Education is Already Free

Note: It may be helpful to read my introduction to this series in order to have some context and understand my disclaimers. You can find that post here.

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This is one of my favorite videos of the SWEAT pledge. Mike Rowe tells a great personal story about his time on QVC and uses it to make a great point. In his experience, he needed education; he realized education could be found anywhere, and it was his responsibility to get it.

To be clear, I love this video for purely selfish reasons. I have built most of my career on the premise of this particular conventional wisdom. To be fair, I did go to college and complete my undergraduate education, but I did it at an institution that was unbelievably affordable and not academically impressive. None of this, however, impacted the quality of education I was responsible for getting on my own.

I was able to study as hard as I wanted to study and access information from any field I so desired. My education was totally in my control, and my academic institution simply provided me with parameters for focusing that energy and proof of the work that I put in.

After graduation, I was able to use those tools to know how to study well. Not all information is good, academically vetted, or even scientific at all (when applicable), but college gave me the ability to know how to find resources and tools to educate myself.

After college I did not pursue graduate-level study, and to this day have no plans to do so. But I think it would be safe to say I have done far more education since I graduated from college than during my studies as an undergrad. There are some drawbacks: I don’t have letters after my name or degrees to prove the work I have done; I have had to exercise quite a bit of autonomy to accomplish all of this and doing so kept me from increased academic relationships and accountability, and my vocational career does not benefit from the academic network provided by a graduate-level education.

But I have been educated and seek to connect more and more of my students to the proper systems — oftentimes those are universities (sorry, Mike!) — and counsel them in pursuing their own goals. I have become an educated teacher and individual who can quote sources (not opinions) and talk about the larger academic conversations that drive my conclusions. I am not speaking of “rogue science” or self-published authors spouting nonsense. The same study from those fine institutions is available to me as a learner. Although the quality of this education is proportional to the money spent, and the oversight is minimal, the opportunity is still mine to seize.

But these goals are available to all of us. College students and high school dropouts, churches and think tanks, businesses and non-profits — we all have the opportunity to use the resources at our disposal to become better at everything we do. There is nobody who can keep us from this task. Some of us enjoy more opportunities and privilege than others, but all of us can work to become better versions of ourselves. It would also be wise to remember something Rowe hinted at in his video: there are many times when we are each other’s best resource. “Education” is not owned by an elite group of people or a system of institutions; it is a process we can all engage in, and the more we do so together, the better it will be.

It seems to me Jesus told a parable about people who were each given different amounts to invest in his Kingdom project (see Matthew 24:14–30). Some were given more than others, but all were expected to take what they had been given and use it to invest in more. Only the one who took the amount and buried it, refusing to do any more than keeping what was handed to him, was scolded.

May we hear the wisdom in this teaching and know we are invited to invest our blessings. May we remember much of this world’s education is already free, and it is our responsibility to pursue that learning.

No Substitute for Common Sense

Note: It may be helpful to read my introduction to this series in order to have some context and understand my disclaimers. You can find that post here.




“Guidelines are great, but they are no substitute for common sense.”

For me, this video was not the most inspiring in Rowe’s series, but the content is decent, and the point is well taken. Even though people tell you that your safety is their priority, it does not remove it from being your responsibility. I think this goes for a lot of other things as well, not just safety. People might say this about your education or your success — they would suggest it is their priority; however, that doesn’t mean it stops being your responsibility.

I like it. There won’t be a lot to say here. Pretty straightforward.

But one passing thought: Some of these same ideas are relevant in a culture that loves to blame others for our circumstances. We love to point fingers and talk about how our situation is brought about by our family, our employer, our government, our neighborhood, our school. We go on endless rants about how somebody else’s mistakes have created my mess.

And this may even be true some of the time.

And I’m definitely not suggesting accountability doesn’t matter or that we shouldn’t fight for justice. That is not my point at all, and anybody who knows me will know I am a big proponent of pursuing those things.

But there is a very significant line crossed when the objectivity of pursuing justice, mercy, and accountability becomes the subjectivity of blame.

People (especially leaders) should be held accountable for the worlds they create.

But we are responsible — solely — for how we respond to our circumstances. And I do get frustrated when people pick one of these sides and denounce the other. They are not mutually exclusive. I say that with all of the awareness of the comfort and privilege I bring to the conversation. As a white male, my list of circumstances working against me is horribly short. And yet, some of the people who have taught me the most about responsibility (especially in the last few years) have been people with much less privilege and comfort than I have.

So accountability does not remove responsibility. And responsibility does not remove the need for accountability. Can both of these statements be true? I certainly hope so.

What does this mean for you and your circumstances? It is not for me to say. I cannot understand what it is to walk in your shoes and I cannot apply wisdom in your life (only my own); but together, we learn from each other.

A (Potential) Bad Decision

Note: It may be helpful to read my introduction to this series in order to have some context and understand my disclaimers. You can find that post here.



This video is wonderfully straightforward. And while there are a couple of things I’m not necessarily interested in (the conspiracy theory mentality is just a little thick in this video, and the promotion for his foundation is beside the point for my purposes), I don’t think I would or could add much to his argument. As someone who is around universities and students for my job every day, I can tell you that this problem is real.

And that probably makes me a really bad campus minister.

But I don’t actually believe it does. I do think there needs to be a market adjustment on the industry of secondary education, but I don’t believe (nor does Mike Rowe) that the institution itself is broken. The university is still an essential place where many vocational pursuits receive specialized training necessary for a given job. I can hardly imagine a world without people trained in medical or legal fields. Engineering allows so much of our world to exist effectively and efficiently. And I need people trained in history, economics, political science, and the like to help lead us.

But what Rowe said in this video is so true. This is not how we’ve been selling university education.

When I was in high school (and I’m not aware of this changing much in recent years), the impression was that college is an absolute must if I want to be “successful” or even simply survive with a family in the future. I got lucky: I went to a very affordable Bible college and was able to, with the help of my family, escape without student loans. But this is becoming more and more of a miracle in today’s experience. And while undergraduate and graduate level training is actually quite effective and useful in many ways, it is not delivering what we were promised. It is developing us as human beings (at least in some ways), but it is not producing jobs.

It used to be true that if you went to college, you were almost guaranteed a starting position in your career field. That is no longer true. Such education used to be affordable; but as you saw depicted the video, this is no longer true. College is no longer (for many) the ticket it used to be, and it is no longer (for many) a wise investment. But we were all told that this is where the path to success starts. For far too many, it is no longer leading to the same destination.

I can tell you that classmates who did not go to college are a few steps ahead if they simply applied themselves and began a practice of hard work. To be sure, their earning potential is often much less than my college-trained counterparts, but the latter are so saddled with crippling debt and had such a slow start on their earning potential that they cannot round the curve.

Meanwhile, an entire generation has bought into a counter-productive narrative (when thinking of the Kingdom of God) that fills them with insecurity and leaves them empty of meaning.

It may be time we quit feeding the same trope of what leads to success and start teaching how to ask a better set of questions. To be sure, I hope our college campuses continue to be filled with people who are convinced of their calling and driven to be trained in their specialized field. I hope these students experience training that is more intentional and a job market that is more balanced with people who have a better understanding of what they do — but even more importantly, who they are.

If we are an organization that believes when we impact the U, we impact the world, then we have to take that logic out beyond the walls of the university campus. To be sure, tomorrow’s leaders are on our university campuses. But they can also be at our trade schools and our community colleges. They can be taking classes in the School of Life Experience. These people, with or without four-year degrees, will be tomorrow’s parents, artists, small business owners, and church leaders. We might even see a world where they can be our political leaders and representatives.

If all of this is possible without being enslaved to crippling debt, this world will be a better place. I hope for people to be found in our university classrooms, but I hope those rooms are filled with more and more of the right people. I hope those who have been fed a line will find the right place in a world that needs their leadership so badly — a place just as fulfilling and necessary.

A DAY IN THE LIFE: Bema Trip

For a summary of what I’m hoping to accomplish in this blog series (in the second week of every month of 2018), I recommend reviewing my explanation here.

I have recently returned from my third student trip to Israel and Turkey. I call these study tours “BEMA Trips” as they are a part of my larger BEMA Discipleship program. I try to lead study tours every other year as an opportunity to allow students to engage the world of the Bible experientially. If you followed the other series on my blog this year, you might remember this post on MODE for Impact Campus Ministries. The BEMA Trips are a great example of how I try to pursue MODE with my students.

This year (2018) was the final instance of a combined trip to Israel and Turkey. The three-week experience was an incredible time — designed for students who only had one opportunity to do this and limited funding, the bang-for-the-buck of one trip ($5800) was something that couldn’t be beat by the price (and time commitment) needed for two separate trips ($4300 each). However, as my job has taken me further from students, and as I have lost a scholarship fund that allowed me to give out $50,000 of support to students who wanted to go, I have needed to shift my focus.

In the future, we are planning for two groups on separate trips to Israel and Turkey. While this will be more expensive, it will be much more feasible for the typical participant who has a job and can’t get three weeks off of work. It will also enable us to have different focuses for each trip. Everything being said, the trip participants are pretty tired by the time they approach the end of a three-week adventure where we hike 7–12 miles a day with over 1800 feet of elevation change. We are beat up physically, emotionally, and spiritually.

Oh, but we are also filled up like never before. It is an opportunity that I thank God for every year. It really is my version of living the dream and I am blessed beyond belief to have the opportunity to do it!

But if this is something that only happens once every other year, is it really something that belongs in the A DAY IN THE LIFE series? The answer is yes, because of all the ongoing work needed to make these trips a reality.

After I return from a trip, I commit to my participants one year of focused, pastoral follow-up. I want to use my experience and the experience of my past alumni to help students make the most of their opportunity, so I will offer them some provocative guidance to help stimulate growth and appropriate responses (e.g., new habits, new community, new disciples) in their lives. I will also be available to them should they need to ask questions or wrestle with new efforts to become a more devoted follower of our Rabbi.

As that year comes to a close (and even a little before), I begin recruiting for our next trip. When we are ten months out, we open official registration and I am busy collecting information, paperwork, funding, and sending our preparation videos for those participants. Simply put, I am always doing something in preparation for or in response to a BEMA Trip.

Want to experience a little taste of our trip? I made a video with some snippets from each day of our last time in Israel and Turkey. (I even remembered to shoot a few introduction videos in Israel!)

MAKING AN IMPACT: Message

For a summary of what I’m hoping to accomplish in this blog series (in the third week of every month of 2018), I recommend reviewing my explanation here.

In the previous entries of this series, we’ve been able to cover the most important pieces of who we are. We have talked about our purpose at Impact Campus Ministries of making disciples, and we have journeyed through ICM’s mission of pursuing, modeling, and teaching intimacy with Christ with our students and others.

In 2015 and 2016, Bill Westfall (ICM’s previous president) returned from sabbatical and emerged from a season of pursuing a doctoral degree in global missional leadership. In his dissertation, Bill wrote about the importance of three key ideas: message, mode, and milieu (Mx3). Bill came back from a time of reflection on his leadership of ICM and encouraged us to think about and grow in these three areas.

To be sure, we are still growing. Many of these ideas are just starting to sink in and we feel as though we are charting new ground in these areas at ICM. We do believe in their efficacy and we continue to strive towards growth even as we learn. This is important to know as I begin to write on these concepts, because any perceived “wisdom” is yet to come from years of experience and application. This is all the passing on of concepts that we are beginning to experiment with.

These ideas are built around how to make disciples of these new generations effectively. Specifically, we are talking about bringing effective discipleship practices into the world of Millennials and Generation Z. These ideas will probably not prove to be timeless, but timely, so there is a sense of urgency to the learning curve that we seek to be on. I want to spend the next few posts talking about these ideas espoused in Mx3.

So today we talk about MESSAGE, and we have defined it as “the whole story of God and His invitation to join.”

The effort rests in the idea that our young generations experience life through the lens of narrative. They are used to the ideas of story — being surrounded by shows, movies, story-based video games, sound bites, YouTube, etc.

We believe God has been telling a story, as well. And yes, while we are talking about the Bible, what we have noticed is that our theological world (predominantly in the West) lacks a coherent understanding of how biblical history works as a narrative. Very few biblically trained ministry professionals can articulate the narrative arc of biblical history in less than five minutes. We just don’t have that kind of grasp of the Text. It wasn’t taught to us as a narrative.

What we are trained in is understanding systematic theology. We were educated insistently on a “biblical worldview” in a package that is becoming increasingly useless among a generation influenced by technology and online streaming narratives.

We need to learn how to convey what God’s been doing in the world in a compelling way. We need to be able to talk about how we got where we are now in increasingly honest avenues and to think critically about engaging the mission of God as a partner. In short, we need to be able to show students what God has been up to since the beginning of our world and what it has to do with them; we need to be able to show them that God is inviting all of us (including them) to join in His redemptive work all throughout creation.

Think about it. Could you give a synopsis of how the Bible works, from Genesis to Revelation, in less than two minutes? If you had a whiteboard, could you map out biblical history as a narrative arc? Could you identify the core elements of narrative in that arc? What is the conflict and plot? Who are the major characters? What is the moment of narrative climax? Is there a resolution? Where do you and I fit?

Our young adults are begging for somebody to make the biblical story compelling. Their postmodern world does not put such a high premium on resolving paradox or answering questions; in fact, these approaches seem shallow and irreverent to them. To “fix” this like it’s a problem is a gigantic adventure in missing the point — and the opportunity.

Luckily, this last decade has brought us some attempts at providing resources to these ends. There have been some books, such as The Drama of Scripture by Craig Bartholomew, and a few others. One of the most popular podcasts and video hosting sources is the work done by The Bible Project. Of course, this is also one of my own personal passions, so I have spent the last decade collecting and creating a body of work that I have been making available in different forms. I spent over four years writing a blog series that walked through the narrative of Scripture in detail; the series starts here and moves through the archives (navigable on the right sidebar) through the first quarter of 2017.

I also created BEMA Discipleship, which evolved into a “flipped classroom” that produces (in partnership with Brent Billings) the BEMA Podcast, which does the same thing as my blog and is intended to be used as a discussion centerpiece for students all around the country. I also have hopes to write a book in the next couple of years to put this discussion into a more concise and palatable format.

All that to say, this world of theology is trying to keep up with the very things Bill Westfall pointed out in his work. Would you join us in trying to become a better storyteller?

A DAY IN THE LIFE: Student Ministry

For a summary of what I’m hoping to accomplish in this blog series (in the second week of every month of 2018), I recommend reviewing my explanation here.

Student Ministry. As I get further and further into my job as President of Impact Campus Ministries, I find I am spending less and less time with students on campus. This is a natural part of my duty to make the difficult decisions to do my job well and lead the organization with the right amount of focus and dedication. However, working with students is still a part of my job that I get to do, and I really enjoy it.

While I am going to end up on campus one or two times a month to meet with a student or two, most of my student ministry revolves around the discipleship program I started years ago, called BEMA Discipleship. With the exception of some of the pastoral duties that naturally arise from this ministry, it is essentially a teaching ministry that utilizes my spiritual giftedness to lead students and find those special disciples who might work with me on a closer level (more on this in a later post).

So what is BEMA? The ministry is situated around a “flipped classroom.” For those of you who may not be familiar with the term, a flipped classroom takes advantage of the technology at our disposal to put the class content online, allowing us to use our valuable “class time” to focus on application and discussion. It’s more of a lab experience than a lecture. While that may sound really impressive, I still don’t do it as well as I should. I’m a work in progress!

We start by recording the weekly podcast; Brent Billings helps me produce a high-quality, top-notch recording that we publish as a public podcast. Listeners can find it on iTunes or any other podcast player. Students listen to the podcast, take notes, and come to class ready to discuss the questions that arose as they studied the material. It’s a really cool thing to be a part of.

Since the podcast has gone public, we’ve had groups start up all around the country. I’ve had the opportunity to meet groups full of people who I’ve never met before as I go about my travels. It’s an incredible experience to see what God does with this decentralized, flipped classroom idea.

People are able to read about this ministry, find the podcasts, stay up to date on scheduling, and even find/start groups around the country by visiting our website here.

Embedded below is a video diary I made that shows the process of making the podcasts, getting ready for discussion groups, and even being at a discussion group in Moscow or Pullman.

Top 12 of CiHD: #11

For a summary of what I’m hoping to accomplish in this blog series (the first week of every month of 2018), I recommend reviewing my explanation here.

As we continue our look at the Top 12 Blog Posts at Covered in His Dust, we’ll now look at my eleventh-most-viewed post of all time. This one happens to be titled “3 JOHN: Diotrephes,” which I wrote on September 29, 2016. Obviously, the post is about the third letter of John, and the big idea is the interaction of truth and love — two persistent elements of all three letters. You can read the post here.

In this series, as we look at each post, I want to ask three questions: why, what, and what else. Why do I think this post got so many views; why were others drawn to this post? What do I hope people found when they got here; what do I hope they heard? Finally, what else have I learned about this; what else would I say about these ideas?

WHY THIS POST?

To be honest, I’m a little surprised this post (and the next one we’ll look at) made the list. I’m assuming there were an awful lot of Bible teachers or students doing a study on 3 John and my Google-based blog jumped to the top of their search results. But I could be wrong. I’ve never ceased to be surprised at the posts that people resonate with and enjoy.

It could be that people found a post that talked about the preeminence of love and its importance — even in the midst of truth.

WHAT DO I HOPE THEY FOUND?

I think the last two paragraphs of the post emphasize what I hope readers took away:

The letter of 3 John always serves as a reminder to me of a couple realities. First, there have always been and always will be people who oppose the work of the gospel and our call to be people of love in the world. For whatever reason (and there are often many), there are those who stand opposed to work that would kiddush HaShem. But second, this letter reminds me, yet again, that the way of truth is not truth because some abstract, absolute truth exists. The way of truth is truth because it is the way of love. 

I know it’s very popular to say that “truth without love isn’t truth and love without truth isn’t love.” That may be true, but the Bible does not teach this idea directly. Yet the idea is undeniably evident, especially in the writings of John, that love is the foundational element, and you will find truth within love. Love always has truth in it.

I hope people found a little bit of encouragement not to give up or grow weary in the way of love. The Theology Police and Truth Mongers can be a brutal bunch, making sure that our desire to love our neighbor as ourselves is held in check. Love is fine, they say, as long as we never compromise on the truth that comes first. But this isn’t what John teaches us, nor what Jesus called us to. We are to love. He commanded it, explained it, modeled it, and triumphed with it. May we never forget it.

I chuckle when I think of the last paragraph because of how my editors and I labored over the wording of the last two sentences. I still love the idea! People hold truth and love in perfect balance. “You can’t have one without the other,” they assert. But this isn’t what I see when I read teachings like 1, 2, and 3 John (or even Paul, for that matter). While it is entirely true that truth must have love in order to be true, I still believe the scandal is this teaching is that if you have love, you will always have at least some truth, because love is truth.

WHAT ELSE WOULD I SAY?

I want to touch on why I think this idea is so uncomfortable for us westerners. For Greek, western thinking, if I asked you where the power lied — in the truth or in the medium — we would say that the power lies in truth. Let me take the use of words as an example. Is the power in the words, or is the power in the truth the words are communicating? We would say the truth; the words are simply the medium, the conduit, the vehicle for the thing with the power. We have sayings in our culture, like “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” I mean, words are just words — they have no power.

And yet, two seconds of reflection proves that statement to be asinine. Words do hurt me. Words are more than just conduits — they are powerful. Easterners (particularly the people of the Bible) saw the question differently. They believed the power lies in the medium itself. They point to the creation of the world and they point out how God spoke the world into existence. Words — they insist — have incredible power. The vehicle matters more than the passenger. It’s not that truth doesn’t matter at all, it’s that truth means nothing if it’s not taken there through an empowered conduit.

This is begging to become a piece on the power of word (or Word), but I digress. The same point is in play here. Does the power lie in the truth or the love? Again, I think we find that the power lies in the conduit of that truth. In fact, just like the Word of God, the medium (love) can cover a multitude of sins (truth/misunderstanding). In a theological world that has been on a truth tirade since the dawn of postmodernity, I think the teachings from John couldn’t be more timely.

MAKING AN IMPACT: Discipleship

For a summary of what I’m hoping to accomplish in this blog series (in the third week of every month of 2018), I recommend reviewing my explanation here.

For Impact Campus Ministries, we are trying to grow in the concept of “starting with the why.” It’s a concept that comes from an old TED Talk by Simon Sinek. For us, we think the compelling reason for doing campus ministry is a foundational belief that if you impact the university, you impact the world. While we don’t think Jesus envisioned the American university campus specifically when he uttered the Great Commission, we do believe the idea of making disciples was one of Jesus’s “whys.”

Taking this idea, we believe that making disciples who make disciples is our purpose on the college campus. This isn’t ground-breaking rhetoric in the church world. It seems that everyone in the last twenty years has shifted towards an emphasis in disciple-making. Discipleship has become a buzzword in ministry. We use it so much that at times it seems to be nothing at all. This reality raises a question: When we talk about discipleship, what exactly are we talking about, and what do we mean?

This is certainly not a quest to find the “correct” definition of discipleship. Not only would that be an effort in futility, it would dishonor so many of the good things that happen in all kinds of ministry contexts. There are a lot of semantics at play in the conversation of discipleship. A lot of things have changed in the last 2,000 years; words take on new or expanded meanings.

When we sat down to define the term discipleship as a staff a couple years ago, the conversation ended up being rooted in a more historical understanding of what discipleship was to the people in Jesus’s day. In their day, being a talmid (Hebrew for “disciple”) was a level of the rabbinic process that very few people attained. Those who progressed to that part of Jewish education would be selected to “follow a rabbi” as his student, pupil, and apprentice. You would follow a rabbi and listen to his every word, but you would also mimic his every move. The goal was to “know what the rabbi knows, in order to do what the rabbi does [for the reasons the rabbi does them], in order to be just like the rabbi in his walk with God.” I wrote about these ideas a few years ago and unpacked a story where the principles are seen applied in a two-part post (here and here).

At the end of the day, we wanted our ideas on discipleship to be driven by our best understanding of what Jesus understood and meant when he said discipleship. And while our context is not the same today as it was so long ago, we still believe we can base the process on some of the same big ideas. On that day, we decided to say a disciple is someone who is submitted to Jesus and becoming like Him.

But how does one become like Jesus? To these ends, we wanted to define discipleship in a way that would mirror the ideas driving Jesus’s ministry. We defined it as follows:

Discipleship is imitating a mentor who imitates Jesus.

This means we need to be entering into intentional relationships where this can happen. For many of us, discipleship is often the equivalent to a one-hour coffee meeting on Thursday mornings. We realized that we would have to expand our understanding of what discipleship is. A one-hour coffee involves very little meaningful mentorship — and hardly any mimicry or imitation. If this was really going to happen, it would require a few things.

First and foremost, it would require that I imitate Jesus (and possibly even imitate my own mentors who are imitating Jesus). Second, it would mean “living life together” (just like the disciples and Jesus!) and not simply creating ministry programs; this focus would require significantly more time and resources to be done correctly. Finally, this is not something that comes easily; we have to pursue these efforts with a different kind of intentionality.

Thankfully, ICM had already been fertilizing great soil for this growth. For years, ICM believed we exist to pursue, model, and teach intimacy with God. Isn’t this a formula (and I use that term very, very loosely) for the kind of imitation we were discussing? It would seem that we weren't really breaking new ground at all, but simply expanding our awareness of how far our mission truly goes.

CHURCH HISTORY: You Are Here

We’ve now finished the journey. Over the course of four years, we have traveled from “In the beginning…” to this very day in 2017. We have just spent the last few months wandering through postbiblical history, figuring out how we got to the point we are at today.

You are here.

I’d like to summarize what I believe I learn from church history in the same way I summarize the trips I lead for my students in Israel and Turkey. As I look at the early Church, a church couched in the context of first-century Judaism, I see four things that stand out to me as a learner.

TEXT: The first-century Jewish world of Jesus was a world deeply committed to the Text. Teaching their children how to memorize the entire Torah at a very early age (and then much of the rest of the Tanakh), they had a working knowledge of God’s commandments we can hardly begin to understand. Without the printing press, this oral communication and commitment of God’s Word to memory would prove invaluable to an entire culture of people devoted to following God. Unfortunately, when we lost our connection to our Jewish heritage (by rejecting the Jewish identity upon which we were built), we didn’t just lose relationships with the Jewish people — we lost the written Word of God, as well. As the one Word that doesn’t return void, but always accomplishes the purpose for which it is sent (Isaiah 55), we effectively lost the power of our movement. Paul told us in Ephesians that the Word of God is “the sword of the Spirit.” I believe we lost the power of the Spirit by losing our connection to the Text, exchanging it for a fascination (maybe idolatry) with doctrine and creed.

COMMUNITY: Our Hellenistic ways always deceive us. Again, as we jettisoned our connection to a Jewish world that lived in intentional subversion to the pagan narrative, we were left with our own pagan roots, deeply entrenched in the narrative of Empire and the Roman worldview. Instead of living in intentional community, rejecting the lies of self-preservation, luxury, comfort, and leisure — we embraced (and still do to this day) these tools of the empire. The most fascinating and effective tool of the Kingdom is an inclusive community that shows the world a better way to live.

DISCIPLESHIP: One of the best ways of training up leaders was the first-century model of discipleship. Consider the fact that Jesus started no churches and went on no missionary journeys. What he did do (and then asked us to do) was make disciples. He spent three years with twelve young men — all day, every day — and he changed the course of human history. He didn’t lead Bible studies (which are great) or create awesome new conferences to teach the masses (although those are incredibly beneficial, as well). He simply went out, told twelve guys to “follow me,” and then showed them how to live as God had asked them to live. It changed everything. We don’t do this anymore.

WRESTLING: The early church community was a community devoted to the same wrestling that Jacob, the father of the Israelites, was known for. They didn’t think answers to all the questions were the point. They believed the Text was meant to be wrestled with and that life was tricky and difficult. They did not believe in formulas or self-help strategies. They believed in walking the path with faithfulness. This walk meant things could be quite complicated and messy. There are many shades of gray. However, working with God to restore the world would be worth the great wrestling match. But this, too, was something we lost. Because we had lost the Text, questions and doubts were threatening. We immediately began to identify orthodox answers to questions and discouraged dissent. In a world that was founded on a culture of chutzpah and engagement, this is an odd experiment.

So, we lost the Text, disengaged from subversively inclusive community, stopped making disciples the way our Jesus did, and discouraged wrestling.

We still don’t know our Text. We find it nearly impossible even to experiment with true community because of the idolatry of our consumerism and comfort. We run church programs and invest in programmatic ministries rather than believing discipleship could change the world. And we still discourage people from asking questions that push the boundaries or color outside the lines.

Is there any hope?

Yes!

God has placed you and I here for such a time as this. Consider the following:

TEXT: Because of the Internet, we have an unprecedented amount of Bible study tools and information at our fingertips. Unlike any other point in human history, accessibility to truth is at an all-time high. Even though many of us struggle to have a knowledge of the Text rivaling that of Orthodox Judaism, we do have the tools to pursue that kind of understanding and keep learning, learning, learning. If the disciples knew we have biblegateway.com or online lexicons to do word searches in a matter of seconds, they would roll over in their graves. There is no reason we cannot create our own kind of Essene community — people who seek to know the path and walk it.

COMMUNITY: No matter the time or place in history, if we are human, then we are capable of great community. There is no reason we cannot create subversively inclusive communities that show the lies of our culture’s idolatry for what it is, and show the way of Jesus is the best way to live, even after all of these centuries. We can create communities that teach the world how to Sabbath, forgive, and be generously hospitable to others. We can look out for the mumzers. There is nothing stopping us from these endeavors. In fact, because of our “connectivity” in our social networking world, we have tools to facilitate community like never before. It simply requires us not to settle for pseudo-community that allows us keep our Herodian idolatry of consumerism and neo-Hellenism. We have to make the sacrifices necessary for true community.

DISCIPLESHIP: I remain convinced that this model and methodology of discipleship would be just as effective in our world as it ever was in the Greco-Roman context. Total immersion is still the best context for true learning and transformation. It is not easy to fit into our world, and we certainly don’t live in a culture that facilitates these commitments, but the Great Commission still sits for us to seize — today more than ever.

WRESTLING: Maybe one of the best things postmodernity has given us is a culture that values the complexities of life and rejects the notion of black and white answers. This kind of context — often misidentified as moral relativism — is not our enemy, but an incredible opportunity. We need to recapture a world where questions are not a threat to our systems of control, but the doorway to discovery. We need to trust the process of searching, believing that if we truly do search for God, we will find Him — just as He promised us.

Will you wake up tomorrow and do all these things like a champ? No, you will not. But can you wake up tomorrow and set some realistic and obtainable goals to begin making new ground in all four of these areas? Yes, you can.

And I believe some wise man once said the journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.

Or as the Talmud instructs us: Just as rain falls in drops and forms mighty rivers, so it is with Torah. A man studies a little here and a little there, until understanding comes like a rushing stream.

May it be so.

In our day, LORD.

Amen.

CHURCH HISTORY: AD 1925 thru Today

NB: For readers who missed it, I suggest going back to review my setup to this section on church history to know about my disclaimers. For the graphics used in this post, the timelines are not to scale, and the dates represented are not intended to be exact. They are meant to be visual aids for understanding the larger conversation.

Fundamentalism and secular humanism continued to be locked in a fierce battle for “truth” for a decade. It would be worth answering the question that often goes unanswered in these conversations: What happened to the parts of Christendom that wouldn’t have aligned with fundamentalism? At this point in history, those who would have rejected fundamentalism often drifted towards theological liberalism. While the Church (in this century) would eventually learn how to have more progressive conversations and put more “options” on the table (rather than a simple bifurcated presentation of the argument), this is not that point in history. For much of [theological] liberalism, their position felt like a weak take on humanism, with Jesus slapped on the label.

The two options most 20th-century Christians had to choose from seem today like equally bad options; it also looked like Christianity, while putting up a good fight, was not going to have the staying power to outlast the run that humanism was putting together.

But that all ended with the arrival of World War II.

Any hope that humanity could usher in some utopian societal existence, whether it was by fascist, socialist, communist, or even democratic means, would come to a crashing end. Every humanistic worldview seemed to show its true self in the face of unbelievable genocide, communist oppression, and nuclear war. Simply put, humanity isn’t as great as we thought it was.

This gave Christianity a great and sudden turnaround that ushered in what I call the modern evangelistic era, and the eventual rise of the evangelical church. Fundamentalism gives way to a broader, softer version of itself in a wide representation of Protestant, American Christianity. While the beliefs that justify “evangelical orthodoxy” change depending on who you ask (even today), modern evangelicalism attempted to plant its flag and set up its defenses. It’s worth noting that we still find ourselves in this tension today. The “culture wars” of the current evangelical church are not the great Promised Land of our day, nor are they the last and final Armageddon we often want them to be. At best, they are simply the awkward phases of a modern evangelicalism that is going through a sociological “puberty” and, at worst, they are the final gasping breaths of a movement coming to a very unflattering end. We would do well to consider these things.

The modern evangelical movement was created by some of the greatest evangelists of our era. People like Billy Graham and Bill Bright (founder of Campus Crusade for Christ) helped the church navigate this very difficult era, giving the Church language for communicating the gospel like we had never seen. I believe history might look back on this era with a similar perspective to our view of the printing press and the Reformation. This modern evangelical push paved the way for cultural engagement like never before.

Evangelism was now in the hands of normal, everyday parishioners — not just the clergy and preachers in revival tents. The creation of the “Four Spiritual Laws” (no matter how you or I might feel about their theological accuracy) created a world where college students, coworkers, and soccer moms could articulate the movement of Jesus in simple language. The same resurgence of cultural engagement would eventually lead to what many from the 1970s call the “Jesus Movement” and the great testimonies of the movement of Jesus in people’s hearts. 

About the same time (the 1970s), the world of biblical scholarship was experiencing a new frontier, as well. While this is highly oversimplified, the work of Jacob Neusner changed the world of hermeneutics as we know it. Neusner, a Jewish literary scholar (not a Christian), was attempting to understand how modern Christian thought had influenced Jewish thought. As he brought modern Christian scholars (mostly Catholic) to the table, they found themselves learning lessons from Judaism that had gone missing some 1800 years ago. Realizing the impact this had on our understanding of the Bible, academic Christians would never again engage in scholastic research or archaeology without the aid of their Jewish brothers.

Many people have asked me, “How could we have not known this stuff for all these years?” The ridiculously simplistic answer is that we just hadn’t asked. Until the work of Neusner and others, Christendom had been too worried about doctrinal purity and theological rightness to ask basic questions about the Bible’s long-lost Jewish context. Since the turn of the century, many evangelical churches are beginning to experience the work of these scholars, finally “turning the corner” to our common knowledge.

I had professors who told me in college that new discoveries often took 20–30 years to find a presence in the Church. These new discoveries have to be vetted and then handed to the educational institutions (universities and seminaries), and then taught to the eventual pastors who would teach these things from pulpits (and through blog posts). Now, with the rise of the Internet, the distribution of this information — and all information (good and bad) — is increasing exponentially.

But that’s not the only thing that changed at the turn of the century. The world of science had also taken an unexpected turn. While the modern era produced a scientific belief that we would be able to figure out everything if given enough time (see how this fits so well with secular humanism?), the discovery of quantum science radically changed all of that. Some of the most basic principles of physics and Newtonian movement no longer applied in quantum science. The scientific world reeled in the implications of this development.

Combine this with the sociological realizations of this century, and we have a major shift in worldview. While humanism took a major hit, secularism was (and is) far from dead. In fact, since the days of the French Revolution, this might be the most shocking shift Christendom has yet to accept. While we talk about it often (“post-Christian culture”), we have not figured out how to respond well to it.

Enter: Postmodernity.

In the late 1990s, the cultural cry became, “What do we truly know, anyway?” Whether it was society or politics or science, it seemed like absolutes weren’t as absolute as we had once thought. While the Church cried out against what they perceived as moral relativism, the world moved on anyway. Some progressive evangelicals attempted to move with this cultural change, bringing the gospel back into the cultural conversation by creating what is known as the Emerging Church. Largely rejected by Evangelicalism (and, I would argue, no longer considered a viable approach to the “new day” of Christian thought — at least in its original form), the Emerging Church helped start some conversations that would set the stage for growth the Church needed to prepare for its survival.

And now, a decade or two later, we find ourselves at today. With the rise of decentralized consumerism (Uber, Airbnb, etc) and social networks changing the language of interaction everywhere, it’s hard to know exactly what lies just around the bend. Where is God calling us and what does any of this mean? Is there any hope at all for the future of Christianity? It seems like we have devolved into such a mess that it's hard to know what God would even approve of in our efforts.

Well, in fact, I believe we find ourselves (as every generation has) perfectly placed for the future.

CHURCH HISTORY: AD 1800 thru AD 1925

NB: For readers who missed it, I suggest going back to review my setup to this section on church history to know about my disclaimers. For the graphics used in this post, the timelines are not to scale, and the dates represented are not intended to be exact. They are meant to be visual aids for understanding the larger conversation.

As the age of revolution changed the cultural setting for Christendom, there was a new push to get our bearings as a faith movement. For almost 1400 years, the world of Christendom had enjoyed being the privileged default of culture. If you unplugged the western world and plugged it back in, the default setting would have blinked “Christian.” But now, with the rise of the Age of Enlightenment, Christendom’s white-knuckle grip on theology, creeds, and doctrinal truths did not age well. As the world became more and more knowledgable, more and more educated, more and more literate — simply affirming creedal beliefs wasn’t holding a candle to the scientific method.

But before we talk about science, one has to talk about the this new culture of independence and the impact it had on our own shores in America. The movement of culture away from Christianity had a positive effect for Christendom as a whole. In an effort to regain what was being lost, Protestant believers fell into what is often referred to as the Second Great Awakening (the “First” Great Awakening is usually attributed to the rise of Methodism in the mid-1700s, which we discussed previously). This great time of ‘revival’ was ushered in throughout North America and Europe through what we commonly know as “camp meetings.”

These revivals became a time for denominations to come together and enjoy fellowship, worship, and preaching. Such a focus and desire to experience true confession and repentance would lead to great times of spiritual revival and movement. Many attribute the rise of Pentecostalism to these experiences where the Holy Spirit seemed to be poured out in abundance. What is widely accepted as the first camp meeting was held in Kentucky in 1801 and would set the stage for an invigorated and passionate movement of Protestant parishioners.

This same awakening, coupled with the cultural movement of America toward freedom and independence, led to the jettisoning of denominationalism. As many denominations were attempting to hold onto their imperial moorings through the use of creeds and belief statements (think of a more colonial version of ‘church membership’), entire groups began kicking against colonialism as it was experienced in the North American church. The Stone-Campbell movement (also known as the Restoration Movement) was started when Barton Stone, a recently ordained minister of the Presbyterian Church, was asked to sign the Westminster Confession before he could receive the Eucharist. Appalled by the use of Confession and doctrine in this way, Stone joined others with similar encounters to restore a sense of the faith experienced in revivals (a faith they associated with the early church in the book of Acts) to Christianity in America.

It is not a coincidence that other movements started at this time, as well. Driven by the same disgust in the direction of Christianity, Joseph Smith received his calling (Mormonism) at this point in history, and we see the work of Ellen G. White, John Darby, and Charles Russell (Jehovah’s Witnesses). Note that all of these movements are capitalizing, albeit unintentionally, on a newfound culture of freedom and independence to start new, revived expressions of a faith they felt was corrupted and dying.

On the scientific front, things are not turning out well for any form of Christendom trying to hold on to the doctrinal confessions and creedal understandings of their faith. In the middle of the nineteenth century, Charles Darwin began his famous work and Karl Marx was pursuing new political ideals; both seemed to work against a Christian worldview. While many of these ideas were critiqued within the Christian worldview, some critical thinkers in Christianity were affirming certain components.

The need for social vigilance was championed by people like William Booth, the Methodist pastor who founded the Salvation Army. Booth would become one of the lead thinkers shaping Christianity’s social consciousness around the turn of the century, giving rise to what we would call the social gospel. While the term has a negative connotation in most conservative evangelical circles, the movement was simply trying to recapture the practical and misplaced emphasis on caring for the poor and marginalized in our increasingly industrialized world where the gap between the rich and the poor was rapidly increasing. These were some of the same things that modernity — in all of its socio-polical growth pains — was trying to articulate, as well.

The secular aspect of this cultural growth curve is known as secular humanism, and after we finished fighting World War I (it’s interesting how war always hinders progress), Christendom in North America turned its attention to fighting these secular ideals. Like a lit powder keg, the famous Scopes Trial in Dayton, Tennessee, led to eruption of Christian “fundamentalism.” Christians immediately saw themselves in a culture war with secular humanism. The problem is that this rings incredibly reminiscent of the mistakes we made with Copernicus and Galileo. It seems we may be in danger of misidentifying our “enemy” and the truth we should be fighting to preserve.

But with all the splintering and division of Christianity, it becomes harder and harder for us to learn from our mistakes.