facing the truth can we fix what has gone wrong.
Fortunately, Mr. Collins is not merely a doom and gloom kind of a guy. He does not leave us without some guidance on how to get things back on the rails. And again, without giving you full details, I outline one of the things he says an organization must do to find its way back. It is what he called “the Hedgehog Principle.”
The Hedgehog Principle consists of finding the one thing you can do very well, something you were meant to do, and place all your resources in that one thing. On Everest in May, 1996, the Hedgehog Principle would have been, get everyone up to the summit and back down safely. It’s the one thing that matters.
For organizations like ours, whether we deal with a product or a process, the Hedgehog Principle teaches us that to move back from the brink of failure we have to find the one thing we do, and then do it better than anyone else in the world.
For us here tonight, I would put the question like this: What did the Baptist Bible Fellowship bring to the table at its formation, what is the Hedgehog we can revive to help put our Fellowship back to rights.
At this point, if you are engaging with me, you are mentally listing topics that need revival, and perhaps even getting out ahead of me. No doubt you’re thinking along the lines of evangelism, doctrine, church planting, things that we have traditionally thought we were good at. And these things are important, and they were present in strength at our founding and the first two decades. But there’s another Hedgehog, and one perhaps even more important, especially when you are trying to operate in thin air. And that is the very notion of fellowship itself. Agreeing to walk together toward a common destination, as Amos says. Having a sense of team.
Think with me. When the 100 or so founders of this fellowship made their decision to walk in Fort Worth in 1950, they did not walk away separately in their different directions. They wanted to walk together. They wanted to send missionaries — together. They wanted start churches — together. They wanted to train young men and women to work in churches — together. They agreed to walk together, and perhaps that was their greatest achievement in the light of what they had been through. Some of those same men went on to build and pastor megachurches, in a day before we knew the term. But they did it with a sense of teamwork and brotherhood and fellowship. The Mission Office, the colleges, the Tribune — they are all a tribute to that sense that if we are going to ascend high summits and operate in thin air, we will not have to do it alone. We will do it together.
To diagnose all the problems of our Fellowship would take more than just an evening sermon, and to find working solutions to them will take more years than some of us have. But there are at least some problems we can address, especially if the solutions are within our abilities. Take the problem identified by Amos: Can two walk together except they be agreed? Yes, because they can agree to walk together. That’s a simple solution.
Perhaps now would be a good time to establish more fully what I mean from a New Testament perspective. I’ve not used the term, unity, but that is essentially what we are talking about. The Apostle places great store in the concept of unity, and in this he was following the example of Jesus and some of his language in the Gethsemane prayer:
Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also which shall believe on me through their word;
That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou hast sent me.
And the glory which thou gavest me I have given them; that they may be one, even as we are one:
I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one; and that the world may know that thou hast sent me, and hast loved them, as thou hast loved me. (John 17: 20-23)
In this passage, Jesus Christ says that unity among his believers would lead to the conclusion (in the world’s eyes) that the Father has sent the Son. I believe Paul is reflecting that idea in his epistles when he speaks of unity. If you think on it, there is at least one thing we see in the New Testament that can get Paul riled more than just about anything. We see it in the Galatian epistle when Paul says he got in Peter’s face over Jews and Gentiles sitting at the same table. For Paul, Peter’s reluctance to sit with Gentile Christians in the presence of Jewish Christians visiting from Jerusalem was not merely rude — it was anti-Christian.
The Ephesian letter spells out why. In the second chapter, Paul tells the Ephesian believers that before their conversion, “ye were without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope, and without God in the world” (2:12). He goes on to describe how the cross of Jesus Christ changed all that, how those who were far off had been brought close, how the strangers and foreigners had become members of God’s family, how God took two separate races of people and made them one, and this had been accomplished by the death and resurrection of Jesus.
Therefore, by Paul’s standard, Peter’s treatment of the Gentiles was a denial of the Gospel — Jesus had not come, and nothing has changed, and we are yet in our sins. And when Christians do not demonstrate the unity that Paul describes, they are making a theological statement.
But you say, you don’t understand. These young guys are different, and they’re doing it wrong. Or you say, these old guys are irrelevant, and they’re doing it wrong. And I say, look, if you want to argue about stuff, fine. Argue. Do all the fussing you want, but do it at sea level where the oxygen is plenty and you can work up a good fuss. But remember, you don’t climb summits at sea level.
The summit is up where the air is thin, and in thin air, most of those arguments are not all that significant. In thin air, high up on the mountain, it’s dangerous, and people’s lives are at stake, and like it or not, way up on the side of the mountain we need one another. There are not enough of us left to keep splitting up in our own climbing parties and expect to get everyone up and down safely.
Let’s start right now, tonight, to solve some of our problems. I’ve already alluded to the generational rift. It’s not that hard to work through. As I indicated in last month’s Tribune, if our young men and young women can fully appreciate and embrace the essential principles of our Founders, become sound in doctrine and practice, and understand the importance of being a Fellowship gathered around a great purpose; and if our older men and older women can fully appreciate and embrace the essential principles of our Founders, become visionary and courageous, and understand the importance of being a Fellowship gathered around a great purpose, then we can span the rift. That is, if we can take the vitality, energy, and vision associated with the young; and wed that to the wisdom, experience, and stability associated with the elders, then we will have the makings of a formidable team.
Other issues remain to be solved, but this meeting can provide us a base from which we can ascend high summits in thin air.