What did you expect? – part 2

A continuation of the post from yesterday. If you were looking for the week in review today (and honestly, who wasn’t?) I’ll probably put that up tomorrow. 

Ron Rhodes writes about a study that tested the behavior of Christians before and after their conversions. Rhodes states, “(t)he disturbing result was that conversion in many cases seems to have had little effect on moral behavior.”2 This is, unfortunately, not all that surprising.

A few years ago, 18-year old twins Alex and Brett Harris wrote a book called Do Hard Things which talks about how teenagers today have very low expectations placed on them. They compare adolescence to a vacation from responsibility. Has the church adopted this mantra as well? Have we allowed people to take a vacation from being the Church and allowed ourselves to simply be?

What is personally frustrating for me is that people often don’t know what they don’t know. They don’t understand how to read the Bible and actually interpret what it means. As Frank quoted from another author who was speaking of John, the author of Revelation, “his writing, his thoughts, his spirituality literally bleeds with an deep, abiding knowledge of the Scriptures.” We don’t know the Scriptures like that, not today. Sure, we could quote the scores from last nights [insert favorite team here] game, and we know which songs are the most popular on the radio right now because we are immersed in the culture. Are we immersing ourselves in the Word, or simply being sprinkled with it on Sunday mornings?

(Yes, this was a minor allusion to baptism. No, I’m not making judgments on how you were baptized. I grew up Methodist and was baptized by sprinkling twice. Focus, people.)

We have reduced church in the United States to something that is done on Sunday morning (or Saturday night) and it is not something that is lived out throughout the week. We have so separated the sacred and the secular that we don’t allow the sacred to bleed in to our secular lives. Sadly, the inverse is not true as secularism daily invades the church. (Testamints? I rest my case.) Rather than live as citizens of Heaven first, we put the values of our society at the top of our list.

The possibility exists that I’ve angered some people with this, and I’m OK with that. If it makes some uncomfortable, then it is working. In our church, the discipleship of our people is my area of leadership. I’ve only been in this position for a few months, but I often feel that I’m failing miserably. I love our people and I want them to not simply know Christ, but to desperately seek to know more about Him. My desire for discipleship is to show people how to search the Scriptures and give them the ability to understand it and apply it to their own life. Will everyone have a Master’s degree level understanding of the Scriptures and be able to teach the finer points of modalism versus unitarianism versus trinitarianism? Probably not, but it would be nice to at least pursue a high school level of understanding.

I want to see all of us have healthy expectations of our churches and the Church, but I also would love to see more churches have more expectations of their members. We are not perfect and we will never meet all of these expectations, but how do we know that we’ve achieved a goal if that goal is never set?

Tomorrow, I’ll outline what  my expectations look like for myself, the local church, and the Church.

2.Ron Rhodes, The Challenge of the Cults and New Religions. (Zondervan: Grand Rapids, MI, 2001) 37.