I Am a Follower

Over the last three decades, there has been a seismic shift across the landscape of the church. The advent of church-growth theory, coupled with exponential advances in technology, has created a hyperpursuit for leadership muscle that has never been seen before. Seminars and conferences have become trendy leadership fitness centers. Titans of business and megachurch pastors serve as leadership fitness trainers, while books and periodicals deliver leadership steroids and growth hormones.

The goal of such an industry? To create better leaders, stronger leaders, to make and multiply leaders.

This is where we are today. This book looks at a different issue: How can we become better followers?

Just hit us right between the eyes, Leonard Sweet.

Which of us cannot raise our hands and confess to a past or present addiction to a leadership culture in the church which is more about what Eugene Peterson calls “religious shopkeeping” than it is about following Jesus and challenging others to do the same?

Leaders are esteemed. Leaders rock the world. Leaders make more leaders. So who wants to be a follower? Do I gain bragging rights based on whose blog I follow – or how many people are following my blog?

Leonard Sweet’s latest book, I Am a Follower will kick and prod and stir you. It challenges the current assumptions of the whole western church leadership culture – and ultimately invites us to step out of that latest leadership conference or seminar with all of its fine tips and dashing powerpoints and simply join the dance as first followers of Jesus.

His book begins by taking us to the Sasquatch Dance Party video that went viral a few years ago (though I missed it at the time):

Sweet observes that the shirtless man didn’t announce or plan or attempt to orchestrate a dance party. He simply heard the rhythm and felt the freedom to move to it. Longer versions of the video show people mocking and pointing at him. Not only does he not care, he doesn’t even notice. He is caught up in the song and in his own dance to it. (And, of course, some would say it was the drugs.)

For Sweet, this is Jesus, and the challenge for us is not to become leaders of the dance, but to have the guts to be that first follower who will join the shirtless man in the dance. The first follower ultimately opens the door for others to join in – and before you know it, it’s an avalanche of participation. Voila, you have a dance party.

Sweet has been called a theological poet – and for me, he is. Reading Sweet is always a bit like following the dancing feather in Forrest Gump. Perhaps not everyone’s cup of tea. But it strikes me as very, well, Jesus-ish.

And so does the message of the book.

Sweet asks us whether or not we have changed Paul’s words, “Follow me, as I follow Christ” to “Follow me as I lead for Christ’s sake.”

Ouch.

Sweet observes that somewhere in the past half century, we diagnosed the church’s problem as a crisis of leading, not a crisis of following. It’s as if we read Bonhoeffer’s Cost of Discipleship and decided we’d rather talk about something else entirely. The event you won’t see happening this year? The first annual followership conference.

Make me a better follower.

Take and read.

Insurrection

Many religious books are written to assure people of what they already know – or what they think they know; to shore up our insecurities and to make us feel like we really do have a handle on things; that our rehearsed answers are in fact the correct ones (aren’t they?).

This is also a purpose shared by many sermons – perhaps even most.

This isn’t what you find in any of the works of Peter Rollins.

Rollins captured my imagination when I was first introduced to him in his book of parables entitled The Orthodox Heretic. In it he challenged and stretched and delighted and bothered me to no end and kept driving back into what is the heart and core of this thing we call Christianity.

I’ve kept an eye open for anything new from him and haven’t been disappointed.

His latest book, Insurrection, is no exception.

He turns the reader wonderfully inside out as he points out what really is the obvious – that “the truly revolutionary move is not to chart a return to the early Church, but to the event that gave birth to the early Church.”

The event is the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus.

This is no deconstruction of current theologies or church practices; it’s really a reconstruction of something we have known but have allowed ourselves to forget. Protestants tend to pass over the loss of crucifixion and all that entails in our experience for what amounts to a hollow triumphfulism of the resurrection. We are not only not allowed to express our own experience of the loss of God in most church life – we don’t even allow Jesus to experience it on the cross taking the cry “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me” out of his mouth and heart and making it merely a quotation of Scripture.

In four chapters, Rollins takes us into the heart of the despair and doubt and unknowing that Jesus experienced on the cross and that we must experience if we are to make real sense of the resurrection that followed . Four chapters on the despair of crucifixion, four chapters on how the resurrection is meant to serve as a catalyst in our lives.

Rollins hurts my brain.

Few will agree with all that Rollins says and surmises. But then, that’s really not the point of healthy reading. Healthy reading, like healthy church, rather than helping us maintain some sort of spiritual equilibrium so we can fit into society as it stands, should instead throw us off balance and thus be a catalyst for our personal transformation and ultimately the transformation of society.

Only the adventurous need apply. Risk it.

Take and read.

Thieves in the Temple

Okay, so the title may not be beckoning you in for some warm holiday cheer…but I still felt compelled to pick it up, break the ice and at least dip my toes into it.

I expected pretty much a trashing of church-as-we-know-it; an expose of American churches with plenty of stones to go around. It’s certainly easy and natural for us to stay in rock-throwing mode, remarking with Forrest Gump that sometimes there just aren’t enough rocks.

But actually, what I found was a very readable (read the book yesterday afternoon, six chapters, 192 pages) and helpful (if somewhat painful at times) critique of church in America. “The Christian Church and the Selling of the American Soul” is the subtitle. The first three chapters provide diagnosis followed by three chapters in which MacDonald offers a path forward.

The diagnosis doesn’t hold any major surprises for anyone conversant with the American church scene. This is a consumer-driven culture and on every corner we encounter a consumer-driven church – a church geared and regearing to meet the felt needs of its market base. MacDonald sums up those felt needs under the word “comfort.” He reflects on a consumer base that feels that life is challenging enough and the last thing we need is more challenges at church. We are seeking, just for a few hours on Sunday, for some relief, to feel better about ourselves, about life. And church in America is here to help.

Touristy mission trips, fun fundraisers, comfy chairs, and only the best in electronic, modern, hip worship and teaching (teaching limited to ten minutes filled with jokes and anecdotes) with multiple projection screens (churches today are more likely to have a large projection screen up front than a cross).

As you can see, the critique is nothing new. Church is an easy target. Megachurch an extremely big, fat and easy target. We can go on and on about how crass and impersonal and shallow and commercial they are all day – which can make us feel really, really good and spiritual by comparison with whatever we are doing (or not doing). Doesn’t deconstruction feel just, well, wonderful?

So it was in the latter three chapters with the path forward that I myself leaned forward to hear what Mr. MacDonald had to say. Curiously enough, he did not recommend the dismantling or abandonment of a consumer-driven church culture. That critter is here to stay (until the end of the world as we know it). He did not recommend the startup of multiplied hand-wringing churches, non-churches, or unchurches. Already plenty of those started with more cued up in the waiting room. Rather ironically, such hand-wringing non-consumer churches –  be they a hark back to ancient paths of the glorious days of yesteryear when men were men, or hand-wringing emerging unchurches that have no idea where they are going (they’re just certain that wherever they are going they won’t get there in any organized manner) – of whatever stripe such protest churches may be, they are, inevitably, just appealing to another niche of our consumer church market and culture.

Blast.

So what is Mr. MacDonald’s solution?

I guess you’ll just have to take and read the book.

The Rise and Fall of the Bible

I don’t remember where I first encountered this title. Was it a suggestion on Amazon?
A blurb in a trade publication? I honestly don’t remember. But the title was intriguing. When I pulled it out of the week’s shipment of books, I wasn’t sure I wanted to get into it – particularly if it was just another Bible-bashing book.

It’s not.

Which isn’t to say it was a pleasant read – particularly in the early chapters.

In those early chapters, in particular, the author, Timothy Beal, pulls the covers back on an entire commercial industry centered on the Bible. We are a culture drowning in Bibles. According to Beal, in 2005 there were 6,134 different Bibles published, which was over 600 more than were published in 2004. Once again, according to Beal’s sources, in our culture, the average Christian household owns nine Bibles and purchases at least one new Bible every year. According to polls Beal cites, two-thirds of Americans believe the Bible to be the definitive, inspired Word of God, but of that same number 28% have never read it – perhaps making the Bible the most revered unread book in history. The greatest Story ever sold.

As he scans the multi-million dollar Bible publishing scene, Beal concludes that all these permutations of the Bible seem to lure the buying populace into thinking that if they just buy this new version or that new fangled edition, they will finally get it this time – they will finally read, understand, and follow through.

Okay, this all had me squirming a bit since Beal is unsparing and incisive, and since, as a church bookstore manager, this is my industry! But instead of getting defensive, I kept reading and considering the merits of his perspective.

At the very least, as a bookstore manager, it led me to conclude I need to urge people lining up with their Bible purchases that they should really consider whether buying yet another Bible is what is called for. Perhaps they should go home and read one of the Bibles they already have on the shelf and use the money they would have spent in helping out a neighbor barely scraping by with their groceries during this holiday season.

After the squirming, the rest of Beal’s book was a delight. With humor and anecdotes and challenging observations, he helped me connect many of the dots yet again that I have personally been musing and praying over in this lifelong love affair I’ve carried on with the Bible.

A good book doesn’t tell you something you don’t know, any more than it merely confirms what you have always believed to be so. A good book gives you words for thoughts, beliefs and ideas you have alreadly been struggling with. In laboring to knock down some of the faulty facades that have grown up around the Bible, Beal left me with an even deeper passion to really know and live the Word – that Word amidst all the words – and to settle for nothing less.

I’ll no doubt be sharing some insights from this read in my personal blog.

So if you think you know all there is to know about the Book of books – from either a negative or positive perspective, here’s a chance to look at it again, to hear again or even for the first time the story of the Good Book and to encounter it, not as a closed book of answers but, as Jerome called it, a bibliotheca: a library of questions, “a place of serendipity and surprise, in which accidents and tangents often turn out to be more important than your best-laid plans.”

Take and read.

Simply Jesus

My computer will, I am reliably informed, do a large number of complex tasks. I only use it, however, for three things: writing, email, and occasional internet searches. If my computer were a person, it would feel  frustrated and grossly undervalued, its full potential nowhere near realized. We are, I believe, in that position today when we read the stories of Jesus in the gospels. We in the churches use these stories for various obvious things: little moralizing stories on how to behave in the coming week, aids to prayer and meditation, extra padding for a theological picture largely constructed from elsewhere. The gospels, like my computer, have every right to feel frustrated. Their full potential remains unrealized.   N.T. Wright, Simply Jesus p. 4

What a perfect follow-up read to Eldredge’s Beautiful Outlaw.

N.T. Wright’s latest entry, Simply Jesus, is the theological complement to the more devotionally inclined Beautiful Outlaw – which isn’t to say that it’s heavy and ponderous. In it’s own way, Simply Jesus is every bit as addicting and enrapturing as Beautiful Outlaw. At least for me. And I’m a book junkie.

Again, it may be due in large part to my current intensive journey through Mark’s Gospel. I very much can identify with Wright’s computer scenario. In my life and experience the Gospels – the first half of the New Testament – essentially sat idle through much of the first three decades of my life as a Christian. I memorized Paul,  which essentially amounts to memorizing the commentary rather than the text. Inspired commentary, granted, but commentary and applied theology nonetheless.

Simply Jesus puts the Gospels back front and center where they have always belonged, and he quite effectively sets them – sets Jesus – in his first century context. Wright develops an extended analogy to the perfect storm (yep, the one featured in the Clooney film of the same name). Jesus literally stepped into such a first century perfect storm – the place where the hurricane of divine love and the kingdom of God met the cold might of empire and the overheated national aspirations of Israel. The place, of course, was called Golgotha.

Simply Jesus is the proverbial tour de force through what we Vineyardites call “kingdom theology.” But I don’t find Tom Wright stuffily intellectual. I always find plenty of cookies on the table within easy reach. This is the third or fourth book of Wright’s that I’ve read, and his thoughtful and thorough yet personable style continues to bless me. You could say he’s easy on the eyes and stirring for the heart and mind.

If you don’t share a “kingdom theology” perspective, you will be challenged on several levels, not the least of which would be on the eschatological level.

Stretching is good for the soul.

But mostly you’ll just be stretched, and blessed, to see the Story – Simply Jesus – put on center stage with its detailed first century backdrop vividly hung in place, orienting not only the rest of the Bible but reorienting our very lives as those who would simply follow Jesus.

Take and read.

Beautiful Outlaw

It’s been five years since I’ve read a John Eldredge book.

Nothing personal, but after Sacred Romance, Wild at Heart and Waking the Dead, his following titles felt like regurgitation when I tried to get into them. Could have been me, to be sure. For me, Waking the Dead seemed to be the pinnacle of his developing thesis in those titles; a thesis I would summarize in that ancient catchphrase: “The glory of God is man fully alive.”

So I almost missed Beautiful Outlaw when I assumed it was “just another men’s book.” So glad I looked beyond the title – and my own prejudices! Beautiful Outlaw was a stunningly beautiful read.

Perhaps it’s the juxtaposition of my own current prolonged journey memorizing and meditating my way through the Gospel of Mark.

All I can say is that Eldredge caught it – or better caught Him. In many ways, Eldredge in Beautiful Outlaw, in each exploration of the personality of Jesus, has perhaps captured the heart of what he has been trying to say about “real men” all along.

The Jesus I am encountering on a whole new level in these vignettes, these portraits in Mark is beautifully highlighted as Eldredge strolls here and there through the four gospels, holding up at just the right angle first this old gospel daguerreotype and then another, and then through his words causing the old picture of Jesus to become a high def image right before our eyes.

Divine playfulness.

Fierce intention.

Extravagent generosity.

Disruptive honesty.

This book is addictive. It could easily be one of those titles you pick up and read through in an afternoon. But don’t. Long before Eldredge himself urges his readers to slow down in reading the book, I found I had already done so, savoring each chapter or portion of a chapter with my morning devotional walk through Mark. In another month or two, I’ll pick it up and savor my way through it again.

Thank you, John, for such refreshing, enlivening, impassioning views of the One who was and is and always will be the Beautiful Outlaw.

Take and read.

Poke the Box by Seth Godin

When my cousin was born, my uncle built a buzzer box. It was a heavy metal contraption, with a thick black cord that plugged into the wall. I looked like something from a nuclear power plant, not a kid’s toy, but that didn’t dissuade him from tossing it into the crib.

The box had two switches, some lights, and a few other controls on it. Flip one switch and a light goes on. Flip both switches and a buzzer sounds. All terrifying, of course, unless you are a kid.

A kid sees the buzzer box and starts poking it. If I do this, that happens!

Mathematicians call this a function. Put in one variable, get a result. Call and response.

Life is a buzzer box. Poke it.

My first exposure to Seth Godin’s unique style was reading his book Tribes. This year I was privileged to hear him speak at the Willow Creek Leadership Summit. Picking up his newest wee book Poke the Box was a no brainer.

Godin’s books are wee books – I love his style of breaking his message into individually titled sections rather than longer chapters. For some reason, it just seems to make the book more accessible, more easily digestible. And though the read can be swift, for me it’s always with highlighter in hand – and it always begs a reread – or two. Or three.

Though technically categorized as a business book, Poke the Box is really much more expansive in the scope of its application. Godin is really challenging us on a very primal level to examine how we do life – specifically to realize how so often we choose to play it safe, to stay the course, to repeat what everyone else has always said or to just do it the way it’s always been done (or more likely, to prefer inaction to ever attempting a way that it’s never been done before).

I can’t help but see the connection between Godin’s life challenge and the lifestyle of Jesus. When Jesus taught, people were amazed at his teaching “because he taught them as one who had authority and not as their teachers of the law.” He was no mere regurgitator of other’s opinions, be they ever so ancient and respected. He had no hesitation in making authoritative pronouncements of “you have heard that it was said, but I say to you” that would have made any other young man of thirty cringe with anxiety. Clearly, and on so many levels, Jesus poked the box. And in so doing he set an example for us to follow. But how easily we settle for something much less adventurous, much more tame and same and lame.

Godin’s clarion call in Poke the Box is a much-needed wake up call for us all in our personal lives, our professional lives, our home lives, our church lives, you name it. It’s the wisdom of becoming a starter, an initiator, a mapmaker, and not simply another safe follower or, worse, a tenacious guardian of someone else’s map and path.

It’s also just the kick in the posterior that many of us disciples of Jesus may need just about now in this greatest of all ventures we call the kingdom of God.

Take and read.