dancing cripples

I went to Avatar a week or so ago.  I know I’m a little late.  I’m a big sci-fi/fantasy fan, but not a big 3-D fan.  So it took me a while to go.  I think what finally put me past the tipping point was listening to a bit of Mark Driscoll’s Avatar evaluation (Mark is the pastor of Mars Hill Church in Seattle – big church).  Now granted if you know anything about Mark Driscoll — some call him the cussing pastor — you know that he likes to speak his mind and he enjoys a bit of controversy.

Anyway Pastor Driscoll called Avatar “the most demonic, satanic movie I’ve ever seen.” He called it “demonic paganism” with a portrayal of a “false Jesus,” a “false resurrection” and a “false heaven.”  Driscoll remarked, “That any Christian could watch that without seeing the overt demonism is beyond me.”  Such remarks coming from a professed fan of ultimate fighting — I decided I needed to see for myself this most demonic, satanic film.

So here are a few thoughts –

1) I thought the 3-D was actually quite good.  The glasses made the movie a little dark, but this was not your father’s 3-D experience.

2) The movie most definitely has a pantheistic (god is in everything, everything is god) worldview, but that has been one of Hollywood’s preferred world-views for years.  We might as well say that Star Wars and the Lion King were demonic movies (both were also quite pantheistic).

3) On the other hand there were some significant connectors to the true story of life — the gospel story — watching the movie you sensed the embrace of things like unconditional love, self-sacrifice, resurrection, incarnation, and even the restoration of creation.  C.S. Lewis suggested that story themes like this can awaken our sehnsucht — an innate sense that we were made for something we are missing.

4) Finally I like the dichotomy that John Ortberg points out in a Leadership Journal article.  He writes,

…the qualities in the heroes (of the movie Avatar) are remarkably consistent with many of the words listed by church leaders (in their description of mature Christians): courageous, loving, giving, loyal, generous. What it means to be a good person has been embedded by God pretty deeply into human consciousness.  How we get there is another matter.  Then I’ll ask this question: do you think the average unchurched person in America thinks of these characteristics when they hear the word “Christian”? Not so much.

If you go to Avatar, enjoy it through the lens of a good Biblical world-view.  It is pantheistic, but it also reminds me that there are elements of the gospel — at least reminders of a hunger for the gospel planted within all people.  I would encourage you to go with someone who is not a Jesus-follower and have a good conversation about their world-view and your world-view.  But just a head’s up — I wouldn’t start with the words — “that was the most demonic, satanic movie I’ve ever seen.”  I statement like that tends to be a conversation stopper.

So what do Icebergs, Ducks and the Kingdom of God have in common?

Last Sunday after the Midtown Gathering, a man was sharing with me some of the issues, ideas, and ponderings that he has been wrestling with lately.  At one point he asked me something like this…  “So do you think the church is getting it?”  I’ll be honest I don’t always even know what “it” is, but it’s a great question that has many different forms.  Are we getting the “church without walls” vision?  Are figuring out how to “leave a gospel mark” on the world?  Are taking seriously the charge to be more like Jesus?  Are we changing in a positive direction?

So I’ve been thinking about that — are we and am I getting it?

Alan Webber, a business journalist, former editor at Harvard Business Review has a blog called “Rules of Thumb.”  Yesterday’s blog was entitled “Icebergs and Ducks.”  What do icebergs and ducks have in common?  With both icebergs and ducks you can’t get the full picture unless you look below the surface.  Ever since the movie the Titanic we have known that 80% of an iceberg is below the surface.  Same with ducks, if you look at a duck floating on the water, everything looks calm, placid and passive, but below the surface, those little feet are paddling like crazy.  It’s all below the surface.

It’s no different in the Kingdom of God.  In order to know if I or we “are getting it,” we have to look below the surface.  This is true for the church and for us as individuals.  In fact Proverbs 4:23 says, “Above all else guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life.”  The very wellspring of life is below the surface.

But where do we look to determine how we are doing?  We tend to look surface level.  It’s easier, quicker, more quantifiable.  Is the church getting “it?”  Well the offerings are increasing, the number of people coming to our gatherings are increasing, the number of complaints we are getting is decreasing — yep we are getting it.  But if “it” is below the surface — surface level looks don’t really answer the question.

I’m not saying we’ll never see the changes above the surface, of course we will, but we need to be students of what is below the surface.  So I’m looking and listening for below surface stories of heart change:  Transformation, freedom from addiction, relational reconciliation, people focusing more on what I can give than on what I need to get, movement from consumer-oriented church-shopping to community-oriented teammates working together for the cause of Christ.

There is a parable coming up in our study of Mark that says, “The Kingdom of God is like a mustard seed.”  The mustard seed is such a tiny seed but it grows above the surface into a might tree.  But the change, the growth, the life, started below the surface.

So what’s going on below the surface in you?

Last week, two different articles were forwarded to me regarding Millennials.  Both articles referred to a recent report form the Pew Center entitled “Religion Among the Millennials.” It’s part of Pew’s ongoing research of the generation of young adults between 18-29. 

While the findings from this report are of great interest to me — 18-29 year olds make up half our community — I could have told you some of the results without the need for a survey.  Living in a university town, you pretty much know that millennials tend to tip to the left politically, are more tolerant of differences in people’s lifestyles, thoughts and beliefs, and they are fairly open to change.

Their lack of “belonging” when it comes to faith-organizations didn’t surprise me either.  We recently did a message series at Calvary entitled “UnChristian” and our eyes were opened to the reputation that the church has with millennials.  In fact millennials are more unconnected to church then any previous generation — at the same age.  At the same time the Pew research is finding that although millennials are extremely disconnected from church, their belief systems still closely resemble that of older people today.  One paragraph reads,

“Young adults’ beliefs about life after death and the existence of heaven, hell and miracles closely resemble the beliefs of older people today. Though young adults pray less often than their elders do today, the number of young adults who say they pray every day rivals the portion of young people who said the same in prior decades. And though belief in God is lower among young adults than among older adults, Millennials say they believe in God with absolute certainty at rates similar to those seen among Gen Xers a decade ago.”

In other words, it is less the case that this generation is losing faith and more the case that they are leaving church.  They are unplugging from religious organizations at an unprecedented rate.

The question is why are they dropping out?  The book UnChristian has several reasons.  Robert Putnam — author of the book Bowling Alone – focuses on one of those reasons.  Last year in a presentation that Putnam gave for the Pew Foundation.  He said this,

“Young Americans are dropping out of religion at an alarming rate of 5-6 times the historic rate (30-40 percent have no religion today versus 5-10 percent a generation ago).  ….youth’s religious disaffection is largely due to discomfort with religiosity having been tied to conservative politics.”

Last week I wrote two blog posts about evangelism.  The word literally means “tell good news.”  So I asked the question, “How did telling good news get such a bad rap?”  I think the reason might be that somewhere along the line we traded the good news of the (big K) — Kingdom of God for the okay news of a (little k) kingdom of politics.  If our politics is keeping us from reaching millennials — it might be time to let the donkey and the elephant retire to pasture.

If you would like to ponder the difference between Big K-good news and little-k good news, click BIG K to listen to a talk on that issue.

Last Saturday, we celebrated State Patty’s day in State College.  Crowds of people descended upon the bars for 16 hours of alcoholic-induced partying.  Which made me think of “the tipping point” concepts described by Malcolm Gladwell in his book of the same name.   

Now I tend to be attracted to numbers. I’m not talking about complex mathematical equations, numbers as in crowds. As a communicator I get energized by crowds. As a pastor I want to see crowds of people become connected in smaller communities where they can find support, friendship and growth. As a citizen of the Kingdom of God who is in love with Jesus and the city where He has called me to live, I want to see multitudes of people encounter Jesus.

There’s nothing wrong with being attracted to numbers — it’s not about counting people, it’s simply about realizing that people count.

But I think I veer off course when I am contemplating the strategies needed to help multitudes of people encounter Jesus.  My default is to think that it takes numbers to influence numbers. But it seems like Jesus thought that when it comes to the process of transformation — individual and city-wide — quality matters far more than quantity.

The words that changed D.L. Moody’s life were spoken to him by a man passionate about crowds. He said, “Moody, the world has yet to see what God can do with one person fully committed to Him.” Jesus loved the whole world and drew significant crowds but he invested his life in 12 disciples (11 were fully committed) and couldn’t we say that those 11 had a significant part in changing the world.

Malcolm Gladwell’s, book The Tipping Point is a study of how organizations change, how people are influenced to change. How does a system reach the “tipping point” whereby people and culture are transformed?  Gladwell documents that it takes no more than six children in a school to begin wearing a certain brand of sport shoe to reach the tipping point whereby in just a few days a hundred children will begin wearing that same brand of shoe.

Don’t get obsessed by the number, but what if Jesus and Gladwell are right?  What if a small group of people fully committed can bring an organization or a city to a tipping point of change?

Then the question in our city is which 6% will have the highest quality of commitment to their cause?  Which 12/11 will band together through the thick and thin of full commitment?  If 6% of the people in a city — or a church for that matter — become 100% committed to making Jesus the tipping point in our region, what would happen?

State Patty’s Day is a local (Penn State student created) knock-off of St. Patrick’s day which calls students to about 16 hours of alcoholic excess.   It’s a mess.  This year, a group of folks from Calvary and a couple of other campus ministries went downtown into the heart of State Paddy’s day and gave away free hot chocolate, prayer-walked, and helped drunk people find their way home.  In addition we did a reverse confessional booth — we confessed the sins of the church to those who aren’t Christians — and had multiple opportunities to help people encounter Jesus.  My guess is that there were under 50 people involved in this State Paddy’s day outreach.

So I was just thinking what would happen if next time around — we got 6%.  For the sake of easy numbers, let’s guess that 10,000 students were downtown drinking.  What if next year we have 600 people prayer-walking, helping drunken students find their way home, giving hot-chocolate, and talking to people about Jesus?

I wonder if that would bring a tipping point — for good, rather than for a tipping point for a pint?

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