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https://www.christianitytoday.com/women/2019/july/books-why-let-go-let-god-is-my-lifeline.html




Why ‘Let Go and Let God’ Is My Lifeline



Trusting in the Lord has made my life both easier and harder.

 
Not long before his death, Henri Nouwen wrote in Sabbatical Journeys about some friends who were trapeze artists. They shared with Nouwen about the special relationship between flyer and catcher on the trapeze. The flyer lets go, and the catcher catches. As the flyer swings high above the crowd on the trapeze, the moment comes when she must let go. She arcs out into the air, where her sole job is to remain as still as possible as she opens her hands and waits for the strong hands of the catcher to pluck her to safety. One of the trapeze artists told Nouwen, “The flyer must never try to catch the catcher.” The catcher will catch the flyer, but she must wait in absolute trust.

The gospel calls us to a similar spirit of open-handed living. Over several decades of following Jesus, I’ve learned that the essence of surrender is found in the posture of our hearts. In this place of yielding, we give the Holy Spirit free rein to direct and sustain our journey, and we also realize that our lives are part of a much greater narrative: God’s story of hope and restoration in the lives of individuals, families, communities, and local churches.

My first big surrender came shortly after beginning a relationship with Jesus in high school. My dad went through a midlife crisis—which included a fancy sports car followed by a perm (another story, another time)—and then he shared the news that we would be moving from Colorado to Hong Kong right before my senior year. Angry and confused, I unleashed my frustration and let God know exactly how I felt about the situation. But at the end of my tirade, I added a sincere prayer: “In my heart of hearts, I really want to know you and do your will.”

This prayer has led me through other life disruptions, as well. After I graduated from college, I came to another crossroads. Should I attend law school? Or pursue vocational Christian ministry? I wasn’t afraid to minister overseas, but I did wrestle with what I considered my worst-case scenario: driving an ugly, outdated car and living in complete isolation and obscurity doing boring, mundane work day in and day out. Nevertheless, I remember praying a tearful but sincere prayer of surrender: “God, I will go wherever you want me to go—even if you ask me to work and live all alone and drive one of those old station wagons with fake wood paneling on the outside. Even then I will choose to follow you.”

When faced with my own cancer diagnosis a few years ago, I prayed another surrender prayer. Every morning I awakened in the dark with my mind racing, wondering if the diagnosis was a bad dream. As my mind cleared and the heavy reality set in, I would make my way upstairs to an overstuffed chair tucked away in a little nook, where I would pour out my fears to God. I wrestled with what seemed like reasonable, honorable desires of living long enough to witness the major milestones in my three kids’ lives. I wanted a front-row seat. The willingness to yield my plans and open my hands—even to let go of my very life—became a moment-by-moment choice.

Each time that I’ve placed my heart into the hands of my loving, good, and all-knowing God, my life has simultaneously been easier and harder. Sometimes I find myself trying to control the outcome of my circumstances. I pray with directives: “This is how you need to answer, God, and this is how you need to fix this situation.” But when I read Scripture, I am reminded of how God is the one who determines our boundaries and the exact places we should live (Acts 17:26).

We are born into this world without control over our family of origin; we have no say in who our parents are, the number of siblings we grow up with, or our birth order. We have no control over our gender, ethnic makeup, cultural heritage, family history, socioeconomic class at birth, or gifts and wiring. But God has his reasons for forming us as he has. “We are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them” (Eph. 2:10, ESV).

In the end, we may not have the opportunity to see the direct outcome of our choices or live the life we always dreamed of, but God maps out for us a way to walk in freedom—even when our circumstances don’t make sense to us. In this place of surrender, he simply asks us to let go and trust that he will catch us.





Vivian Mabuni has spent 30 years serving on staff with Cru and is the author of Warrior In Pink and Open Hands, Willing Heart. Connect with her on Instagram/Twitter @vivmabuni or on her website www.vivianmabuni.com. This piece was adapted from Open Hands Willing Heart: Discover the Joy of Saying Yes to God (releasing July 9). Copyright © 2019 by Vivian Mabuni. Published with permission by WaterBrook, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC.





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https://www.christianitytoday.com/news/2019/july/va-hospital-veterans-affairs-bible-display-religious-libert.html






VA Hospitals Can Distribute, Display Bibles Under Revised Policy




After a legal fight over a POW/MIA table, Veterans Affairs clarifies religious liberty protections.

 
In the wake of a Supreme Court decision permitting a cross to remain on a public highway, the Department of Veterans Affairs has revised its policies on religious symbols in displays at VA facilities.

VA Secretary Robert Wilkie announced last Wednesday that the new policies will reduce inconsistencies among VA facilities.

“We want to make sure that all of our Veterans and their families feel welcome at VA, no matter their religious beliefs. Protecting religious liberty is a key part of how we accomplish that goal,” he said in a statement.

“These important changes will bring simplicity and clarity to our policies governing religious and spiritual symbols, helping ensure we are consistently complying with the First Amendment to the US Constitution at thousands of facilities across the department.”

The revised policies “allow the inclusion in appropriate circumstances of religious content in publicly accessible displays at VA facilities.”

They also permit patients to request and be provided with sacred texts, symbols and religious literature during treatment at facilities or visits to VA chapels. And they allow the VA “to accept donations of religious literature, cards and symbols at its facilities and distribute them to VA patrons under appropriate circumstances or to a patron who requests them.”

The announcement noted the Supreme Court’s June 20 decision, in which it permitted the so-called “Peace Cross,” a World War I monument in Bladensburg, Maryland, to remain in a traffic circle. The VA said the case “reaffirmed the important role religion plays in the lives of many Americans and its consistency with Constitutional principles.”

The policy revisions, announced July 3, come two months after a US Air Force veteran filed suit against the director of the Manchester (New Hampshire) VA Medical Center, seeking the removal of a Bible from a POW/MIA table at that facility.

“As a Christian, he respects and loves all his military brothers and sisters and does not want to be exclusionary by the placement of the Christian Bible,” the suit states.

The Military Religious Freedom Foundation, which the suit says received complaints from 14 other veterans about the display, decried the VA’s revamped rules.

“These brand new VA policies — clearly based upon the US Supreme Court’s recent, idiotic decision in the Bladensburg Cross case — are nothing more than a transparent and repugnant attempt to further buttress and solidify fundamentalist Christianity as the insuperable official religion of choice for the VA, our Armed Forces, and this country,” said MRFF President Mikey Weinstein.

The MRFF has previously complained about similar Bible displays at other locations, such as a naval hospital in Japan and a Wyoming Air Force base.

First Liberty Institute, a nonprofit legal organization that sent a letter in May to Wilkie requesting “a VA-wide policy that permits Bibles to be included in POW/MIA remembrance displays,” applauded the VA’s revamped policies.

“This new VA policy is a welcome breath of fresh air,” said Mike Berry, director of military affairs for First Liberty Institute, which also helped defend the Maryland cross monument.

“The Supreme Court recently upheld the constitutionality of religious displays with historic roots such as those commonly found in VA facilities. We commend the VA for taking this necessary and positive action.”






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https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2019/july-web-only/sollereder-evolution-was-death-suffering-gods-plan.html






Predators and Prey: Was Death Part of God’s Plan All Along?



Q&A: A theologian finds God’s care amidst suffering in an evolutionary creation.

 
Last month, scientists proposed a new ancestor of all life: a tiny, versatile organism akin to a stem cell. It would truly be an awesome God who could bring about all lifeforms from such a tiny creature, according to the view of evolutionary creationists. But the story of life isn’t always pretty: Animal death and suffering over millions of years is part of the history of our world. Creatures compete for limited resources, often at each other’s expense. Predators—including humans—rely on the death of other creatures for survival. These things are often cited as consequences of the fall in Eden, but could competition and pain have been part of God’s plan all along? And could such an awesome God, complicit in so much suffering, still be a good God as well?

Bethany Sollereder is seeking to answer that very question. Sollereder, who holds a PhD in theology from the University of Exeter and is currently a postdoctoral fellow in science and religion at the University of Oxford, was first inspired to study the theology of animal suffering after hearing other Christians struggle with the interaction of faith and evolution. Having just completed a four-year residency at The Kilns, the home of C. S. Lewis, Sollereder is the author of God, Evolution, and Animal Suffering (Routledge, 2018).

Sollereder spoke with CT recently about how her work has affected her own faith and understanding of the created world.

Would you say there’s scientific evidence that animals actually suffer?

Well, in one sense, all suffering is understood by analogy. I can’t prove, scientifically, that you suffer. All I can do is look at the signs you are giving me. And the same is true for animals. Where we see a similar brain system that processes pain in similar ways to us, chemical reactions in the body that are similar, and particularly when we see behavioral responses that are similar to ours, we can assume that there’s suffering.

Scientists recently started using post-traumatic stress types of therapies with orphaned elephants and actually found them really successful, because elephants’ suffering is similar enough that the treatment can be similar and have really good results. The Calgary Zoo found that polar bears were acting very anxiously, pacing and scratching and doing the sorts of things that we would think of as anxious behaviors. One of the caretakers decided to put them on an anti-anxiety medication and found huge improvement. They started playing again; they stopped pacing.

So while you can’t prove that they suffer, there’s lots of good evidence for it.

The theory of evolution is contingent on a whole lot of suffering, over millions of years. What kinds of reactions do you see people have when they’re trying to reconcile animal suffering and evolution with a good God?

Well, there’s usually two reactions. One is, “Why would a good God allow all these animals to suffer?” And the second is, “Doesn’t the Bible say that death and suffering came with the Fall, with the sin of Adam and Eve?”

Evolution actually gives us a compelling answer of its own, which is that suffering, to a certain extent, is necessary and good for survival. People might think they’d have a much better life if they couldn’t feel pain, but that’s actually not true.

For example, Hansen’s Disease, which is commonly known as leprosy, actually just kills the pain nerves in your body. All the damage we associate with leprosy—fingers falling off and that kind of thing—happens because people hurt themselves and don’t realize it. They’re actually destroying their own bodies because they can’t feel pain. Jesus’ healing of lepers was restoring their ability to feel pain.

The Christian message has never been one of pain avoidance, right? It’s “take up your cross and follow me.” When we’ve given in to the Western idea that a comfortable life is a happy life, we’ve become pain-averse in ways that are actually problematic for our own flourishing. Which is paradoxical.

The second reaction is, “Didn’t death come through the Fall?” There’s real division on this. About one-half of scholars in this area say yes, suffering and death only entered with the Fall, but the Fall happened at the very beginning of time, whether because Satan and his angels fell or because there’s simply something about creation itself that entails a fallenness. There’s another group of us who say, actually, no, sin entered the world through humans, but death and suffering are not the result of the Fall.

It is interesting to me that throughout Scripture, God is constantly pointing out the most vicious wild animals, from the mighty leviathan to the fierce lions, with special pride. God’s speeches to Job are basically one long tirade about how God made all the most problematic bits of creation, from hailstorms to carcass-eating eagles. If all of that was a result of the fall, why does God take such pains to claim it as divine handiwork?

But also, what is meant by death is a little ambiguous. Adam and Eve are told that “in the day you eat of the tree, you shall surely die,” but they don’t fall down dead physically. When Paul talks about the entrance of sin in Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15, he says things like, “I die every day.” He’s not saying his body has died. He’s talking about some sort of spiritual death.

Have you found people who want to blame Satan for all animal suffering? What problems does that cause?

I think it raises two problems. The first is theological. It seems odd for God to have given up so much of creation to Satan and then not have told us about it. The overwhelming chorus of Genesis is that the world is good. Everything about the Psalms, even after sin has entered the world, says that “the earth is the Lord’s and everything in it.” So I think that if that was going to be important to the structure of the world, God might have been a bit clearer in the scriptural text.

The second problem is scientific, and it’s this: Darwin’s insight is that it’s the competition, it’s the violence that drives the beauty and the skill and the cooperation. So if you say that violence and competition are due to sin, then you’re handing over the root of all the goodness, beauty, and skill to Satan as well. Or you try and start dividing it up in really odd ways, like when it’s competitive it’s Satan, but when it turns out for the good it’s God’s work. And I find that that becomes really, really messy.

And the suffering is part of what makes that creature itself; we know that God delights in the creatureliness of his creatures.

[Theologian] Christopher Southgate pulls from Gerard Manley Hopkins’s view of “selving,” and he sort of sees God celebrating each creature becoming itself, and even transcending itself, as part of God’s purpose. The purpose of God in creation is a lot wider than just humans, and because the Bible is really mostly interested in humans, we don’t hear the rest of that story. So we have to speculate. This may not have the stamp of inspired approval, but I think it’s an important thing to do, especially in this moment of ecological crisis.

How did your understanding of God change as you undertook writing your book ? What have you learned that surprised you?

I used to think of God primarily as the cosmic architect who carefully planned, measured, and built everything, like an engineer. But engineers and architects tend to work with non-living materials. You use dead wood; you use stone.

But when I looked in Scripture, most of the analogies are organic: They’re God as king, God as parent, God as lover. Then you’re not working with a dead thing that you can plan and calculate and position. You’re working with dynamic entities who have their own modes of being. And so I sort of laid down a lot of the views of God planning so much as God accompanying, coaching, loving, growing.

So what does the cross teach us about all of this?

One view—shared by around half of the scholars who write on this topic—says the redemption that happened on the cross wasn’t just for humans, but for all the suffering of the cosmos. Jesus shared not only in humanity but in the molecules of the world. The carbon molecules in Jesus’ body were forged in the heart of a long-dead star, just like every molecule of carbon in your body. And so there’s this deep continuity of Christ with all of creation, animate and inanimate.

And then finally, you can take it to mean something like what [philosopher] Holmes Rolston says: that all of creation is cruciform, that what you’re seeing playing out in Jesus’ life is true of the whole world. In one of Jesus’ parables (John 12:24–26), the seed has to fall into the ground and die before it can produce new fruit, and in the whole evolutionary process, death is necessary to new life. You can kind of read the whole narrative of creation as a larger-scale story that the passion of Christ is the key to understanding. So Christ dies in the death of each animal and is raised in the life of all the animals who benefit out of that death.

And through the cross, Christ is really showing us how to love.

Yes. Here’s another one of my crazy beliefs: I don’t think that animals love. I think that love is a particularly human thing because it doesn’t come about naturally. I think that love is something that is sort of fermented by God in the soul. It’s baked in the soul, like bread. Bread is taking natural ingredients and combining them in a particular way to turn them into something wonderful. The same is true of beer, which doesn’t occur in nature. There’s the sort of fermentation process that doesn’t necessarily happen in nature, but we figured out how to do it.

And I think love is the same: It takes the natural evolutionary desires, whether that’s altruism, the desire for security, or selfish desires, and God takes these natural ingredients and starts working in us to develop love in our hearts, and we can resist that. And I think that’s what sin is: It’s resisting the work of God as God is transforming us into the creatures who love.

Has your understanding of what love is changed through your study of animal suffering?

I think it’s highlighted for me how patient love is. God’s love in relationship to animals doesn’t rush the process, doesn’t intervene to get to the goal faster. Learning to see the patience of God in creation and the way that love allows the other to be the other has really challenged how I have relationships. I’m not just trying to change other people to suit me, but really take them as they are and love them as they are, whether they change or not.

God’s never given up on creation. We talk about the major extinction event that’s happening now and it’s a problem. Human activity is devastating thousands and millions of species. But there have been five major extinction events in the past where 90 percent of the species have been wiped off the face of the earth, and conditions like the Snowball Earth, where there were at least five feet of ice over the whole of the earth. If another 90 percent species loss happens because of us, humans might not survive. But life probably will. And God will continue to work out the celebration of life, the journey, even if humans manage to eliminate themselves.

Because Christ is still victorious, even if we’re making terrible decisions.

Absolutely. Which is not to say we don’t need to worry about climate change. But there’s an ongoing hope in the resilience of the creation and the patience of God.




Elyse Durham is a writer in Detroit.





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https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2019/july-web-only/elusive-presence-cult-personality-pastors.html







And Now, the Star of the Show....


How we inadvertently create a cult of personality around our preachers.

 
Here is the “most effective” and terrible sermon illustration I’ve ever used:

One day my wife and I were arguing about something—the exact subject has long been forgotten. In the course of the argument—probably when she was getting the best of me—I became so frustrated that I hit our dining room wall with my fist. The wall didn’t move, of course, but I expected to at least put a hole in the drywall. As fortune (or providence) would have it, the place I decided to punch with all my force was backed by a two-by-four stud. Let’s just say it hurt.

We both fell silent after that, and I set about sweeping up the kitchen and dining room (we were remodeling at the time). It became immediately apparent that there was something wrong with my hand, as I could barely hold on to the broom with my right hand.

My wife noticed that I was in pain and that my hand didn’t look right. She gently lifted my hand to look at it. “I think it’s broken,” she said. “We need to get you to the emergency room.” Her diagnosis was soon confirmed by the medical staff at the clinic.

From the point where she looked at my hand, there was no anger, resentment, or moral superiority on her part—all of which would have been justified. She was just concerned about my welfare. She very well knew that there was some part of me that was striking out at her when I hit the wall, but instead she focused on the fact that I vented my anger elsewhere than at her and was in deep pain as a result of my foolishness.

I used this illustration in a sermon on grace. It was the final illustration, tailored to drive home the truth that God treats us with kindness and grace even when we show ourselves to be hostile and angry, even toward him. I thought it the perfect illustration.

Turns out, very few listeners heard all that. Comments after the service, and for a few weeks running, were of three sorts:

“Thank you for being so vulnerable and sharing that story.”

And, in a low voice so no one else could hear, “I’ve done that but was too afraid to tell anyone.”

And of course, “That was so funny!”

No one ever told me that as a result of the illustration they understood God’s grace better. No one.

But they understood me better. They learned something about my temper. My remodeling efforts. About my wife and my marriage. And they were entertained.

By contemporary standards, it was effective: It was riveting; it was funny; listeners remembered it for weeks, even years.

But they remembered the wrong thing. They remembered me. They didn’t remember anything about God’s grace, as far as I could tell. Therefore I have concluded that it was about the worst illustration I ever used.

The problem is this: This type of sermon illustration is the order of the day in evangelical preaching. And it’s one reason evangelical preaching is in dire straits.

When Style Becomes Substance
Preaching is one time in the week when we have the opportunity to hear about something other than ourselves, other than the horizontal. It’s the time to hear about God and the wonder and mysteries of his love, of what he’s done for us in Christ. But more and more, evangelical preaching has become another way we talk about ourselves, and in this case, to learn about the preacher.

Once again, in the interests of identifying with the culture, the entertainment world has become the model here for many churches. To begin with, the sermon in many evangelical churches represents a cross between the patter of a standup comic and the opening monologues of late-night television. The idea is to be “authentic”—that is, natural and unscripted and funny to boot.

This, of course, is naive as naive can get, because you can be sure that those opening monologues are hardly unscripted. The patter of the comedian, as well as his or her persona, has been fashioned and sharpened with months or years of practice. Late-night TV hosts and comics are entertaining, no question about that. But they are entertaining precisely because they are anything but authentic. Instead, they are deeply practiced in their profession.

The evangelical sermon mimics all this but without the use of a teleprompter or without repeating the same shtick honed over months of gigs. There are no podiums or pulpits, no notes, not to mention a sermon manuscript. You can be sure, however, that the preacher has practiced the sermon in the quiet of his or her office and memorized his or her best lines, as well as the right gestures at the right moment—all so that he or she can appear authentic.

It’s not just the setting but the content that communicates the most troublesome thing: that the sermon is, in the end, mostly about the horizontal. Given the length of the sermon and the method of delivery and the personal illustrations from the preacher’s life to drive home the message—it all brings an inadvertent focus on the one who is preaching.

Let me emphasize that word inadvertent. Because I doubt if many preachers invest in this style of contemporary preaching so as to exalt themselves. These men and women love God and strive to make him known. What they don’t recognize is that the style they are engaged in thwarts their desires.

Whatever happened to the pulpit?
Take the method of delivery—often without a pulpit (at best, a transparent lectern), and often by walking back and forth across the stage while preaching. And doing so for 30 to 45 minutes, at least half if not up to 75 percent of the worship hour. What all this communicates is this: The preacher is by far and away the most important person in the room. The preacher is the person upon whom we are riveted for the greater part of the service.

I didn’t realize how theologically important the traditional pulpit was until I received a comment after one guest sermon I preached. The church’s pastoral team liked to preach from the center of the stage and wander back and forth during the sermon—the standup comic style. I, however, stood behind the makeshift pulpit—a wooden lectern sitting on a small table. I did so mainly for practical reasons—I’m pretty dependent on notes and/or a manuscript, and I didn’t wander from them.

After the sermon, one man said to me: “Thanks for preaching from the pulpit.” When I asked why, he explained, “The pulpit reminds us that the authority of the preacher comes not from the preacher and his personality. The pulpit is a symbol that the sermon derives its authority from the church, which in turn derives its authority from Scripture.”

Pondering his comments for weeks afterward, I realized how much a pulpitless sermon, and especially the sermon delivered in standup comic style, does an extraordinarily good job of entertaining people and making the preacher, and not the preached word, the center of attention.

A funny thing happened to me on the way to church
Add to that the problem of content. Make no mistake: Jesus is preached in many evangelical churches still. But not necessarily foremost.

We evangelicals are suckers for the practical sermon that tells us how to live for Jesus. But too often, the practical crowds out the biblical. A sermon on “Five Ways to Keep Your Marriage Strong” might mention Jesus or the Bible here and there, but take away those references and the substance of the sermon remains the same: great, practical relational psychology. In a similar vein, we hear sermons on how to manage one’s finances, with the key insights drawn from financial self-help literature, decorated with verses from Proverbs. And then there are the sermons on raising children and finding a career and work against abortion so on and so forth. Such sermons are full of sound and wise advice, and we need sound and wise advice on many topics.

The question is: Is this the most vital, relevant thing we have to communicate in worship? The one time in the week in which we gather to praise and glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, is this really the most important thing we can say? Have we exhausted the treasures and wonders of God’s Word? Have we said all we can say about the glories of salvation? Or are we bored with talk about God, so that we revert once again to talk about ourselves and how to make our lives more manageable?

One giveaway that we are deeply tempted by the horizontal in preaching is the number of illustrations preachers today use from their own lives. There was a time when preachers were discouraged from using their own lives as sermon illustrations. But sometime starting in the 1960s that began to change. The idea was to show listeners that the preacher was no different from the listeners and faced the same challenges, difficulties, and temptations as everyone else. This led to more attentive and appreciative listeners, who now felt they could connect psychologically with their preacher.

Today, it’s not uncommon to hear a sermon in which the opening, closing, and key illustration from the sermon’s main point is taken from the life and experience of the pastor and his family. Such sermons do a wonderful job of helping listeners connect with the pastor. And pastors keep using them precisely because when people leave the service and shake their hand, they say what a wonderful sermon it was, with comments like, “I love hearing about your family” and “Your kids are so cute” and “I really identify with you.”

Really? We want our congregations to identify with us? This is precisely the problem with personal illustrations: It inadvertently puts the spotlight on the preacher. Within a few months of such preaching, everyone knows the quirks of each member of the pastor’s family, his triumphs and failures in key parts of his life, his passions and his dislikes, and so forth. In the end, they know more about their pastor than they know about Jesus.

Some pastors defend the practice by saying they only use negative examples of themselves—talking about ways in which they have failed to live up to the call of Christ. What they don’t realize is that this just raises their status even higher with the congregation. Invariably, the illustrations turn on a moment or realization when the preacher recognized his flaw and changed direction. So now the pastor is someone who is a model of humility! And even if the pastor says, “I still struggle with this,” either no one really believes her or they exalt her as a model of spiritual seriousness—they think, She really is working hard on her spiritual life!

There is, in short, hardly a way to use an illustration from one’s personal life without it distracting listeners’ gaze from Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith. That role has now been subsumed by the preacher, who depends on the personal illustration to make the sermon relevant.

Too many evangelical pastors have become addicted to using them because, let’s face it, they love the feedback. People pump their hand after the service and tell them how much they enjoyed that little story. I know of where I speak. Pastors are a lonely and insecure lot, and we need affirmation as much as (and maybe more) than everyone else. It is very difficult to resist this temptation in a day when the personal, the intimate, and tell-all is the order of the day everywhere else.

(It is no wonder that we’ve stopped understanding this part of the service as “worship.” It isn’t in so many of our churches. In this regard, I thank God for praise choruses—they at least keep the service from completely collapsing into the horizontal.)

Some suggestions
The way forward is not hard to fathom, and let me take privilege of being more hortatory in this article, as I do have experience in preaching.

First, we might bring back pulpits. It doesn’t have to be the kind that remind us of churches of yesteryear. How about designing a contemporary pulpit that accents the fact that the preacher has been commissioned by the church, and that the sermon is finally under the authority of the church—all of which is under the authority of God? Something that says in its design that in this moment, the sermon—the spoken word of God—is not about the speaker of that word but about the God who stands with and above the preacher.

Second, pastors might shorten the sermon so that the service is not dominated by one person and one voice. We can make room for more singing. Make room for more prayer. Make room for silence. Maybe make room for the regular celebration of the sacraments/ordinances. In other words, we can make room for God.

That means congregations have to give the pastor more time for sermon preparation. As hard as it might be to believe, it takes more time to prepare a shorter sermon than a longer one, because every word and phrase becomes ever more weighted. It requires the preacher to think hard about what to keep in and what to leave out.

Third, I’d suggest we put a moratorium on personal illustrations—or at least go to some lengths to curtail the number. Preachers can tell they have become addicted to personal illustrations the moment they decide to stop using them. Try for a few weeks not to use any, and what you’ll see is your mind returning to yourself and your experience time and again to drive home a point.

Of course, in a People magazine/Facebook culture, where we are dying to know the intimate details of others’ lives, where someone doesn’t seem authentic unless they reveal something from their personal life—well, we cannot be effective communicators in this culture without dropping in the occasional personal illustration. People want to identify personally with speakers and preachers and writers. So if we want to gain an audience in this culture, we have to offer them a bit of ourselves. This is precisely why, when I am a guest speaker at a church, I try to include one personal illustration toward the beginning of my talk. For better or worse, it makes it more likely that the audience will give me an ear. It’s also why my publisher asked me to include a few in my book.

So I get it. But I’m unclear why a pastor, who has all sorts of occasions other than worship to lift the veil and let the congregation see him as more than a preacher, needs week after week to draw on his own life to drive home a point in sermon after sermon. And I’ve seen too many instances when the personal anecdote becomes such a crutch that a cult of personality slowly but surely begins to develop around the pastor.

Part of this is due to sheer laziness—believe me, I speak from personal acquaintance with the vice. It’s so much easier to reach into one’s memory than it is to read extensively. And when Sunday morning is breathing down your neck, it’s just too easy to reach for the personal illustration.

Part of this is due to the fact that preachers do not feel they have time to read widely and deeply, in literature, in history, in politics, in theology. So they don’t have anything in the tank when they sit down to write a sermon. It’s another reason congregations need to insist that their pastors take anywhere from 10 to 15 hours a week in sermon preparation.

Fourth, preachers need to ask themselves at the beginning, the middle, and the end of sermon preparation: “Is this mostly about God? Does this help people better grasp who God is, and what he has done for us in Christ? Does it first and foremost exalt Christ?”

One sign of how horizontal our faith has become is the internal objection that our minds raise at this point: Really? Can I preach about God week after week? I mean, how much can one say about Christ before it gets old or one starts repeating oneself?

As if God is finite. As if there is only so much one can say about his countless attributes? As if heaven will get boring after a few weeks of praise because we will have run out of things to praise.

One objection, of course, is a good one: “Doesn’t my congregation need guidance on how to live in Christ?” Yes! And when that guidance is thoroughly and firmly grounded in who Christ is and what he has done for us, then it will be more relevant and meaningful than anything we can conjure up by talking about our needs with highlight reels from our lives.






THE ELUSIVE PRESENCE
As Christianity Today's editor in chief, in this column I reflect on American Christianity, but especially evangelical Christianity. I’ve been embedded in the movement for over five decades, so I should have something to say by now. And what I have to say about the movement is more or less what I have to say to myself, as I see in myself the same shortcomings and potential that I see in the movement at large. The title of the column, “The Elusive Presence,” is deliberately borrowed from The Elusive Presence: The Heart of Biblical Theology by Samuel Terrien, originally published in 1978. I read the book soon after it was published, but today I don’t consciously remember much from it except the title (though I suspect it has formed me in ways I remain unaware of). As this series goes on, the careful reader will understand why this is an apt title for the column. (Subscribe to The Galli Report newsletter for updates.)

Mark Galli
Mark Galli is editor in chief of Christianity Today and author, most recently, of Karl Barth: An Introductory Biography for Evangelicals.
PREVIOUS THE ELUSIVE PRESENCE COLUMNS:
Whatever Happened to Communion & Baptism?
The Temptations of Evangelical Worship
The Church’s Sickness Unto Death
More . . .





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 Predators and Prey: Was Death Part of God’s Plan All Along?
The same is true of beer, which doesn’t occur in nature. There’s the sort of fermentation process that doesn’t necessarily happen in nature, but we figured out how to do it.

Sorry,  all fruit and grain when crushed or rotten will have naturally occurring alcohol. As long as there is sugar, yeast and water alcohol will happen.

Bread in water and left to sit has these ingredients and naturally turns to beer.  This is exactly how the earliest beer makers, the early Egyptians, made their bread beer. She is obviously a thinker, not a researcher...

...yet she didn't think that the scriptures about animals were pertinent when she was trying to understand evolution...

 Something is off about animals: 
1st hint: The serpent is declared to be more evil than the other beasts, implying that they are / have a lesser evil.

2nd hint: the serpent is cursed above, ie, more than, the other animals, a weird thing to say if they were not evil.

3d hint: the flood was a judgement on the wicked violence of man and the animals.


Many Christians suggest that the evil of animals is GOD's response to Adam's sin but that would necessitate GOD creating evil beings as a response to evil which fails at two levels: 1. GOD is light and light cannot create darkness and 2. how is more evil an answer to stop evil?

Since the animals need not be actually evil to show the fall into savagery as a natural effect of sin, the thought occurs, why were they said to be evil lite? Especially at the time the serpent was said to be full bodied evil BEFORE Adam ate? If we accept the serpent as being evil when he was mentioned to be evil then why must we put off the evil of animals from when they were said to be evil until AFTER Adam ate?

Then there is the contention that sin can only accrue to those who have chosen to be sinners by their free will decison....but animals would seem to not have the ability to make a free will decison though they are judged for their sinfulness as the flood story tells us. Hmmm.....only an intelligent spirit who chose by its free will to be sinful and then was moved into an animal body fits this particular bill at all, eh?

If some evil spirits imbue some animals, that is, if some sinful spirits receive animal bodies when they are moved into the world, Matt 13:36-39, would that cause any serious disruption to Christian thinking? It is not regular thinking but it does follow scripture and as far as I can see, it does no harm to existing revelations of GOD's nature...