My friend L(only) V(only) Hanson asked this question as part of his Facebook status the other day: “How do you do church without doing events?”

Now…that’s a question that’ll give you fits, won’t it?

I think what this gets at is whether or not we see the church as something we do or something we are. The word “church” brings to mind all sorts of event-related images. Our Sunday morning assemblies are events, aren’t they? All the activities of a church…those are events, right?

But — even as a child growing up in an attractional-model church — I was always told that the church is not someplace to go. Rather, I was told, the church is what we are. We don’t simply go to church; we are the church.

Still…that rhetoric is nice and all…but we talk about planting a church, attending a church, being a member of a church. What do all these phrases mean? They refer to a place where a group of people do things. A church is a group of people who hold events.

They do church.

Okay, now I’m stuck a little. Are they a church because they do church? Or do they do church because they are a church?

I’m not saying that the two have to be mutually exclusive. At least I don’t think I am.

What’s your take? Is it possible to be church without doing church?

There are some who say there are no answers to be sought, philosophy has reached a dead-end, there is no virtue, no truth, no exit.

But they’re wrong.

There are answers. Not all of them are good answers. Not all of them work. But none of that stops them from being answers.

In fact, there are lots of answers to the big questions of life – questions about where we came from, where we’re headed and how we should live in the meantime (that’s origin, destiny and morality for those of you keeping track at home).

The truth is – and everyone knows this at some level – we cannot live without answers. It’s one thing to be a relativist as long as the conversation sticks with theory. But once we move into practice, relativists have to drop their relativism. Otherwise, they couldn’t do things like, oh, drive or type on a keyboard.

One key isn’t the same as all the others. And it’s not okay for red to mean stop to me if it means go to you. A door is not the same as a window, and neither of them are a brick wall.

Beyond any of this, when a human cries out for truth or love or justice, that human must be given something real. Not mythology. Not a philosophical lecture. The cries of the heart demand something more than that, something actual.

And so…we have arrived back at our original question: Where do we go from here?

Shall we go back to the way things were before Jesus appeared and Christianity took over as the foundational worldview for western civilization?

Shall we attempt to re-establish that foundational Christian worldview?

Shall we continue to seek out a new worldview that everyone can accept but which places something other than the God of the Bible at its center?

Or shall we give in to the despair, sit down and wait for death?

I think those are our options unless you can help me think of something else.

In a comment to yesterday’s post about the differences between preaching and teaching, Brian said:

“When I hear that preaching is to be inspirational, that can be interpreted to mean ‘inspiring the church to action’, but I think inspirational can imply that the audience leaves feeling good, and I think if that is the extent of inspiration that takes place, the church loses momentum.”

I’m pretty sure I know what Brian’s talking about. I think he’s speaking out against messages that are often called “feel good” messages — sermons and/or lessons designed to make the listeners feel good about themselves, about their beliefs, about their lives, etc. Critics will say that these messages do nothing, they have no teeth, they don’t challenge the audience to any kind of change.

And yet….

I wonder if we could say that about, say, some of the sermons of MLK, Jr. His sermons seem to have been aimed at helping the immediate audience make sense of life and feel better about things. But he also knew that there would be an audience outside of those immediately gathered who would read or hear his words and be greatly challenged, even disturbed.

There are times when life is hard, and the last thing a person needs is to go to church and get kicked in the shins. Now…don’t get me wrong. Sometimes a good kick is precisely what a person needs. But sometimes a person needs gentle words. Sometimes a person needs to feel good, right?

That’s not a rhetorical question. It’s an actual question for you to answer:

Should preaching make you feel good?

Darin suggested that the main difference between “teaching” and “preaching” may be in the way a “sermon” is perceived.

Teaching, says Darin, seems to be more practical and instructional.

Preaching is more inspirational.

Does that ring true for you? And, if so, do you prefer one to the other for a Sunday morning assembly in church?

Frank made some great observations about why Christianity worked as a basis for society for so long. By combining philosophy and religion, Christianity provided not only a macro-view of life, it also provided a micro-view. In other words, it not only addressed big, deep questions, it also helped you know how to live moment-to-moment. It addressed issues about origin (where we came from) and destiny (where we’re going); it also addressed issues of morality (how we should live in the meantime).

I think there were some other reasons why Christianity worked so well for so long.

For one thing, it actually worked. You could live out a Christian ethic, and it made life better for everyone concerned. If the basis of society was loving God, loving others and caring for the entire world (even if only in theory)…well…that just made for a more positive experience. And people were drawn to that.

It was comprehensive (addressing issues big and small). It was coherent (it actually made sense). And it corresponded to reality (it looked at the world and humanity as it actually exists rather than as it should exist).

But it did have this problem: God was at its center. And that meant that humanity was not. There was a reasoning that trumped human reason in this system. God’s thoughts were considered higher than ours — higher in priority and higher in quality.

And that chafes a lot of people. It always has. So, for the past 500 years or so people have tried to devise a “better” system — a way of thinking about and living in the world that had human reasoning at its core instead.

For 500 years we’ve worked on this, and it hasn’t really gotten us anywhere. Actually, to be honest, it has gotten us somewhere, but it hasn’t gotten us anywhere good. And the question we face now is, “Where do we go from here?”

Some say there’s no use going anywhere anymore. There’s nowhere to go anyway. We’ve tried every door, and there’s “No Exit”. There are no answers. There is no meaning. There is no purpose. There are no values, no truth, no virtue.

John Lennon wrote a song that expressed these sentiments (in a rather naive and sentimental way). He wrote:

Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today

Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace

Now, this sounds all sweet and gentle, but let’s go ahead and imagine it. Imagine no heaven or hell. That means no consequences and no accountability. No reward. No punishment.

How do you suppose people would actually live if they knew there would never be any sort of account to be given? If they knew they would never have to answer for the things they’ve done and said? If their secret activities (either positive or negative) would never be revealed? Honestly, how do you think people would live?

Imagine people just living for today. No repercussions. No long-term planning. No restraint. Just impulsive people living in the moment. It sounds nice at first, but you don’t want a person like that working at your bank, do you?

Now, imagining there are no countries and no war…I understand this. But the line about there being nothing to die for? That gives me pause. I wonder: if there’s nothing worth dying for, is there ever anything worth really living for? I don’t think I could ever muster up the whatever-it-takes to kill someone for something. But I like to think I have it in me to die for a worthy cause. For my children. For my faith.

Imagine a world like that. John Lennon was correct in saying it’s not difficult to imagine. But was he wrong to suggest that a world like that would be preferable to the world in which we currently live?

Cyber-pal and bible teacher extraordinaire, Frank Bellizzi, suggested the topic of yesterday’s conversation was too big and that I should break it up into smaller pieces. Now, Frank is no dummy. He’s a Yale-y and all. He has initials after his name, so when he says it’s too big…it’s too big!

So, here goes. I’m going to attempt to break up the history of western philosophy into smaller pieces — but not by that much, I’m afraid. At the risk of oversimplifying things, you could view the story of western philosophy to this point as five 500-year-long acts — which would be long even for Shakespeare.

The 500 years before Jesus was born recognized lots of big questions and offered many possible answers. None of those answers was universally accepted, and most of them had short shelf lives. But, the point is that by the time Jesus lived there was a pretty broad spectrum of philosophies (aka worldviews) by which to live. In other words, pluralism and relativism aren’t really new inventions; they’ve been around for a while.

The main difference between the kinds of pluralism and relativism folks encountered back then and what we experience today is that they didn’t see relativism as exhaustive. In other words, people may have disagreed over how to define things like meaning and virtue, but everyone believed that things like meaning and virtue actually existed. You may debate whose truth was more accurate, but you didn’t debate whether there is such a thing as truth.

Now, the next 500 years saw the rise of Christianity as the dominant worldview. Christians led the way in defining things like goodness, truth, meaning, value and purpose. There were other worldviews, to be sure, and they got into fights like we’d expect them to. Christianity was attacked philosophically and physically, but Christianity would not go away. In fact, Christianity became — for better or worse — the foundation upon which the next two 500-year-long acts of the story were based.

Just about everything that happened in the western world from 500AD to 1500AD happened as a result of the Christian underpinnings in society. Again, this isn’t to say that everything was wonderful; there were terrible things that happened as well. And Christianity was often misunderstood and/or misapplied in the realms of politics and statesmanship. But still…it is undeniable that Christianity was integral, vital and necessary to the formation of western civilization.

Then we arrived at the fifth act: the era of modernism from which we have recently emerged. The fifth act completely undid the previous three acts, destroying the united foundation upon which our civilization had been built. Interestingly, it didn’t do this by showing how false the Christian worldview is per se. It simply pushed the Christian worldview aside in favor of a new approach. What might happen, the question was asked, if we built everything upon the foundation of human reasoning? What if, instead of God, people were at the center of everything?

Thus have we arrived at the beginning of the sixth act. And we are confronted with the failure of the last 500 years. To quote philosopher Peter Hicks, “Modernism has drawn a blank”. Instead of offering a worldview that allowed us to understand and live properly in this world, the current philosophical landscape is littered with irrationalism, deconstruction and despair.

Tomorrow, I hope to take up the question: Where do we go from here?

But today I’m interested in your opinion on this: Why do you think the Christian worldview was so successful for so long?

My post yesterday was…uh…a little heavy. I’m planning to return to it, but a was just thinking about something a few minutes ago and wanted to get your input.

When I get up on the platform every Sunday for 35 minutes, am I preaching or teaching? Is there a difference? Is one better than the other? Does it even matter, or can we just use the two terms interchangeably?

I’ve got a lot of stuff clogging up my brain these days. Practical things like relationships and finances and numbers and figures and diagrams and charts and stuff like that. It’s become a bit of a problem for me, because I find it paralyzing to an extent. I need to get my brain juices flowing again.

And — if you know me at all — that means my brain is starting to ruminate on some deep-ish kinds of things. Philosophy. Theology. Psychology. How do they intersect? Where do they diverge?

With that as a preamble, I’m going to launch into some ponderings here. I’d love it if you’d chime in. I always find it more stimulating to do this kind of thinking in the context of community.

For the past 500 years, a remarkable thing has been happening in the Western world. It has been the greatest challenge ever embraced by the greatest intellectual minds in all of human history. And the way we deal with the consequences of this undertaking will determine the future of philosophy — perhaps the future of humanity.

Here’s what happened: Some folks decided that they were dissatisfied with a theocentric (God-centered) understanding of the world. Furthermore, they were dissatisfied with the standard way of living that had been practiced for the previous thousand years or so.

This is an important thing to remember: Thinking about the world and living in the world with an understanding that God was the center of it all — that was the way of the world for about 1,000 years. That was the way the vast majority of western people thought and lived until a little more than 500 years ago.

So, when these folks set out to create a whole new approach to thinking about and living in the world, they were really swimming upstream. And they decided to build their approach upon the foundation of human reason. They weren’t concerned with any sort of external input from any source outside our world — no supernatural help allowed.

This seemed like a very good idea at the time, and — for a while — there was a lot of excitement that it might just work. In fact, some guys actually claimed to have done it!

But the sad truth is that none of their systems was ever deemed satisfactory. Every system had flaws and inconsistencies, and — more to the point — every system proved unliveable. They all sounded good at first, but the closer you looked, the more the cracks appeared. And when you tried to actually work it out in real life…well…that’s when you ran into trouble. And you always ran into trouble.

Eventually, the initial optimism faded and was replaced by cynicism. The idea that human reason might save the day began to seem laughable. In fact, people started shifting the conversation away from the power of the human intellect to the limits of the human intellect. From there, the conversation continued until we were actually discussing the utter failure and complete inadequacy of the human intellect.

By the end of the 20th Century, it was universally acknowledged that the entire project was one, big philosophical failure.

So…what are our options now? Do we simply deal with the fact that our puny human brains are incapable of devising a system of viewing and living in the world that answers all the important questions? Or do we keep trying? Do we go back? Do we go forward? Do we give up our Western heritage and seek answers in the East? Do we blend parts of both East and West?

Are there options I’m not thinking of here?

I feel kind of stuck w/ the blog here lately. Honestly, I have loved doing this for so many years, but I let it slip after we moved to California last fall. The website got hacked. I got busy planting a new church. So much is going on, and my thoughts have been kind of muddy about how to move forward.

So, that’s me and the blog right now: stuck.

How would you suggest I get unstuck? Or should I shut the thing down? If I keep going, what would you like to discuss here?

Go ahead; I’m all ears. Well…not really…but you understand what I mean, right?