The Evangeliad (30:26-30)

(Click here for an introduction and previous installments of the Evangeliad)

Section 30:26-20 (corresponding to Matt. 22:10-14)

So the servants go out, the banquet is set,

All those brought in, in the King's hall are met;

They've responded in joy to His gracious call,

Arrayed in obedience, one and all.

Except, as the King comes, He sees one man,

Who gives no regard to the wedding-feast plan;

That man is not wearing the feast's festive robes,

No garment to answer the grace of the host.

The King says to him, 'Friend, how came you here,

Without the robes in which my guests should appear?'

But the man is silent; he gives no response;

So the King tells his servants, 'Tie him in bonds.

Yes, bind up his hands and bind up his feet,

And then toss him right back out in the street--

Out in the darkness, where grief is profuse,

For the called are many, but the chosen are few.'"

The Radical Danger of Christian Celebrity

I'm going to begin this piece with a thesis that will sound perhaps a little radical:

- Any person in a public-facing Christian vocation should hope that they do not reach large-scale success or acclaim.

Musical artists? Give thanks for poor sales on your recent projects and at the difficulty of building any momentum in the touring industry. Pastors? Give thanks that your church does not grow to megachurch proportions (or even anything approaching that). Authors? Give thanks that your books sell poorly and that the publishing industry is stacked against you from the outset (I have a little personal experience of my own with that one).

A little radical, no? So much so, probably, that many people have already clicked away from this article because it sounds so off-kilter. "Why would I hope not to have success? Doesn't my success mean that more people are hearing about Jesus?" Well, maybe, but only in a very limited sense. Think of it this way: if you weren't successful, doesn't God have other means and other people by which he could also make the gospel known (1 Kings 19:14, 18)? Doesn't God have even greater resources for doing that than you have? If you fall short of celebrity status, it does not mean that the Kingdom of God has fallen short of its potential for growth.

My thesis is put in striking terms to make a point, but it's not really that different from the apostle Paul's counsel: "Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life" (1 Thess. 4:11). And with regard to giving thanks for a lack of success? - "Give thanks in all circumstances" (1 Thess. 5:16). Nor is this thesis different from the actual practice of our Lord Jesus, who based his ministry in what was essentially a rural backwater province and who invariably slipped away from the crowds whenever the specter of celebrity raised its head; in one instance he even seems intent on whittling his core of followers down in numbers, not building it up (John 6:60-66). The picture of ministry that emerges from the New Testament is small, communal, and local. This is true even in the exciting days after Pentecost--the church of Jerusalem, from what we can discern, was not today what we would call a megachurch, but seems to have operated on a flexible model as a network of house churches (see Acts 2:46). Further, the "celebrity" leaders of the early church lived lives more marked by persecution, imprisonment, and martyrdom than by any kind of popular acclaim. Indeed, that seems to be more along the lines of what Jesus expects a "successful" ministry to look like, rather than high sales and surging crowds. 

With that thesis in place, let's go back to what prompted this train of thought. Why am I up on this particular soap box right now? This week has seen another grievous set of revelations from the contemporary Christian music world (CCM)--Michael Tait, the frontman for the Newsboys (and former member of DC Talk), has been outed for a long-running double life while on tour, a story marked with drug abuse, alcohol-fueled parties, and sex abuse. A few other voices who know the CCM world well have spoken up to say that this was something of an open secret and a pattern that is not infrequent in the industry. This news hits hard to someone of my generation, who grew up loving Christian music in the '90s and early 2000s, when the Newsboys and DC Talk were at the forefront of it all. But is it surprising? No, it's not.

CCM has consistently shown itself to be a remarkably poor subculture for promoting spiritual maturity. This should have been obvious all along: to take musically gifted young men and women and dump obscene levels of popularity and acclaim on their heads, set them in front of roaring crowds, interview them as if they have deep personal insights on Christian living, put them on tour where they are disconnected from their own families and churches for large chunks of the year--this is a recipe for almost certain failure. We are uprooting them from their support networks and surrounding them with pitfalls and temptations. It is not a favor we do them by making them celebrities; it is an act of thrusting them into grave spiritual danger. I grieve for them, and I regularly remind myself and others that these are among the last people we should look to for teaching on the gospel or wisdom about the Christian life. They are in a place of dangerous prominence, both for themselves and others.

And it's not just Michael Tait; this is a story we've seen played out several times. Another of my favorite bands, NeedtoBreathe, has also been pierced by accusations of sex abuse and betrayal. Other prominent Christian musicians have gone apostate, either leaving the Christian faith entirely or "deconstructing" their faith--Hawk Nelson, Kevin Max (another DC Talk member), a Hillsong frontman, Audrey Assad, and others. Now, that's not to say that every CCM artist or band falls in this category--the majority, by all appearances, are well-rooted enough and put enough safeguards in the practice of their vocation so as to handle it well. But the dangers are very real, and we should be aware of them.

We can go further, and say that it's also not just a CCM problem. It's a pastor problem, too. This is especially the case in megachurches, but it really applies anywhere, even in small churches, if a pastor is surrounded by people who prefer to pretend he's not a sinner. Every Christian communion deals with this issue at some level--it's something we saw in the shockingly public outing of sexual abuse by Roman Catholic clergy (and the continuing echoes of it, both in their communion and those of other denominations, from the Eastern Orthodox to the Southern Baptists). It's something we see even in small ministries, where too much trust is given to fallible, broken, sinful human beings (a category which includes all of us). And it's something we see in a grossly inflated form in evangelical megachurches (the list of megachurch leaders and celebrity pastors that have fallen from grace for sexual misconduct, abusive leadership practices, financial crimes, and other reasons would run for pages). 

Megachurches are perhaps the easiest target for this critique. And I'll say up front that I don't mean to imply that God doesn't use megachurches to accomplish great good--He certainly does, just as he's used CCM artists to do the same. But the leaders in these ministries must always be aware that they are walking through valleys where temptation is going to be on every side, temptations that have mastered and overpowered better Christians than they themselves are. They need to resolve to live radically self-effacing lives, to reject celebrity status with their words and their deeds, and to surround themselves with strong networks of support and rigorous accountability. Otherwise, they are very likely to find themselves in the category of those who have gained the whole world and lost their own soul. I know a man whose side-ministry was, for decades, to serve as a pastoral counselor to megachurch pastors in crisis, many of whom were still in active ministry, and his conclusion is that megachurches are bad for the spiritual health of pastors, period. 

And I include myself in this critique too, by the way. Praise the Lord, I live in an area which, demographically speaking, is unlikely to produce a megachurch. My church draws attendance at a higher percentage of the population of my city (about 3.5%) than most megachurches do of their cities, and yet we're just a bit above 100 on a good day. I honestly wouldn't want to be in another context; bigger churches have come courting on occasion and I've turned them down. If it sounds like I'm wagging my finger at megachurch pastors, it's actually much more of a sense of "There but for the grace of God go I"--I sincerely thank God that he has put me in a place where I can't become a celebrity, because it would probably be my downfall, too.

But the issue isn't just a problem with the size of the church, either. There are dangers associated with the levels of money and elite status-brokering which come with the celebrity life. We don't take seriously enough just how frequently an attachment to money is presented as a tremendous spiritual danger in the gospels. Having more money than you need is perilous for the soul. Even if you can handle it well, living a life of simplicity and generosity, just having it there keeps alive its cancerous potential to befoul the spiritual growth of your children and grandchildren (and I actually know a few Christian families for whom, sadly, that has been the story). As for the status-brokering--getting into social circles with other influential people--our culture has decided to call this "networking" as if it's something good rather than an amplification of the dangers involved, most frequently leading to the sin of pride and a sense of apathy regarding one's own perilous spiritual condition. Remember that we follow a Lord who networked with the ones that nobody else even bothered to care about, and shunned the company of influential people.

Further, the whole nature of evangelical church life has, unfortunately, set up the pastorate as a vocation founded not on spiritual maturity, but on the exercise of natural gifts. A charismatic communicator can draw thousands, even if he is in a wretched spiritual state. Evangelical worship, unfortunately, has degenerated to the place where many people come to church to enjoy the exercise of natural talents--primarily, musical abilities and public speaking--and not to encounter the living presence of the Lord in their midst. I'm not suggesting this is an easy problem to solve; it's not. The exercise of natural gifts is part of this vocation, and one that God has ordained. But there is a danger involved which we must always be aware of--are the people coming to hear me, or to meet with God? That ought to be a conscience-striking question for any pastor with gifted communication skills. 

As I said, I don't have easy answers, other than to say we need two things: a way of grounding our worship services less in the natural gifts of those up front, and more in the presence of God; and a way of seriously ensuring that we are cultivating deep-rooted spiritual maturity for anyone placed in a position of leadership or trust. For me, a lover of the early church, I would say we should bring back the Eucharist as a celebration of our weekly participation in Christ the Great High Priest's eternal presentation of his sacrifice in heaven (thus putting the focus squarely on him), and we should make prospective Christian leaders spend significant seasons before their ministries (and probably during their ministries, too) in places of complete self-renunciation, like a monastery. But I acknowledge that probably won't work for everyone.

My guess is that, in the end, our celebrity culture in American Christianity has almost no grounding in reality. When we look back at this age of the church, viewing it from the perspective of eternity, almost all of the true giants of God's Kingdom will be names we won't recognize at all. I expect that megachurch pastors and Christian music artists will be very poorly represented, except for those few who were able to survive the dangers of their vocations by a sustained practice of humble self-renunciation. The saints who knew God best and were of greatest use to his Kingdom will be, in large part, ordinary people that were unknown beyond their own hometowns, people whose examples of virtue rang out so loudly in the courts of heaven that their smallest, most unnoticed acts will resound through eternity. Those ranks will be especially filled with workers for the Kingdom who labored in almost complete anonymity from the world's gaze, people serving the Lord in places of persecution and suffering, living lives marked by the quiet, patient work of planting seeds in the darkness. I've known a few in my travels, and I did not deserve to stand in their presence. Those are the ones who deserve the acclaim, and one day they will get it, and we who received too much acclaim here on earth will probably just make it to the other side "as one passing through the flames" (1 Cor. 3:15). 

The Evangeliad (30:21-25)

 (Click here for an introduction and previous installments of the Evangeliad)

Section 30:21-25 (corresponding to Luke 14:21-23; Matt. 22:8-10)

Then to all of his servants who still remain,

The King, with renewed resolution, will say:

'Those I invited, unworthy have proved,

Yet still there's a feast, the finest of food!

Go out to the markets, alleys and streets,

Call in the outcasts to come and to eat!

Go bring in the poor, the blind, and the lame,

Call in those burdened with heartache and pain.'

So the servants go out, in come the crowds,

But still there is room to gather around.

'Look, Lord,' they say, 'we've done as you asked,

Yet still seats are empty at your repast.'

'Then go further out,' their Master replies,

'Yes, out to the paths of the countryside,

And call everyone, all those whom you meet;

Constrain them to come to the joy of my feast!

My house shall be full, in spite of the fact

That those I invited have all turned their backs.

Of them, at my table, shall none get to feast,

For my joy goes out to the least of the least.'

The Evangeliad (30:16-20)

(This is the first Evangeliad portion I've posted in months; forgive my lassitude. Evangeliad posts, along with occasional essays, should resume with a more-or-less weekly frequency now that my patristics article and the greater part of my book-editing are done. The stanzas below continue a parable of Jesus, begun in the previous sections: Part 1 / Part 2.)

(Click here for an introduction and previous installments of the Evangeliad)

Section 30:16-20 (corresponding to Matt. 22:4-7; cf. Luke 14:21)

But the good king sends even more servants out,

To deliver another message about

The joy of his son, the table prepared,

The lavish event he was longing to share.

But instead of the righteous deference they owe,

The invited ones all contempt start to show.

Some laugh at the servants, some walk away,

Some murder them rather than hear what they say.

Then what will the king, in all his wrath, do?

He'll send armies to where his servants went through,

Root out the murderers, burn down their homes,

Wreak judgment on all the cruelty they've shown.

The Danger of Making Revival an Idol

Across a broad swath of evangelical and Pentecostal churches, there is a fixation on the idea of revival. The term itself can be used in several different ways, some of which are useful or even laudable, but one sense in which--I've now come to believe--it tends to be more of a hindrance than a help when it comes to the church's experience of life in Christ. The hope and expectation of a future revival, perhaps just around the corner--when this is meant to refer to a period of breathless fervor, high emotion, and mystical experiences--has the danger of becoming an idolatrous affectation for both churches and individual Christians. 

Picture in your mind the stories you may have heard of previous revivals: massive public crowds gathered to hear the gospel preached during the Great Awakening; attenders falling down weeping under their conviction of sin during the Second Great Awakening; prolonged sequences of worship in the presence of God that might stretch on for days. For many Christians today, these extraordinary scenes have consolidated into a desire that such times would come again, and in doing so, this sensibility has taken a new form: the idea that these things ought not to be extraordinary, but ordinary; that "revival" should be the normative state of the Christian life, and if it isn't, then one's church is doing something wrong.

But is that sensibility actually true? I'm not so sure. Before I go into why that is, it's worth noting that there are certainly cases in which the hope and expectation for revival can represent something healthy in a church's life. Revival need not mean a full-on outpouring of dynamic spiritual experiences in corporate worship as the normative Christian experience; some people use the term simply to mean a large-scale societal return to Christian faith, or a state in which a church's members regain a sense of abiding earnestness and zeal in their everyday practices of faith and devotion. I have folks in my church who pray and yearn for revival in these terms, which I find not only appropriate but commendable. Both of these senses of "revival" are, I think, something that we should hope for and pray that God brings about. In most of my usages in writing and sermons, I think I tend to lean toward the idea of revival as society-wide swing of the pendulum away from secular atheism and back toward the historic Christian faith. That's something that might include vast outpourings of spiritual fervor, but not necessarily so: such a revival might also happen very quietly, under the radar (as I would argue is even now happening across much of the West). But in many evangelical and Pentecostal circles, a broad social return to faith is only one small aspect of what is meant by "revival," and what many (perhaps most) people have in their heads is a scene of impassioned spiritual excitement that sweeps up enormous numbers of people in its fervor. 

This disjunction in meaning is one that has come up in my own church life. Some years ago, I felt a prompting in my spirit to devote a year to daily prayer for revival, and I shared that prompting with my church. Some of our folks excitedly grasped onto it, and I got the sense that, for at least a few of them, the expectation was that a promised revival would come upon the fulfillment of our year of prayer. That year--from early fall of 2019 to early fall of 2020--came and went, and the results were...well, let's just say that it was definitely not a massive outpouring of spiritual excitement through our town. Instead, what followed (in the very week we finished our year of prayer) was the first major outbreak of the Covid pandemic in our area, after having already had to re-imagine our practices of doing church thanks to society's efforts to "flatten the curve." This was swiftly followed by an outbreak in our own church, which (since it was still early in Maine's story of experiencing the pandemic) made headlines across the state, cast our church unfairly in a poor light to many of our neighbors, and resulted in several months of our church trying to connect online rather than in person. Instead of a revival, our year of prayer resulted in our church standing empty, week after week after week.

Where was the promised revival? Well, for anyone who might have been expecting crowds of people shrieking with excitement in a new Great Awakening (and I'm not actually sure we had too many of those), it hadn't happened. No doubt the Lord had used our prayers to prepare us for what was probably the hardest year in the history of our congregation, but no "revival" of that kind. Except...something peculiar is starting to be noticeable now, five years later. That time of transition in 2020 led into a new season in our church life marked by the vibrancy and joy of a growing faith-community that spans all the age groups in our town, who delight in spending time in fellowship and devoting their hearts to the worship of God. Even more strikingly, some experts in the wider world are now pointing to 2020 (the year we completed our season of prayer for revival) as the point at which a new and surprising upswelling of faith started to become visible, and which is now making headlines across the West: public intellectuals coming out as new Christian converts, high-church communions seeing crowds of new catechumens, and Gen Z swinging the pendulum away from agnosticism and back toward faith. And it's not just the West, either--these early decades of the twenty-first century have seen an acceleration of movements to Christ among people of other faiths around the globe (and especially among Muslims and Jews), and that acceleration shows no signs of slowing down. But apart from a few little hotspots that pop up here and there for a time, this hasn't been a "revival" of the emotional-outpouring variety; it has been a broad, quiet, grassroots work of God taking shape in the background of our daily lives. This quiet revival has the potential to be one of the biggest things to happen in the entire history of Christianity if it continues along its present course, and lots of people are still unaware that they are living in the midst of it.

What has this experience taught me? Well, it's taught me to keep praying for revival!--so long as we're aware of what we're really praying for. But it has also made me a little wary of the fixation on a Great-Awakening-style revival that persists in the hopes and expectations of our churches. There are two main downfalls to that fixation that I can see. First, it can leave Christians in a place of perpetual sadness and disillusionment. While there is certainly a sense of hope in some future great work of God that might raise one's spirits, the continued absence of a visible, emotional outpouring of the Spirit on a broad scale is something that gnaws away at a person's faith, raising questions about God's willingness to act. It also builds up a sense that our normal Christian life is somehow insufficient, and that we (or our church's leadership) are doing something wrong. Is it any wonder that pastors and leaders in these traditions seem so often to fall from grace, often into sexual sin or abusive leadership practices? They have been conditioned to provide a sense of visionary excitement that God is at work, in answer to the hopes and expectations of their congregants, but in the end that excitement very often turns out to be little more than a cult of their personal charisma, and the perpetuation of that cult bears the fruit of its own consequences.

Second, this fixation on "revival" can lead to a kind of idolatry, which replaces the very real work of God that is going on in our lives right now with a wished-for substitute. Much of what we're called to as Christians is faithfulness and obedience amid the normalcy of everyday life. The mountaintop experience of the post-Pentecost church in Acts quickly makes way for the patient rhythms of simply figuring out how to live life together as faithful followers of Jesus, marked less by ecstatic wonder and more by "making it [their] ambition to live a quiet life" (1 Thess. 4:11). The whole Christian tradition, from the monastic fathers of the early church to the mystics of the Middle Ages to the leading pastors of twentieth-century evangelicalism, have tried to remind us that real Christianity is less flash and more substance, less of ecstasy and more of humble simplicity. As Oswald Chambers put it, "The snare in the Christian life is in looking for gilt-edged moments, the thrilling times; there are times when there is no thrill, when God's [blessing] is in the routine of drudgery on the level of towels and washing feet." The great Spanish mystic, St John of the Cross (who knew something about amazing experiences of closeness to God), advised other Christians not to seek out visions or ecstatic manifestations or special words from the Lord as the normal course of one's Christian life. Such things were always meant to be extraordinary, not normative. If one got caught up in pursuing them, one would lose sight of the greater part of the work of God in one's life. 

And that, I fear, is exactly what has happened with those Christians who are fixated on the idea of a future revival--they are missing out on what God is actually doing right under their noses. That's not to say that revivals of that sort can never come, of course. They do--we know they do, and they are great gifts of God when they do come. But we should treat them as St John of the Cross treated personal visions--accept them as a special gift of God, a blessing of precious value, and then move on. They are a gift to be appreciated, not an idol to be mounted on the altar of one's heart. We must always ask what comes next after the vision, after the revival, after the outpouring. And in most cases, like with the post-Pentecost church, it's things like patiently suffering persecution (Acts 4), dealing with matters of sin and holiness in our lives (Acts 5), congregational administration and dealing with church conflict (Acts 6), and other non-glamorous practices of ordinary Christian discipleship. These are things that God wants us to attend to, just as much as the mountaintop experiences of a Great-Awakening-style revival. God can work just as readily through slow, patient, quiet means as he can through big, showy, flashy means. It is perhaps no accident that Jesus describes the growth of the church in analogies of things that grow so slowly that one would almost die of boredom of one watched them from beginning to end: yeast spreading through dough, crops growing in a field, and so on. And yet, in the end, those slow, patient, quiet things are what make all the difference. So don't get lost in waiting and wishing for the next great revival. Pray for God's work in the world and then get to work yourself. Be faithful, proclaim the gospel, and give thanks for all things. Our Master is doing far more right now than we can even imagine, and perhaps what we are most in need of is simply to have eyes to see it.

Bible Study Series on the Book of Revelation

This page offers a new Bible study resource, with links to videos of studies in the Book of Revelation, as originally offered to my local church. These videos are not polished or high-level productions; they are simply the recorded livestreams of my in-person midweek Bible studies. With Facebook no longer hosting archived recordings of livestreams for more than a month, I needed a new place to offer these files, and demand was high for this particular series. (The first three chapters of Revelation are unrepresented in the videos below because those Facebook files had already been removed by the time I realized I needed to download them, but I've uploaded a few old audio sermons on those passages to represent that material.) This page will continue populating with new links to Bible study videos on a weekly or biweekly basis, until the series is complete.

Audio sermons on Rev. 1-3 (from a different sermon series of mine): 

Rev. 1; Rev. 2 (Letter 1); Rev. 2 (Letter 2); Rev. 2 (Letter 3); Rev. 2 (Letter 4); Rev. 3 (Letter 5); Rev. 3 (Letter 6); Rev. 3 (Letter 7)

Revelation 4

Revelation 5

Rev. 6 - Eschatology Intro

(Eschatology Handout)

Revelation 6

(Whiteboard display)

Revelation 7

Revelation 8

Revelation 9

Revelation 10-11

Revelation 11-12

Revelation 13

Revelation 14

Revelation 15-16

Revelation 17

Revelation 18

Update

Just a quick update on a few things going on here, written partly in apology for not yet resuming my often-promised return to regular posting on the blog:

- My current book project is progressing, but it calls for more work in the editing/revision stage than I had foreseen, so at my publisher's bidding I'm focusing most of my writing attention on that at the moment. The hope is still to be able to release it sometime this year, so I will keep you all apprised.

- I have a few academic presentations upcoming as well, with a bit of in-country travel, and since travel always sparks my itch to write, I hope it will result in a few good essays here. This coming weekend I'll be traveling with my family to my old alma mater, Houghton University, to present lectures based on my previous book (regarding the historical missiology of the early church). And later this spring, I'm off to Chicago to present a paper at the North American Patristics conference. I hadn't planned on attending this conference at all, but when the call to papers came out and I saw that they were specifically looking for papers on early church fathers and birds (yes, really)...well, you'll agree that I didn't have a choice in the matter; I had to pitch a paper proposal. 

- In the absence of daily (or even weekly) offerings on the blog, please feel free to check out my sermon podcasts on my church's website (calaisbaptist.org). I'm doing a series based on the "Glimpses of Grace" studies I began writing here a few years ago, and the response has been tremendous.

- Once this year's book project is off my plate, one of my great hopes is to return to my Evangeliad and perhaps even pick up the pace (it's still possible for me to complete it in less than a decade from its launch in 2017, so that seems a worthy goal). Blessings to you all, longsuffering friends, and many thanks for your kind support of my wildly-ranging writing projects over the years.