In case you have missed the brightly painted eggs strewn all over the marketplace, Easter is this weekend. As we get closer to the actual day, it has made me think about the holiday itself and how we, as the Church, approach it. The impetus for this particular in depth introspective came from my good friend and former roommate Greg Ramer on his Twitter feed this morning. “Only 4 more days of the sadness that is church marketing of Easter. Maybe 1 day pastors will actually let the Gospel draw in the people.”
Now, this is not a revolutionary comment. Nor is it something I have never considered before. Rather, the modern American Church’s handling of Easter has been a long-standing source of discontent. Years ago, the frustration actually was so strong that I made a decision. When the day comes that Defender Ministries has a ministry-wide retreat, we will hold it on Easter weekend. It has gotten to the point that I find it almost impossible to actually celebrate Easter any more in a church.
Here’s the thing about Easter. When you look at the great spread of things that make up Christianity, Easter should be one of the absolute biggest elements. Think about it. As Christians, we have this relationship with God based on the fact that we are sinners, He is God, His Son died for us and erased our sins, and then His Son rose again so we can live forever in Heaven with Him. It is THE CENTRAL TRUTH of The Gospel. It is the crux of everything we believe and stand for. That weekend represents the climactic battle – and ultimate victory. There was the showdown between the forces of sin and death and the infinite power of God. By the end of the weekend, sin and death laid busted up and broken on the ground. The game was over. We were just playing out the clock at that point.
I can’t stress this enough. EASTER IS THE KEY. It is the heart of the message. When we are trying to lead people to Jesus, everything goes through Easter. Sin. Death. Forgiveness. Resurrection. All the elements come to a head right there. It is D-Day. It is Victory Day. It is the 4th of July. It is THE DAY!!! As Christians, we should be unable to control our excitement as that day approaches. The chance to rejoice in our freedom, our rescue, our victory. That should get us giddy with joy. We should be standing at the doors on Sunday, waiting to get in for a time of celebration. And we should be dragging people in to show them. “THIS is what I mean! Look at this party. Let me tell you what happened today.”
But…
Somehow this has all gotten mixed up. American churches don’t do this. They see Easter as THE DAY, to be sure. It is the day to set a new attendance record. It is a day to create a bigger and better spectacle. It is a day to get as many visitors and guests in the doors as possible. But it isn’t to hear the Gospel. Sure, the Gospel may be tacked on at the end, along with an invitation of sorts. But that isn’t the point. The main goal is to jack up the numbers, to impress people with all the stuff we are doing.
Before you write off my rantings as some dissatisfied para-church cynic, allow me to make a couple of points. I’ve been in church since I was five. I attended a Christian school. I have served as a lay leader in just about every church I was involved in from my teen years. I’m an ordained Southern Baptist minister. I have served on church staff in various capacities for over a decade. I have been in countless Easter planning and prep meetings. I have designed Easter mailings and billboards and promotional materials. I have been IN the machine. I was part of the machine. I have seen it from the inside and outside. And both views make me feel like something is wrong.
I have heard the lingo. I have been a part of conversations. Shoot, I have even led some of those conversations. And I am quite confident that the overwhelming majority of American churches this Sunday want to pack the pews. The communication of just what Sunday means is secondary. That is why churches put on every special event you can imagine. They host the largest Easter egg hunt in the city. They put on massive Broadway level musical presentations. They build elaborate sets and bring in live animals and reenact the Crucifixion in extreme gory detail. They spend millions of dollars on billboards, direct mailings, newspaper ads, radio pitches. They do everything they can to get people into the building.
And then … what? What do we do with them then? The truth of the matter is that most churches are going to be pretty full on Sunday. They are going to have higher than average attendance, just because it is one of the two days a year people force themselves to go to church. All of the other trappings may ensure a packed house. But there will already be people there. So what do we do with these people once they are in the building? Do we entertain them? Do we try to make them feel bad – emotionally manipulate them? Do we try to show them why they should keep coming to the church? That is the motivation of a lot of churches. They want to put on a good face and impress people. Generate leads for visitation teams. Get people to come back.
I just feel like we are dropping the ball here. The entire concept of Easter just is bursting with The Gospel. We should want to bring people in so we can share the greatest news ever with them. It shouldn’t be, “Come see our petting zoo and stage show.” It should be, “Come and hear something so incredible that it will change your life for eternity.” We should pour out hearts. This is the moment to hold nothing back and show let your Jesus Fish flag fly.
Jesus doesn’t need a soundtrack. The Gospel doesn’t need styrofoam rocks. God doesn’t need thousands of plastic eggs. People will be won for the simple reason that they are broken and are looking to get fixed. They don’t realize it, but every single person on Earth is literally dying to hear the Good News. Their hearts are aching and breaking. And on Sunday they will flock to our sanctuaries out of habit or obligation. Let them find what they are looking for. It would be tragic if they came to hear our best and missed out on what truly mattered. It will be horrible if they leave impressed and entertained without finding the best part of Easter. Don’t miss the chance to share Jesus in the midst of the pageantry. He’s all that matters.
Quite a bit of controversy has arisen due to Rob Bell’s new book, Love Wins. In it, it seems that Bell claims, to an extent, that Hell does not exist. While he doesn’t seem to outright declare that, it is something that emanates from the pages of the book. This is not really new territory for Bell. In a previous work (Sex God), he hinted at a belief that Hell is really a place on Earth and not its own locale. Countless virtual pages have been filled with defenses of Bell, attacks on Bell, attacks on the attacks on Bell. All of this has happened before the book even has come out! (It isn’t officially released until March 15, 2011.) Finally, a reviewer with an advanced copy of the book was able to make his opinions know – which quickly became one of the most linked to articles on Facebook.
This issue has generated much passionate debate, as you would expect. The proposition that Hell is not a real place certainly would grab the attention of Christians everywhere. It minimizes the importance of Jesus’ death on the cross. It removes the need of evangelism and salvation. To a large extent, it makes Christianity superfluous. If everyone gets in, then why not live however you want?
Many pastors and bloggers have raced to defend the belief in Hell. They proudly proclaim that Hell is indeed a real place. They point out all the verses in the Bible that defend this position. They hold up Christ’s own words that warn of eternal separation from God. They reaffirm that Hell exists (or will exist) and that anyone who does not have a saving faith in Christ will spend eternity there. And then they nod their heads to each other, proud of the fact that they have successfully proven their point – that BILLIONS OF PEOPLE ARE GOING TO SPEND ETERNITY IN HELL.
Do you see the problem? I have had a bad feeling all along about this whole Rob Bell controversy. I’m no Rob Bell fan – never have been. That has always been my own personal feelings. At the beginning, I was in the minority as his Nooma videos were being used all across America and being sold in Lifeway stores. Then there was a growing group of people who began to sense some problems with his theology. Now, it appears that a large majority of vocal Christians have thrown him in the heretic pile. But this is NOT about Rob Bell. The problem I have is that we just spent hours and pages to prove that people are damned to Hell for eternity – and the biggest concern we had was to discredit Bell. We aren’t sickened by what we just proved!
If Bell is wrong, which I believe he is, do you understand what the truth is? We have just stood up and solidified our belief in the theology of Hell. That means that the majority of the six billion people on this planet right now are going to spend ETERNITY there. So why aren’t we doing anything about it? Why are we expending so much energy on trivial stuff? Why are we going out of our way to discredit this man instead of running out and trying to help the countless masses who are doomed?
I can understand WHY Bell doesn’t want to believe that Hell is real. The thought that it is real is nauseating. Think of it like this. There is a disease running rampant across the country. Eighty percent of all Americans have been infected. And it has a one hundred percent mortality rate. All 300 million people with the disease are without a doubt going to die. The head of the CDC looks at that. He can’t change it. He tries to find ways to make the numbers and findings mean something else. But it is useless. The disease is going to kill everyone. So, instead he just announces the disease isn’t real. He figures that the reality is worse. I can understand wanting to bury our heads in the sand and wish the truth away. But we can’t.
Those people who spent so much time attacking Bell and proving him wrong should have then fallen on their knees to beg God for mercy. They should have typed their last period, posted their blog entry, and run out to try to get some people saved. They, more than anyone else, should have realized what their being right meant for this world. Instead, it was like they stood over the carcass of what was Bell’s career and crowed about how they had beaten him. The enemy was Bell. He had been vanquished. Hooray to the victors. And the whole time, millions of people passed into eternity without Jesus.
The sad thing about that CDC story is that there is a cure to that disease. It isn’t a six month regiment of pills and shots. It is so simple that we refuse to believe its simplicity – so we usually add all kinds of rituals to make it harder. But the cure is held by the twenty percent that isn’t infected. And they don’t want to share. Instead, they just go about their normal lives like nothing is wrong. They think about how they will divide up the country once those eighty percent are gone. They argue about how to stay relevant. They entertain themselves. Or, even worse, they act sick so they don’t offend the stricken.
I’m one of those people. I have the truth, the cure, the healing and don’t share. So many times I find myself worried about pointless distractions. Who should my favorite team draft? Which movie is the best? What song do I want my iPod to shuffle to next? Very rarely does my mind think to the endless seas of humanity being swept along to Hell. The other day, the reality of it just came crashing down onto me. I, for a brief moment, felt the complete desperation of the situation. And I just sat there and cried. It was one of the worst feelings of my whole life. But it passed and I went to order pizza.
The truth, though, is that the reality didn’t pass away with my realization of it. For just a moment, I saw the world how God sees it – full of lost and dying people. It was too much to handle. So I ran away. But we as God’s people and representatives on Earth can’t just run away from the problem. Even if we do, it is still there. People are still dying and spending an eternity separated from God. That thought is sickening.
I certainly do not think that heresy should go unchallenged and unanswered. There will be many people who will read Rob Bell’s book and find validation in their own mixed up theology. They will hold onto that because it was a “legitimate” and “popular” minister. That must be corrected. We are told in the Bible to challenge faulty theology. The point I want us to remember, though, is that the true challenge is not with Rob Bell. While his errant theology may lead some people down the road to Hell, our approach is to not even care that they are going. Which is the most troubling? (Hint: no winners in that contest.)
On Tuesday, March 8, the FOX Network show Glee aired a show entitled “Sexy.” The episode was highly anticipated and promoted, due to the return of Gwyneth Paltrow’s slinky, anti-establishment substitute teacher, Holly Holiday. Being an avid viewer of this show, I was excited to see Paltrow return. Her first appearance in the “The Substitute” was startlingly fun. Her character was useful in jolting some of the main characters out of their rut. And the musical performances – my personal favorite element of the show – were amazing. Paltrow kind of has an image of this high society, art house actress. To see her cutting loose in a comedic turn was very refreshing. And her singing talent was definitely a pleasant surprise.
The new episode, though, didn’t have the same attraction for me. The theme of the week was sex. They discussed abstinence, sex education, same-sex attraction, safe sex, and much more. Of course, this being a television show, the perspective was quite different that what is taught in a True Love Waits conference. Generally, they mocked abstinence programs in school. Saying that it was a legitimate option for teens was like saying “vegetarianism is a legitimate option for lions.” The general argument consistently hammered home was the teens are going to have sex. We can’t stop them. The best thing we can do is to train them how to stay safe and learn what they are doing. Train them how to do it right and how to stay protected.
This is a common argument on television these days. And it has been a hot button issue in health classes for decades. I remember back in the late 1980s that my mother had to sign a permission form for the sex education unit in health class. In high school we had the protection lecture. So I was hardly surprised by the whole presentation. I also wasn’t surprised to see the show present the belief that labels don’t matter; you love who you love. That may be a boy or a girl or both. You can’t control who you love. Just protect yourself. Be educated.
The show took a bizarre turn, though, toward the end of the show. It was almost as if once they laid down the standard arguments about teen sexuality, they then began to backtrack. Only the retreat was hardly as clearly stated as the early exposition. Instead, it was something you had to be paying attention to catch what was going on. It largely played out in the story lines of several characters. I’ll recap some of them in order of importance.
SANTANA AND BRITTANY: These two cheerleaders are some of the most sexual active teen characters in television history. Brittany claimed at one point that she had slept with every boy on the football team. Santana has had sex with tons of guys as well. In addition, these two girls have frequently made out and cuddled together. They say they aren’t gay, but they have certainly explored that point of view. This episode both of them came to a realization. They were tired of that kind of life. Brittany has been in a monogamous dating relationship for most of this season with wheelchair-bound Artie. In him, she found someone who actually cared about her. In this show, she explained how she liked talking about important stuff and not just “doing stuff.” Santana also decided she wasn’t interested in sleeping around and being angry. She wanted Brittany. Unfortunately for her, Brittany was not willing to break up with Artie, even though she was agreeable to being in a relationship with Santana if Artie was out of the picture. The message delivered by this was kind of surprising. Both of these girls had basically been living out the earlier message about teens. They were having sex. They had been educated and were doing what they wanted to do. BUT, they also had found out that they were left empty by that lifestyle. They wanted something better – something more.
HOLLY AND WILL: Holly Holiday is as free wheeling as they come. She does exactly what she wants with who she wants. Numerous times in the show she flaunted her sexual experience. She was a predator – the role that traditionally has been filled by a man. She was actually the one spearheading most of the lessons. She was the one mocking the abstinence movement, encouraging the same sex attraction, mocking the chaste characters. But when Glee leader, Will, decided that he wanted Holly – she backed away and warned him off. “You don’t want any of this. I’m damaged goods.” Later she explained that she had been around a lot, which makes you “great in bed” but unable to have a serious relationship. She basically was admitting that she was empty in her supposedly awesome life. And, by the end of the episode, she was saying that she wanted more. She wanted romance as well.
KURT AND HIS DAD: Kurt is gay. His dad is one of the most awesome father figures in television history. Even though he still is uncomfortable with his son’s sexual preference, he loves his boy. And in this episode, he tried to actually teach his son about sex – obviously difficult for a straight man to do with his gay son. Instead of getting into the specifics, though, he began to explain how men and women are different. Guys just want sex. They are driven by the physical desire of the act. Women, though, realize it is much more than that and they want the whole experience. He explained that guys will do anything to get sex and women get used and mistreated and hurt because they think they are getting something more and then don’t. They he warned Kurt that because it would be two guys, the danger is that they both will just be meeting physical drives. He told his son that he was going to get hurt and begin to do things because he thought he didn’t matter. And then he told him that was a lie because he did matter. I was stunned by the whole exchange. It was one of the most amazing descriptions of the problems with modern views of sex I have ever heard. The big problem is that we have divorced the physical act of sex from the whole being interaction of sex. It was incredible. (I was actually envious that I wasn’t so eloquent explaining all of this in a Defender session.)
EMMA AND CARL: The couple that was the comic extreme of the other argument also had their important lesson. Emma is scared of sex. This couple has been married for four month and never has had intercourse. Carl finally just couldn’t take it any more. It showed how dangerous it is to go the other extreme and see sex as a bad thing. Sex is very important to a marriage. By withholding that from her husband, Emma was damaging their relationship. She was robbing him of true intimacy because they never were connecting on the physical level.
Those four story lines actually showed how the traditional sex education teaching for teens is actually damaging them. By encouraging teens to just do what they want but be protected and educated, teens have run wild and gotten obsessed with sex. They are heading down a road that will leave them shattered and broken. They are giving themselves away and cheapening themselves. At the end, they will realize that there is nothing there – and that they traded something so much better for something so inferior. We see Kurt’s dad warning him about this. We see Santana and Brittany acknowledging that they have done this. We see Holly admitting that she is tired of living this way.
Now, if a Christian group was to go into a school and try to teach that message, they would be scoffed at and mocked. They would be accused of being moralist, intolerant, naive, closed minded. However, even the creators of one of the more “forward thinking” shows on television cannot deny that living the very same life that THEY ARE PROMOTING is destructive and hurtful! (Side Note: Creator Ryan Murphy also created Nip/Tuck – one of the most sexually explicit, disturbing, out there shows in recent memory.)
The fact of the matter is that we have completely lost focus about the important messages about sex. Sex was never intended to be just a physical act. God created it for married couples to interact in every element of their person – physical, emotional, relational, intellectual, and even spiritual. It was supposed to be something so much more, so much better. In today’s world, we worry about sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies. So the battle is waged on how to protect our kids in those realms. But we never talk about the other stuff – the things that hurt them deep inside and for their entire lives. From our experience, we have found that teens are much smarter than we give them credit for. They respond to us when we talk honestly about sex. We present the science behind sex – how brain chemicals can begin to lock us into patterns and behaviors. We also talk about how sex is supposed to look. And we talk about those same lessons that Glee ultimately did demonstrate. And students actually respond to that. They begin to understand that these decisions are more about if they are ready to “do it.” They can affect their whole life for the rest of their life.
I was actually impressed to see some of those lessons in Glee. Unfortunately, they did not really TEACH those lessons. They put them in there as things to think about. I wish that some of those characters had gone back to the student groups and been honest. “Look, this is going to hurt you. It is worth waiting – not just because of a moral code that you may not subscribe to. It is worth it because you are worth so much more. You are special and wonderful. All you are doing is cheapening yourself.” Those are wonderful messages. They are things that kids should hear BEFORE they start getting sexually active. That is not something that they should find out after they are the end of a wrecked life, wishing they had learned how to protect their hearts.