Snippet: A Profoundly Simple Definition of Spiritual Maturity

Snip·pet | ˈsnipit | noun a small piece or brief extract.

This one is from Chip Stam, quoted by Mike Cosper:

“A mature believer is easily edified.”

Cosper is the guy behind “The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill” podcast. The podcast (12 total episodes) chronicles the rise and fall of a very influential church in Seattle from the late 90’s to its demise in 2014, weeks after its founding pastor (Mark Driscoll) resigned.

Driscoll was a uniquely powerful communicator who hated listening to most other preachers because they didn’t keep his attention.

His models for preaching included shock jocks and comedians like Chris Rock.

But early in the article, Cosper points out that Rock would test his material in small venues before using it on the big stage. But he was always concerned that his celebrity and personality would draw the laughter, so he would test his content using the most deadpan voice and personality he could muster.

The snippet from Chip Spam follows this in Cosper’s article:

“It turns out, though, that [Driscoll] missed the deeper ethic of Rock’s craft: that the substance of the material was more important than the presentation. It had to work without him.”

We can spend a lot of time talking about and thinking about the problem of building a church around a celebrity pastor’s personality.

Or we can spend more time asking whether we need star power and entertainment to engage with God and his Word and to worship him. And if so, why? And what can we do to grow past that?

All that said, as I think about this, I want to keep a few things in mind.

First, I’ve spent some time pondering the fact that some pastors can’t help being stars. If you’ve experienced Francis Chan, for example, I don’t think he can help it. And he’s spent a good part of his ministry running away from being made into a celebrity.

Second, Old Testament worship called for a lot of pageantry and would have been highly entertaining in that day. The reason you may not see that in the New Testament could be that the churches were small and met in homes.

Third, I’ve attended services led by people who tried to keep it simple and wanted to be the antithesis of the big mega-church style of worship. In some ways this describes Five Oaks. But the “simple style” can be and often is just a different way of being stylish.

In the end, maybe what we need to ask is, whatever type of church we attend, can we connect with God in quietness and aloneness? Can we still hear from God when the preacher is having an off week? Can we still sing praises from our hearts when we don’t particularly like the song or the song leader is struggling with some of the notes?

Am I easily edified?

And as a pastor and church leader, I know we at least have these twin responsibilities—to equip our folks to connect with God outside of our weekend services, in the mundane of everyday life, and to make sure that the substance of what we share works without us.

Photo by Rachel Coyne on Unsplash

Snippet: When Even Our Best Disappoints

Snip·pet | ˈsnipit | noun a small piece or brief extract.

Here’s one from Justin Giboney, quoting a Twitter post by Jane Coaston:

“One of the most fascinating things about politics is that at no point are the truest believers ever happy. Not once. Not ever.”

Later in the same Church Politics Podcast (Nov. 24) he says:

“Once you get engaged in civics, sometimes you slowly start to realize that there’s no finality or ultimate conclusions in human accomplishments. The best of our accomplishments are usually reversible or corruptible. Even the greatest policies that we’ve been able to enact, none of them have ended human suffering and none of them will ever end human suffering.”

This is a follow-up to my sermon from this past weekend. I wanted to include some of these thoughts but I had to make cuts, not add to the sermon.

As I said this weekend, “waiting hopefully” strengthens our hope in difficult times.

To wait hopefully means we do the work Christ called us to do in the world. Part of that is the difficult work of restorative justice.

But involvement in restorative justice without the distinctly Christian hope of the new creation and God “putting the world to rights” (N.T. Wright’s phrase) can lead to deeper hopelessness. Our biggest efforts and biggest wins for justice are always “reversible and corruptible,” even in the individuals who are helped.

As Christians, we simply don’t get a pass on seeking justice or on living hope-filled lives.

We don’t get to say despondently, “What difference will it make anyway in the end.”

Nor do we get a pass on true, enduring happiness.

And most of us don’t want to get a pass. Most of us, given a choice, would not choose hopelessness.

We have a hope on which to set our eyes and our hearts, hope that will not be reversed or corrupted.

Ultimately, that hope is set in God himself.

Photo by Rachel Coyne on Unsplash