How Have We Changed Since 9/11?

In the current issue of Christianity Today, several evangelical leaders contribute to a piece entitled "How I Have Changed Since 9/11." Some of the contributions are rather unspectacular, and some recognize the awkward challenge of answering a question like this. For instance, Douglas Wilson writes, "Of course, a stupefying event like 9/11 should never be reduced to a matter of personal growth or understanding. At the same time, to be unchanged by such an event, or not to notice such changes, is to be ranked in the top tier of those who are not really paying attention." But the highlights of the reflections are found in the statements by Anne Graham Lotz and William Willimon. The entire article can be found here: http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2011/september/howleaderschanged.html?start=1

Here is what Lotz had to say:

"September 11 was an alarm that penetrated my daily responsibilities and my busy ministry schedule, warning me … of what? Ten years ago, I could not have answered that question. All I knew with certainty was that God was trying to get the attention of his people, including me. Like the prophet Isaiah in the year that King Uzziah died, I looked up with the eyes of faith.

What I saw was not just a fresh vision of Jesus Christ. Like Isaiah, I also saw a humiliating vision of my own sin. I spent days on my face before God, confessing my sin and receiving his cleansing. The result was an authentic experience of personal revival. The immediate impact was a renewed vibrancy in my relationship with God, an increased fervency in prayer, clearer insight into God's Word, and a sharpened focus in ministry.

But the alarm did not fade away. Instead, I have heard it reverberating throughout the past 10 years: from Hurricane Katrina to the record-breaking floods, forest fires, tornadoes, droughts, and snow storms; to the collapse of our major financial institutions; to the economic recession; to the inability to win the war in Afghanistan. The alarm keeps resounding because so many people have not heeded, or even heard, the warning. 

And what is the warning? Simply this: It is five minutes to midnight on the clock of human history. Judgment is at the door. Jesus is coming! It's time to wake up and get right with God! Are you listening?"

_______


Willimon's comments are below: 

"On 9/11 I thought, For the most powerful, militarized nation in the world also to think of itself as an innocent victim is deadly. It was a rare prophetic moment for me, considering Presidents Bush and Obama have spent billions asking the military to rectify the crime of a small band of lawless individuals, destroying a couple of nations who had little to do with it, in the costliest, longest series of wars in the history of the United States.

The silence of most Christians and the giddy enthusiasm of a few, as well as the ubiquity of flags and patriotic extravaganzas in allegedly evangelical churches, says to me that American Christians may look back upon our response to 9/11 as our greatest Christological defeat. It was shattering to admit that we had lost the theological means to distinguish between the United States and the kingdom of God. The criminals who perpetrated 9/11 and the flag-waving boosters of our almost exclusively martial response were of one mind: that the nonviolent way of Jesus is stupid. All of us preachers share the shame; when our people felt very vulnerable, they reached for the flag, not the Cross.

September 11 has changed me. I'm going to preach as never before about Christ crucified as the answer to the question of what's wrong with the world. I have also resolved to relentlessly reiterate from the pulpit that the worst day in history was not a Tuesday in New York, but a Friday in Jerusalem when a consortium of clergy and politicians colluded to run the world on our own terms by crucifying God's own Son."

Romans 12:1-2 Living Under the Lordship of Christ (Dr. Danny Akin)

Dr. Danny Akin was the guest speaker for our combined worship service of Immanuel Baptist Church, Greensboro Chinese Christian Church, and Ethiopian Christian Fellowship Church on Sunday, September 4, 2011. Click here to hear his powerful message on Romans 12:1-2 (right-click to download). 

What We Have Here is a Failure to Communicate

Over my vacation, I did a lot of thinking and reading and planning about ministry in both general and specific ways. One thing that kept coming into my mind was how advances (if it be fair to call them all advances) in technology and communication have changed the way that each generation relates to one another. Of course, these advances have occurred simultaneously (sometimes as a cause and other times as an effect) with many other changes in our society. I found myself coming back over and over again to these ideas as a fundamental reason why there is often misunderstanding between church members of different generations. Of course, in many cases, church leaders have simply decided to ride these waves of change, resulting in mono-generational churches, which are either predominantly filled with older people or younger people. I can't help thinking that this is not pleasing to God. If the Kingdom of God is reflected through the local church then a church should be diverse. Most of the time when we think of diversity we are talking about ethnic diversity, and indeed we should talk a lot about that! But I do not think we talk enough about generational diversity. I believe that it is necessary for a healthy church to be home to many generations, each of which is trying to understand one another, to love one another, and to embrace one another in the bond of Christian fellowship. After all, the Gospel that unites us should be stronger than any uniqueness of generation, ethnicity, or socio-economic status.

I got to thinking about how our church has a wonderful blend of adult generations, a blend that is becoming more diverse with each passing day. In our congregation, we have members in their 90s, and college students in their teens and early 20s, and folks from all generations in between. For convenience, I have lumped these folks into four broad categories. First, there are the Builders, those folks who are 70+ years of age. This is the generation of my grandparents, those whom Tom Brokaw called "The Greatest Generation." Then there are the Boomers, folks who are in their 50s and 60s. This is the generation of my parents. Then there is my generation, which has gone by many names over time, but probably most commonly called Generation X. We are today in our mid-to-late 30s through the mid-40s. Then there is the generation coming behind us; we might call them Millennials. For those on the older end of Generation X, these are our children. For those on the younger end, they are our younger siblings, the people we drink coffee with on occasion, and the people we are mentoring in our workplaces. They are in college, or have recently graduated from college or grad school. Today they range in age from, let's say, 18-34.

Now, any time we lump people together in broad categories, there is a risk of over-generalization. For instance, if we say that Millennials are a Twitter generation, we must not think that Boomers and Gen-Xers are not using Twitter. Likewise if we say that Builders are "front porch" folks, we mustn't think that Millennials are not ever face-to-face communicators. We are talking about generalizations, maybe even stereotypes, but ones which have a thick strand of reality running through them. We are talking about comfort zones and preferences.

When it comes to the Builders and their preferred mode of communication, we are talking about a generation largely comfortable with the face-to-face visit. I call this "front porch" communication, but it encompasses more than just casual chats on the front porch. I can recall when my grandparents had something to mail, or something they needed to take care of with the phone or power company, they would get in their car and drive to the place where these things could be handled. They went to the post office. They went to the phone company office or the power company office. Their banking was done inside the branch with the teller. Their travel plans were made at the desk of an agent at the AAA office. And when they want to find out how someone is doing, or catch up with an old friend, they drive to their home and visit with them. They keep their homes clean because they never know when someone may be dropping in on them.

My parents did not do things this way too much. Boomers never knew what life was like without a telephone in their home. So, if their parents were a "front porch" generation, the Boomers are a "telephone" generation. If there was a problem with the power, they didn't drive to the power company; they called them. If there were travel plans to be made, phone calls were placed to the airline, the hotel, the rental car agency. Since this generation moved farther away from home than their parents did (again, because of the "advances" of society), family ties were kept tightly tied by frequent phone calls. Since divorce rates skyrocketed with the Boomers, sometimes the telephone was the means of keeping in touch with their children. While we probably won't find a generation that works harder than Builders worked in their prime, the Boomers were the first generation where two working parents was the norm. Theirs was the first generation in which most of their work day was spent on the telephone. Fast food and local restaurants were the places where the family meal was shared (if a family meal was shared at all). The home was not kept tidy because there was no time to keep it tidy between work and the kids and all. Drop-in visits were not appreciated like they were in their parents generation. The telephone enabled the builders to take care of most communication without face-to-face interaction.

My generation, Gen-X, grew up with telephones, and saw the gradual rise of cellphones, but more importantly, the computer became a staple in homes and offices for my generation. I can remember being told in elementary school that we better learn something about computers because one day they would rule the world. We bought a computer when I was a child, a Texas Instruments job that hooked up to the TV, but I honestly have no idea what it would do. I imagine it was a fancy calculator. When I went to college, we had computers in the dorms and computer labs on campus. Professors didn't want papers typed. They wanted them laser-printed in a certain font. Our lives became consumed with computers. And at some point in our formative years, this thing called the internet came about. With it came email, and my generation found that with a few clicks of the mouse, we could communicate instantly, in real time, with anyone in the world. We had CompuServ addresses and AOL accounts. We stopped buying stamps and going to post offices. Everything we needed to do could be done online and through email. While we use the phone, and cellphones, and make personal visits, email is my generation's comfort zone. It is where we have done our work, our schooling, and our friendships.

A few years ago, I was trying to connect with one of my Millennial friends, and I sent dozens of emails with no response. I gave up. When I was finally persuaded by a friend to join this thing called Facebook, I found that Millennial friend on Facebook and sent them a message. I heard back from them in seconds! When I asked why they didn't respond to my emails, they said, "Oh, I never look at email. Email is too slow!" I still can't wrap my brain around that one, but I have come to learn that the Millennials are not an email generation. They are a texting and social networking generation. Essentially, they communicate by way of their cellphones and laptops, each of which is turned on nearly 24 hours per day. So, they will send texts, facebook messages,  and tweets.

Now, it may seem that I have gone to great lengths to state the obvious, but there is a reason for it. When generational conflict arises in a church family (as it easily does), I believe that what we have here is a failure to communicate. The Builders didn't see the facebook post. The Boomers weren't home when the Builders dropped by. The Gen-Xers let the call go to voicemail. The Millennials stopped checking email a decade ago (or so it seems). And we misunderstand this as a lack of concern. But it isn't. Rather, it is just a crossing of wires, like the speaking of different languages. Call it a contemporary Babel if you will.

So how do we as a church handle this? First, we need understanding. If you are a Builder, and no one has dropped in to see you for a while, don't get angry or upset about that. Be understanding that the other generations in the church have not valued "front porch" time like your generation did, for better or worse. If you are a younger person, a Gen-Xer or Millennial, don't be angry or upset that an older person didn't receive or respond to your text, tweet or email.

The second thing we need is a willingness to learn "a new language." Older folks can pick up the phone and call, and even invite that younger person over for coffee or lunch or dinner, or just to sit and chat. If you have the means to get online with a computer, try out some of the methods that other generations are using. You might actually like it, and it has become affordable and very user friendly over time. You could even invite someone from the younger generations to come help you learn to use it. Younger folks need to pick up the phone from time to time and call older folks or drop in to visit them. And every generation can appreciate the time, effort, and expense involved in a hand-written note sent the old fashioned way. Generational miscommunication comes when we grow frustrated that others are not "speaking our language." What if instead we learned to speak their language?

It is give and take: understanding and willingness. But if we will love one another in Christlike ways, we can have a church that glorifies Him by uniting several generations who have nothing in common but the Gospel into one family where communication takes place in ways that are both comfortable and uncomfortable to our own preferences.

How I Got Stumped, and What I Did About It

In our Wednesday night Bible Study tonight, we were moving through Exodus 9 in our customary way when I was presented with a question. How can the hail kill all the livestock (Ex 9:19) when the plague already did (9:6)? While I was elated that someone in the congregation has been studying the text closely enough to see the problem, I had to confess that I was stumped. I had not even noticed the tension between these two statements. While going through Exodus, I am using the NIV Study Bible rather than my usual NASB, primarily because the footnotes were written by my old professor Walter Kaiser, and I like the idea of having his insights handy in case a question arises in our informal study. So, as I usually do, I referred to the notes and found the explanation that only those who were in the field, as opposed to those in shelters, were afflicted by the plague in 9:6. Seems plausible, but did the text make this point clear? I wasn't sure. We brainstormed about a couple of other possibilities (they stole the Israelites livestock, they went out and traded for more livestock, etc.), but acknowledged that none of these were conclusive from the text. Ultimately we moved on from the question, me admitting that I was stumped, but also reminding us that as long as at least one possible explanation could be found for the difficulty, we need not assume that there was a contradiction present. 


Well, after the service ended, I came back into the office and started looking into the question about the livestock. I really don't like to get stumped! So, I turned to the commentaries and the Bible handbooks, the Study Bibles, and the apologetic works. I didn't find the question addressed at all in most of the works, and in the one where it was addressed, the answer seemed weak and indecisive. So, I pushed all those books off the desk and started reading the text. Again. Slowly. From the beginning of Chapter 9. 

Then and there I had a "Eureka!" moment. The answer to our question had been right there in the text all along, and I just hadn't paid close enough attention to catch it. In 9:2, the Lord says, "If you refuse to let them go and continue to hold them back, the hand of the Lord will bring a terrible plague on your livestock IN THE FIELD." So, even though verse 6 does not make a distinction between those in the field and those not in the field (i.e., those in the shelter), that distinction was already made in verse 2. While I had dismissed the NIV Study Bible note as unconvincing, it was in fact spot-on. I had simply not slowed down in my reading of the text enough to notice it. 

Here's the lesson learned. Often times when we think we have stumbled upon a biblical difficulty, a conundrum, a contradiction, or some other perplexing issue, the answer may well be lurking there in the text if we will simply slow down, pay attention, and observe the details that are there. I know that. I've practiced that. I have taught that. But all of us are prone to forget it, to take shortcuts, to make assumptions, and to commit other errors of bad Bible study. So, every now and then it is good to be reminded that this God-inspired text is true and trustworthy, and most of all worthy of our very careful and attentive study. 

Fish University

In the course of my ministry I have seldom walked away from a free book. Sometimes they come in single volumes, and other times in stacks and boxes. Often it is years later that the value of a book that I acquired freely is discovered. Such is the case over the last few weeks as I have been reading through a volume I picked up in a stack of discards at Fruitland Baptist Bible Institute some 15 years ago or so. The book in hand is An Old Testament Gospel, by Charles A. Blanchard. My copy dates to 1918, published by the Bible Institute Colportage Association, which I believe is now Moody Press. Blanchard was at some time the president of Wheaton College. When this volume was published, he described himself as a member of College Church of Wheaton, saying he had been a member there for 55 years. I admire the fact that he lists this first, before any other achievement. He goes on to describe himself as a member of the faculty of Wheaton College for some 45 years, Director of the National Christian Association, President of the Chicago Hebrew Mission, Director of the Chicago Tract Society, honorary Vice-President of the Christian and Missionary Alliance, and Counselor of the Africa Inland Mission. The book, he says in the introduction, was written from a series of talks on the book of Jonah, "so that when I can no longer speak, this truth may yet be uttered." In the spirit of Blanchard's desire for what he has written, I want to share at length from his seventh chapter, entitled "Fish University; Or, Graduate Courses in Divinity." Everything below is excerpted from this portion of the book, so quotation marks are omitted. I will use elipses (...) where necessary.
____
...
Jonah had probably been a student in one of the schools of the prophets which Elisha conducted. This is not certain, but it is not at all impossible. ... (B)ut to preach in a great city of three-quarters of a million of inhabitants, in a manner to produce results and secure convictions and conversions, was no light task and since God had called him to this work He proposed to fit him for it. He even used the efforts which he made to get away from the work to prepare him to do it. ... The very effort that Jonah made to get away from his work led him to the place where God intended to complete his education.

He had prepared a great fish. The fish was near at hand when Jonah was plunged into the sea. The fish swallowed him and for three days and nights he remained in him, alive and apparently conscious. At the end of these days, having learned his lesson and become ready for his work, God had him vomited forth on the side of the sea, and started him toward Nineveh, the place where he was to do his work, for which work he was now prepared.

In our days there is a great insistence on the education of the ministry and there is no question but that the minister has a task to perform which calls for the best training which men can receive. The difficulty with much of our modern ministerial education, however, is that it is not the sort of education which God employs when He is calling men to large service.

If one of us had stood by and watched this series of events, we would have said, when Jonah went into the mouth of the fish, "That is the end of Jonah." The fact is, it was not the end of Jonah, but the beginning of his largest service and, furthermore, it is probably the fact that without that particular course of training, he could never have continued the great task which he performed at all.

If the young men who are in our theological seminaries could be trained somehow to believe in a God who can raise the dead and who calls the things which are not as though they were, they would be far better fitted than now for the impossible tasks which they have to perform. These men must go into little towns and big towns and country churches. They must meet the hard, cold unbelief which has ruined the world. They must not be discouraged when there is everything to discourage them. They must not be defeated when they have beaten again and again. They must learn never to be defeated but always to triumph in Christ Jesus.
...
Of course, after Jonah had lived three days and three nights in the belly of the fish and then had been returned to the walks of living men, he had no doubt whatever about the power of God to do miracles. ... He was in all probability so humble that he had really a desire to do for Nineveh what God wanted him to do and that he believed it was possible to do.

This was the object of his graduate course in divinity and this should be the object of all graduate courses in divinity and this is the object of graduate courses in divinity so far as those who conduct them know what they are about. When the thought of the teacher is simply to have a large salary, pleasant surroundings, congenial associates, and an easy time, that is one thing, but when his eager desire is to see men saved and see men become saviours of other men and to help those who desire to do this work, in some way to undertake it, then he is in a way ready for the high and holy task of training men to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ.

These courses which prepare men for their work are ... frequently those which involve isolation. Somehow it seems necessary for a man who wishes to know much about God to get apart from men. ... When they had gone away from men they had a chance to listen to God. ... So Jonah, in the belly of the fish, had an opportunity for acquaintance with God which he could never have had if he had remained among the cities and villages of Galilee. Men, even good men, would have hindered him from his divine training. He needed to be alone.

Another fact about the courses in Fish University is, that they frequently involve the element of danger. We are likely not only to be confused by men, but if we attend to them we are likely to be corrupted by ease-loving and place-seeking. I imagine there are comparatively few men used for large service who do not first or last have to confront situations in which their lives are really in peril. ... They have oftentimes been compelled to choose between what seemed likely to be fatal assault and infidelity to God. Dangers as well as isolations are helpful to those who are called to large service in the kingdom of God. As loneliness makes the heart reach out after someone who can always be at hand, so danger makes the heart reach out after someone who is always sufficient for the need and whether the danger be more active or passive, whether it be, for example, from starvation, or freezing, or of death by assault from an assassin, there is always help to a holy man in going into a situation where he will feel that God alone can do for him the thing that needs to be done.

The course of nature for Jonah would have been to be suffocated, then to be attacked by the gastric juice, then to have come into the circulation of the whale and thereafter to have been unknown among the habitations of men. There was nobody to help Jonah except God. ... If Jonah retained consciousness, as it seemed he did, he knew perfectly well that ... he was forced back on God as his only possible recourse.

Again the courses in Fish University oftentimes involve discomfort as well as danger. There is a broad line between the two. A person is uncomfortable when the house in which he lives is displeasing, when the food which he is eating is not attractive and appetizing, when the clothing which he can secure is not gratifying to his aesthetic tastes, when the people who are about him are not agreeable. In all of these and a thousand other ways a life may be uncomfortable which cannot be said to be in danger and which cannot be said to be alone, yet this latter, as well as the two former elements, are oftentimes involved in the training which God gives people who are to be used for large things.
...
Let the person who reads these words, who is at present taking courses in this great school, be of good courage. They are not pleasant, but they are profitable. No difficulties for the present seem joyous, on the other hand, they seem grievous but afterwards they work out the peaceable fruits of righteousness to those who are exercised thereby.

On the other hand, if you have had an easy time, if your path has been smooth and pleasant, if your life has been unfruitful, look about and see if you cannot find a place where God called you to isolation, danger and difficulty. Seek to recall whether or not at that time you shrunk from the narrow, hard path which opened before you. If you did, believe that that is probably the reason for your unfruitfulness. ...

Fish University will never be a popular school. Those who attend it will not boast of its facilities or its attendance. The instructor is not obtrusive. He does not spend any time in telling what a distinguished person He is, but out from this school come the men and the women who really lift the world. So if you are already a pupil, rejoice even while you are perplexed and suffering, and if you are not a pupil, make haste to register for all the courses for which God is willing to take you on.
___

Charles A. Blanchard, "Fish University" in An Old Testament Gospel (Chicago: Bible Institute Colportage Association, 1918), pp. 56-65.