We want to reclaim both the word [religion] and the thing the word signifies. Yes, it is a way of pushing back at what I would consider an overly simplistic, overly smug argument that is made these days by people who, for one reason or another, are alienated from the idea of people of faith coming together. I am not arguing for the immaculate nature of institutional faith, but I do believe that there is a tendency in our culture toward solipsism, toward an individualism so radical that it becomes essentially meaningless for the public square. If everyone is living privately inside their own heads, then the religious phenomenon has no public center of gravity and there’s no communicable experience. I don’t think that all institutional religion is the work of the devil. Frankly, it remains durable. Public living traditions of faith continue to have a huge impact, for better or worse, on our world. And to somehow hold yourself aloof from all that seems to me to be a little coy, honestly.
Everyone has heroes. There are people in the world who we want to emulate, who have played major roles in shaping who we are, how we think, what we do. This is certainly a good thing – some people have much more wisdom than we do, some have a better understanding of how to live the Christian life than we do, and these are worth studying and learning from. But the line between hero and idol seems to blur rather easily in Western culture.
In many ways, the media has served to blur the distinction because of the false sense of reality it creates. James Davis Hunter observes in his recent book, To Change the World, that the way media is used in our culture
[fosters] a reality that exists primarily if not only within the surfaces of sensory awareness and understanding. This is a world constituted by image, representation, simulation, and illusion. This is, of course, a highly engineered reality that distances us from our natural surroundings and the immediacy of primary relationships. It is a simulated reality that, in many ways, supersedes lived reality (209).
The media creates the illusion that we have some sort of relationship with the people we see on television, a sense of familiarity and intimacy. For someone to be our hero, we need to have some personal knowledge of them. In the past this meant having a personal relationship with them, or finding out enough of them by other means (such as an objective, balanced biography) that we have some knowledge of their character. Modern media is selective, however, in its portrayal of celebrities, and thus we only know of them what the media shows us, creating the illusion that what we see on the screen is an honest representation of the individual. Yet we make heroes out of the people we see projected in this simulated reality. In point of fact, however, we turn them into idols.
In recent years, the church has made a lot of use of technology, which in many ways has benefited the community of believers. But the church has also not been immune from using media to create an illusion of reality that fosters a kind of idolatry. The cult of personality has arisen because of the way certain pastors and leaders with their exceptional gifts have been cast into the limelight. Again, Hunter warns of the problems that arise from our misuse of technology:
All of the faith-based work that comes through these technologies bends to fit the technology's requirements, fostering a reality that exists and operates primarily on the surfaces of sense perception... Reality becomes constituted by the ephemera of image, representation, and simulation. Pseudo-intimacy with well-known personalities provides the primary form and style of communication for a population hungry for significance. Here too the message is fragmented, creating a context in which the distinctions between simulated and lived realities are largely dissolved. And because these media are used as a sales media within the Christian marketplace, this material is packaged in the same way as any other consumer goods in the marketplace are promoted, offering sensational appeals but making no demands and providing no accountability. How much spiritual fruit actually comes from the frenetic symbolism created by these media is debatable, but there is no question that in all of these ways, these technologies unwittingly weaken the connective tissue "between word and world" (222-223).
You do not need to spend much time in Christian culture here in the West before you have become acquainted with the glut of pastors and leaders that have become celebrities. Their names are everywhere, their sermons and talks are on nearly every Christian's iPod, every one of their tweets are re-tweeted hundreds of times over, their books are constant bestsellers, their image and style is adopted by pastors all over the country. They have become idols.
The damage this does to the local church is not insignificant. It puts extraordinary pressure on the pastor to fit the mould of the celebrity leaders that many people in the pews idolise. When their pastor does not preach as dramatically as the celebrity pastor, they begin to take his preaching less seriously and get their fill throughout the week elsewhere. They begin to wonder what their pastor is doing wrong when he is not headlining national conferences or publishing books or drawing in lots of 'outsiders'. And for the church that is without a pastor, their search committees put together a list of qualifications that one wonders if Jesus himself could even meet. All the while, lots of seminary graduates who want nothing more than to preach the gospel and shepherd God's people find themselves working at Starbucks because they are deemed inadequate until they have had ten years of experience learning to model this or that celebrity preacher. Having just gone through three years of seminary, I personally know many godly and faithful men who have such a passion and desire to serve Christ's church but are not given the chance because of the unrealistic standards churches have for their pastoral staff.
In part, this is just another manifestation of Western culture's rampant individualism and unwillingness to submit to authority. Since you, as the parishioner, know what you need best, you take it upon yourself to find what you think you need. In some cases, this may be a legitimate quest, but often it is driven by the consumer mindset of this culture that has us constantly shopping for something better than what we currently have. It is no exception within the church. How many people do you know who have left your local church to go to a celebrity pastor's church across town because the preaching there is just 'so much better'?
Another damaging result of this trend, then, is that it breaks apart the community of the local church. Parishioners begin to find the community life of the church less important when they no longer see it as an integral whole. They get 'awesome' preaching daily on their iPod, they get 'awesome' worship from the live stream of the mega-church four hundred miles away, but really like the potluck dinners with the folks from their own church and so they will show up for those once a month. They begin to live a fragmented ecclesial life that erodes their commitment to the local church and to the ministry and ordinances Christ has entrusted to the church.
Not only is damage done to the local church, but celebrity leaders cannot minister faithfully if they are not fully connected a local church. Even those who have become celebrities and are still connected to a local church find their ministry to the congregation they have been called to hindered by the demands of the celebrity culture. Because they are suddenly a draw for consumers from all over, they find their buildings overflowing with people who might drive two hundred miles each Sunday to hear them. They are forever preaching to an audience they have no personal knowledge of, they cannot hold their listeners accountable (nor can they always be held accountable), and the temptation to become prideful and arrogant becomes an exceedingly easy trap to fall into. Yet because the demand is ever-present, the will power to resist stepping into this role is continually weakened.
The celebrity model of leadership is entirely alien to the biblical conception of leadership. It is driven by consumer culture and a misguided quest for significance. Hunter notes that faithful, Christian leaders practice their leadership 'in all spheres and all levels of life and activity. It represents a quality of commitment oriented to the fruitfulness, wholeness, and well-being of all.' He continues,
It is...the antithesis of celebrity, a model of leadership that many Christians in prominent positions have a very difficult time resisting. Celebrity is, in effect, based on an inflated brilliance, accomplishment, or spirituality generated and perpetuated by publicity. It is an artifice and, therefore, a type of fraud. Where it once served power and patrons, in our own day it mainly serves itself and its pecuniary interests. Celebrity must, of necessity, draw attention to itself. In American Christianity, the relentless pressure to raise funds within churches and para-church organizations reinforces the pressure toward celebrity, with an endless flow of direct mail, advertising, and ghost-written sermons, speeches, articles, editorials, and so on. These pressures are difficult to resist even for those who, by instinct, might find celebrity either tasteless or problematic. The reason is that celebrity is not just a certain kind of status one achieves but it is also a powerful institution the entire structure of which is oriented toward burnishing a leader's image and projecting his or her visibility. The justification one often hears is that more people are reached in this way, yet there are often financial interests at stake for the celebrity leader and his or her organization, and these can either obscure or undermine the ends of outreach.
And so, whether leadership is expressed within the dynamics of celebrity or outright arrogance rooted in a sense of superiority, such leadership is artificial, unbiblical, organizationally unhealthy, inherently corrupting, and all to common in the Christian world (260-261).
It would be easy to continue on about this, but I think Hunter's summary of the problems with the cult of personality is sufficient at this point. Celebrity culture erodes the church's faithful witness to the gospel and destroys the community God intended the church to be.
Local churches need to free themselves of the self-imposed burden to be more like the church down the road or the mega-church on the other side of the country that everyone is talking about. It is time to turn our focus to ministering to the people God has called together in this particular time and place, and ministering to the community he has placed us in. For pastors, this means faithfully preaching the Word and shepherding God's people, their primary concern being to love, serve, and disciple them. For the parishioners, it means recognising that God has called the pastor that serves them to do this task in this time and in this place, and submitting to the authority God has granted that pastor. It means a wholehearted commitment to the local church they belong to, and a willingness (indeed, a desire) to participate in all parts of its ministry.
You learn from your heroes, and seek to use what you have learned from them to benefit others or to live more fully to the glory of God. But you copy idols, and seek to adopt their style and image for your own benefit, under the guise of benefiting others, and to live more for the glory of yourself. It is one thing for pastors to have heroes who they seek to learn from in order to edify and build up the people of God in their congregation. It is another when pastors seek to imitate their idols for entirely self-serving purposes. The danger of the latter is all to real in the culture of the Western church. And the same goes for parishioners – you can have heroes who have played a major role in deepening your knowledge of God and your understanding of Christ's Lordship over all of life. But you can also have idols who you cling on to in order to meet your demands for dynamic preaching or your hunger for self-help tips that end up turning you into a clone of the celebrity instead of someone transformed by the gospel.
We need to keep the church free of the simulated reality than can so easily be created when we let our guard down. We need to focus on the objective, tangible reality that God has placed us in. Let's abandon the cult of personality, the culture of celebrity, and concentrate on being faithful in our own contexts for the building up of the people of God and for the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ.
One can foster religious convictions on one's own, but we have Christian faith only in the fellowship of the church. Private Christianity is wooden iron. A church that is like a restaurant, where all kinds of customers sit at individual tables and are served by waiters who rush here and there attempting to meet their wishes, is wooden iron too. If any comfort consists in the fact that I do not 'belong to myself,' then there is no comfort for me without having my circling around myself taken away from me. Where the church is, there a redemption comes into view that redeems me not simply as an individual, but redeems me also from my individualism. So to be a Christian means to be in the church.
Article 55 expounds this. It says rightly first off that all Christians together and each individually – as members of Christ – 'share in one fellowship with Christ' and in his gifts. For the Head of the community is not only the key to what the community is. He is also the reason that Christian life is life in fellowship. Jesus Christ is Immanuel, God's guarantee to be God in fellowship with us humans. As such, Jesus Christ is also the fulfillment of the double command of love, in which the vertical and the horizontal, the God-human relationships and the human-human relationship are insolubly linked. If the Holy Spirit brings us into relationship with this God who in Christ keeps fellowship with us, then faith means: 'fellowship with Christ.' If we come into fellowship with him, we come into fellowship with all with whom he keeps fellowship. None of us can be a child of God in the Holy Spirit without being together with other children of God who now may and should discover one another as sisters and brothers. That 'the Son of God...gathers, protects, and preserves' the church does not take away the responsibility of those who experiences this, or make them passive. This action calls them forth and calls them out to answer in word and deed and to confess themselves part of the church gathered and supported by him. They do this because they no longer belong to themselves, but to their faithful Savior (225-226).
One of the problems that has kept surfacing as I have been thinking about worship over the past little while is our selfishness. When we look at the music of worship as a stimulant, as Stapert suggested we often do, we are looking for something that will make us feel good. When we make the music the primary aspect of our worship, we are acting on the premise that what we say is more important than what God says to us. And, of course, there are many other ways that we make worship a thoroughly self-centred act.
The thing is – and we know this to be true despite our actions often being to the contrary – worship is not about us at all. The image of worship we get from Revelation 4 and 5, for example, makes perfectly clear that the focus of worship is the Lord. All that his creatures do in the picture John paints for us in those chapters is to praise God, ceaselessly. They have seen the glory of the Lord, and they fully understand the purpose of worship.
William Temple, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, in his book, Readings in St. John's Gospel, had this to say about worship:
Worship is the submission of all our nature to God. It is the quickening of conscience by his holiness; the nourishment of mind with his truth; the purifying of imagination by his beauty; the opening of the heart to his love; the surrender of will to his purpose – and all this gathered up in adoration, the most selfless emotion of which our nature is capable and therefore the chief remedy for that self-centredness which is our original sin and the source of all actual sin (68).
Temple understands the purpose of worship. Deep down, I think we all do too. But there are countless idols competing for our worship and adoration (some of which may even be disguised as true worship) and our sinful nature is all too eager to serve those idols. Indeed, the god we seek to worship most often is ourselves. I believe it was Luther who said that pride is the first sin, and the root of all other sins.
It would be easy to say in response that changing this is just a matter of setting our hearts on God. True as this is, it is much easier said than done. It requires the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit, who empties us of ourselves and fills us with himself. For this reason we must constantly implore the Spirit to be present in our worship, because unless he is among us, there can be no true worship.
Earlier this year, I was in a discussion on what role home visitation should play in the ministry of a church. Home visitation basically entails a visit by the pastoral staff or elders of a church to each family or member of the congregation in their respective homes to inquire about their spiritual well-being, and to provide support, encouragement, and instruction. A few days ago I quoted the Puritan minister, Richard Baxter, on this very issue. Baxter understood how crucial it was for the minister (and by extension, the elders or other pastoral staff responsible for spiritual oversight) to engage in this sort of work. It would not be a stretch to say that for Baxter, the very life of the church, or at least its vitality, hinged on faithfully carrying out this practice.
To be honest, I was quite shocked by the response of most of those I was talking with; most felt reticent about their churches engaging in such a practice because it would infringe on the privacy of the members of the church and would implicitly communicate that the leadership of the church was seeking some sort of totalitarian dominance over the lives of its parishioners.
At first I thought maybe they conceived of this as an antiquated practice, done in the days when ministers were not as conscious of being relational or relevant (to borrow a few modern terms) in their ministry. But then it occured to me that perhaps part of the reason some might hesitate to engage in such a practice is simply because they are living in a culture that incessantly bombards them with the message that they are autonomous individuals, subject only to their own authority and responsible only for themselves. The 18th and 19th centuries wove into the fabric of Western – and especially American – culture an aversion toward authority, which has largely defined the Christianity of this culture as well. The emphasis turns on the individual as the primary unit, whether it is an over-emphasis on personal salvation or turning subjective experiences and feelings into objective standards of theology and practice. In turn, this means the individual has full responsibility over their life and spirituality, and the church is there to serve them and meet their felt needs.
But that's not how it is supposed to work in the church.
When you are baptised into the church, either as an infant or later in life upon professing faith, you are brought into a family. You are no longer an autonomous individual, but you have been bound to the community of believers who have a shared identity as those called by God to be his people. Naturally, this does not entail giving up your individuality – indeed, Scripture lauds this as a great gift to the church – but it is a declaration that you now belong to a covenant family, living a shared life together as children of the heavenly Father.
If you have spent any time living with as part of a family, you understand this already. Each member of the family has his or her own life, of course, but the nature of family life, even something as simple as living in the same house, means that these individual lives are going to constantly cross paths. And this crossing of paths is not something that family members try to avoid, but they recognise it as an important part of their life together. A family supports each other, encourages each other, and will call each other to account if need be.
Like a family, this is how it is to be in the church. Your life becomes the life of the others you live together with. While you certainly retain a measure of responsibility for your personal life, this responsibility is also taken up by the other members of the church. Many congregations will make vows to either the parents of a child or to a professing believer on the occasion of their baptism to support them, pray for them, and nurture them in their Christian walk. An extra measure of responsibility for this task is given to the leaders of the church. Paul's letters to Timothy and Titus make the importance of spiritual oversight very clear. Likewise, the author of the letter to the Hebrews, clearly a pastor himself, makes mention at numerous points of looking after the spiritual well-being of those he wrote to.
When I was growing up, my father served as an elder in Christian Reformed congregations in Toronto and Bradford, Ontario, for many years and he will tell you that home visitation was among the most blessed and fruitful time of his ministry as an elder. This was largely because he came to really know the members of the congregation under his oversight, and he then knew how to minister to them more effectively. Now, of course, there are some factors that will determine how successful this practice is, and perhaps key in this regard is ensuring the church has godly elders or pastoral leaders; this was a major concern for Baxter in his discussion of the matter.
I know that there are plenty of pastors and church leaders who understand all this and practice it in one way or another. But I think there is a lot of wisdom and benefit to be gained from practicing it in a systematic way, ensuring that during a period of a year, each member or family of a congregation gets to visit with the church leaders responsible for pastoral oversight. This method has something of a proven historical track record since it has been done for centuries. The simple act itself of stepping into someone's home is an intentional way of deepening the level of intimacy and trust in the relationship of the pastor and parishioner. It is a very concrete way of saying to each member of the church, 'We care deeply for you.' All of this lends itself on the one hand to fostering the spiritual growth of a congregation, and on the other hand to strengthening the bond of fellowship of the church as the members come to understand what it means to be a family.
The Christian life was never meant to be lived alone. Don't think of spiritual oversight as an intrusion into your private life, but welcome it as a blessing. God intends for the leaders he appoints to the church to shepherd his flock because, in Isaiah's words, we all like sheep will go astray and turn to our own ways. The church was designed from the beginning to be a family, and her members are intended to live their life together. Our journey through life is enriched and deepened when we travel with others and help each other stay on the path.
So make a cup of tea, invite the leaders of your church into the living room, and share your lives with each other. Because in the end, it's all about the family.
(Below I've attached a PDF file of a chapter on home visitation from a book my father was given when he first became an elder, called The Elder's Handbook. I believe the authors come out of the Christian Reformed Church. It contains a bit of rationale for the practice, as well as some practical tips for how to do it. I think there are some really helpful suggestions here.)
