I Knew It! ...or did I?

I could never really describe the delusional problem that we all seem to suffer from. Today I stumbled on a few articles on these studies. At last, the ugly truth has a name.

The Real Problem

The greatest allies of a failing bureaucracy are not the bureaucrats; they are the common people who believe that the bureaucracy could be used for good if only it was steered in the right direction. Bureaucracy isn't a big ship with a bad captain. It's an oil slick. It isn't a productive machine that is just going the wrong direction. It is the juggernaut that systematically destroys all productive ideas because it is in its very nature to do so. The man who tries to harness a wild bureaucracy for "good" is as foolish as the various heroes of story and legend who--in their hubris--thought that they should try to control the mighty cave beast rather than just slay it.

"Bureaucracy is the death of all sound work"
-Albert Einstein

"Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy."
-Oscar Wilde

"Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism."
-Mary McCarthy

"You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing."
-Thomas Sowell

"Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies."
-Honre de Balzac

"Bureaucracies are inherently antidemocratic. Bureaucrats derive their power from their position in the structure, not from their relations with people they are supposed to serve. The people are not masters of the bureaucracy, but its clients."
-Alan Keys

Purpose Driven Toyota.

About the same time that the contemporary Christian church began to advance the idea of a Purpose Driven church, the business practices of the 1990s began promoting a new business paradigm. It's vision casting ideas were in all of the business and manufacturing books and the church basically copied those ideas word for word in their new church growth books.

If there was one shining example of business in those days, it was Toyota. Toyota had gone from mediocre to awesome so fast and their innovations were state of the art that no one company highlighted this new way of doing business better. If you sat in a business meeting or a manufacturing floor in the 90s, you heard about Toyota and how their successes had to be copied. If you read a business book or went to school for business, Toyota usually came up as an illustration of the latest business practices. Toyota was the Willow Creek of the business world... or should that be the other way around?

So, by proxy, the church was chasing after this kind of business model. The business ethic of thinkers like Toyota has as much to do with the Church Growth as anything else. It is no coincidence that the cracks in the mission of the new church are beginning to show as the recalls, lawsuits, and government investigations loom over the poster boy for purpose driven secular business.

Read this article about what went wrong with Toyota. It is a business critique of success over quality that is eerily similar to the church critique over the Purpose Driven movement. The similarity is no coincidence.

Now it is time for the church to follow the lessons of Toyota once again. When you skip quality and humble listening for bigger numbers in a spreadsheet, you fail.

Grand experiment over. Let's get back to work.

The Hidden Horror of Gospel-less Ministry

It's horrible that some churches aren't preaching the gospel correctly to their people. What people rarely consider is the horrible truth that so many of them don't ever "fix" their ministry problems when tragedy hits.

When you don't give the gospel to people in the congregations, you don't have the mindset and experience that you need to deliver the gospel in times of crisis and critical illness. If you don't understand Law and Gospel from the pulpit or in the pew, you won't know what to say at the bedside. Even the best of us have trouble in emotionally difficult situations so, if you aren't immersed in the Gospel, you aren't going to dust that off and declare repentance and the forgiveness of sins when it really really counts.

For all the talk of relevance, helping, and healing people, if you don't have the gospel then you've got nothing in clutch time. All of your rhetoric and platitudes mean nothing in those crushing times when all human words fail. I've been there. I've stood by the beds as the trendy pastors mumble positive thinking and empty hope. I've been at the scenes of a violent death where counselors don't know what to say or they say things that make it all so much worse.

This is the hidden shame of Christ-less Christianity. Nothing they have to offer is eternal... and so it becomes an insulting joke when death looms.

How Free is our Will?

Okay... so this is not about theological Free Will. This is about us and our free will in earthly terms when it comes with our powers of choice in dealing with ourselves and others. In that context I ask, "How free is our will?"

Even if you are one of those rare individuals who is humble and honest enough to admit that Total Depravity is the correct doctrine regarding our disposition towards God, there are still many otherwise intelligent people who frankly delude themselves into thinking that they are virtually immune to influences that affect their judgement.

So can the human mind be totally independent? Of course not and we wouldn't really want to achieve that. You want to be open minded. The key is not to be empty minded. The idea that we are independent moral agents which are incapable of being seduced by others is just not backed up by history or science. It is not as though people who fall under these influences are some how defective or weak. Everyone, in the right circumstances, can be pressured and manipulated. Half the time we manipulate ourselves!

This is important because about the worst way to approach any situation or idea is to go into it with a "that could never happen to me" attitude. The generations past called this hubris and it was considered the very definition of foolishness that doomed even the most noble of intentions.

The fact is that it looks like our subjective human experience is alot less reliable than we want to believe. Even worse than that, our grasp of objective truth is far from rock solid. In both cases, the people around us and the situations that we find ourselves in have a tremendous amount of influence on the very nature of our judgement. These problems of perception suggest that any attempt to understand truth must be done with a sober mind and a very critical eye (and often times that means a self-critical eye.)

I am going to include some links that highlight some research and stories that will give you an idea about what I am talking about. Please don't make these links the sum total of your research in these topics.

The concept of Groupthink is summarized in this wikipedia article.

Sometimes our own brain chemistry and mental health conspires against us. It makes us want to resolve things that don't initially make sense through any means possible. Read about cognitive dissonance here.

Sometimes we can experience very important emotional experiences that shape our lives, but these feelings may not be true or based in anything other than our own brains. After all these religious experiences can now be artificially created in lab conditions.

Sometimes we are alot weaker to peer pressure and authority than we want to admit. It affects our moral choices and claims to truth. Read about the Milgram Experiment and the Asch Conformity Experiments.

Even when you get past these influences, the very way we think is much weaker than it used to be in previous ages. Check out this list of logical fallacies and become familiar with what they are talking about. Then you can start to examine the faulty assumptions and flawed arguments in your own world view. Better than that, you can start to tell when people are trying to convince you of things that just don't cut the mustard logically.

This is just a very shallow summary of what I am talking about when it comes to being a truly independent thinker, but you get the idea. Why is this important? Because when you recognize just how badly the deck is stacked against you, there is no choice but to actively engage in a careful quest for the truth underneath the layers of delusion. When you recognize all of the subtle tendencies that all humans have working on them, you can more easily recognize when you are being pushed around by something other than logic, ethics, and plain reason. Will you able to start thinking independently with total success? Of course not, but you stand a better chance of being clear headed than if you wander through life unprepared and under the assumption that you understand everything that matters.

Does any of this interest you? Do you have any thoughts or questions?

Amen!

Go read this post over at Confessional Gadfly.

Another Problem

Pastor Weedon made an excellent point about the gospel on his blog. It got me thinking of another really big problem that is really just a different manifestation of the exact same thing:

Another problem is when we get caught up in constantly worrying about how we are "doing church" or how we are "protecting the church" rather than just actually being the church.


...and, if you happen to think that we confessional Lutherans are in some way immune to this temptation as if to say that the danger of drifting away from being Christ-centered in favor of a focus on what men need to do is merely some external danger that only afflicts the less-enlightened people "out there", I would encourage you to engage in prayer and close self-examination in light of Holy Scripture with a spirit of humility and love.

How Will Ted Know if He is Not Told?

This happened in Iraq.

I was in the small chapel for music practice. I played piano for the contemporary service and organ for the liturgical (See? I can play nice with other people when I want to. :P) As the praise band finished their practice, I started picking the hymns for the litrugical service. The drummer for the praise band (we'll call him "Sergeant Ted") walked by and glanced over my selections. As I continued to go through my binder, he scanned the lyrics.

"I have a question," Sergeant Ted said. He then asked me, "Why are all these hymns so macabre? I mean why does there have to be so much blood in them?"

I responded, "Because, Ted, the Bible says that 'without the shedding of blood there is no forgivness of sins.' Christ's bloody death on the cross for the forgiveness of your sins is the only thing that can save you from hell. It is what Christianity is all about."

He stood up as if I had just said something very odd and remarked, "That's wierd."

---------

This is what Christless Christianity does to people. You can have regularly attending church members who help run the services as your worship leaders or musicians in the music program week after week for years and those people might still not even know why topics like blood and death would show up in a Christian song. This is more common than anyone wants to admit. Lord have mercy! If you want an evangelism opportunity, go find out where the Ted's in your church are hanging out and love them enough to share the gospel with them.

As True Now as it Ever Was

"All this is the old devil and old serpent, who also converted Adam and Eve into enthusiasts, and led them from the outward Word of God to spiritualizing and self-conceit, and nevertheless he accomplished this through other outward words. Just as also our enthusiasts at the present day condemn the outward Word, and nevertheless they themselves are not silent, but they fill the world with their pratings and writings, as though, indeed, the Spirit could not come through the writings and spoken word of the apostles, but first through their writings and words he must come. Why then do not they also omit their own sermons and writings, until the Spirit Himself come to men, without their writings and before them, as they boast that He has come into them without the preaching of the Scriptures?"

-Blessed Martin Luther, Smalcald Articles (Article VIII:5-6)

Discernment Pop Quiz

Alright... get out your #2 pencils. Pop Quiz.

Question 1: Based on what is presented on the front cover, is there a problem with this book? Why or why not?





(This is one of my favorite practical application questions to spring on unsuspecting confirmands who wander too close... hehe...)

Note: Before someone accuses me of judging a book by its cover or suggests that I am taking this book title out of context, I will include part of the author's blurb about the book. In his own words:

"My goal in writing The Hole in Our Gospel was to confront people with the implications of the faith we profess. The Christian faith was never meant to be some tame anesthetizing tonic meant only to soothe our souls; no, it was intended to be a medicine so powerful that it could challenge the legion of social illnesses that plague the human race – poverty, alienation, hatred, corruption, apathy and injustice." [my emphasis added.]

I guess this is what happens when CEOs are allowed to write theological books. Did you notice that it won a "Christian Book of the Year" award from somewhere? Lord have mercy!