Date posted: February 21, 2012
The Road was an amazing experience to be involved in. Personally I came away stunned and humbled by what God did through this event.
Thanks also to all of you who came. Especially those of you who flew in from around Oz and NZ. A special thanks to those who went on ‘road trips’ driving down to Melbourne.
Since we got back into the office we have had lots of people asking whether The Road is going to go ‘on the road’. At this stage we won’t be taking the whole event on the Road. The good news is that we will be doing some smaller events around the place linked to the release of the book later in the year. Stay tuned.
Also a lot of people have been asking about whether the talks will be available on the net. The answer is yes. You can subscribe here where the talks will soon be appearing.
Date posted: February 10, 2012
In early 2010 there was a lot of buzz and internet chatter about Brian McLaren’s new book A New Kind of Christianity. I read that his book was based around ten questions that he believed Christianity in the 21st century had to address. When I finally saw the questions I was utterly deflated.
Not because I did not think the questions that he was asking were not important, it was just so far from where my own thinking was. It was the usual suspects, yet I was sensing as I read the culture, as I listened to those of faith and those outside of faith, a whole set of different questions. I was looking for the questions that were behind the questions. The questions that no one was asking, but that needed to be asked.
So at the beginning of I scribbled in my notebook my own list of ten questions. Yes some of them were quirky, but I believed they were vital. I just I did not realise just how vital they would become.
Here are my questions.
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1: The almost overwhelming consensus in the West is that Church needs to change. But what if Church is not the problem what if we are? In the past people were part of the church because of their sense of devotion, their expectations of Church were much lower. What if we are looking for Church to give us the transcendence that we are meant to find in God?
2: The contemporary christian scene has now fragmented into movements. I know people who were in the new reformed camp but who are now in the emergent camp, and people who have made the move in the opposite direction. I know people who grew up Eastern Orthodox and are now at Pentecostal churches, and Pentecostals who have become Eastern Orthodox. What is the way that we move and change affiliations and tribes telling us? Maybe beneath the theology, and practice something else is going on? Why are we always on the move?
3: Why did the Church flatline across the Western World around 1963-1968? Why such a specific time frame? What happened?
4: What if we as the Church has been so focussed on the way that the enlightenment has captured our minds that we missed the way that romanticism has captured our hearts. How do you communicate the gospel in such a new emotional landscape?
5: What if the sexual climate of the West tells us more about our view of the universe than it does about our sex drives?
6: What if the American author Jack Kerouac in 1947 created a new form of being a half-Christian half-unbeliever that would come to dominate the way contemporary Christians fifty years later would live out their faiths? What if his book On the Road was the genesis of the life script of young adults today?
7: Maybe young adults across the western world are leaving church because we embraced the idea of the seeker? The problem being that in the Western imagination seekers never stop seeking?
8: Everyone in the West sees their life as a journey. What if life is not a journey? What if by seeing life as an individual journey we are preventing ourselves participating in God’s grand narrative of salvation?
9: Why did the 9/11 hijackers spend their last months on this earth smoking dope, binging on donuts, drinking in night clubs, sleeping with prostitutes and buying porn? What does it tell us that men who were so committed to a radical and violent vision of Islam and who despised the culture of the West found themselves so conflicted when it came to behaviour?
10: Why do so many young Christians who profess to follow Christ seem by their actions to be more disciples of Nietzsche, anxiously spending their waking hours attempting to carve out lives of meaning?
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2010 was a year of lots of travel. So I took my ten questions with me on the road. Just me and my small notebook, trying to work it out as I sat in airports in New Zealand, caught trains across Denmark, or drove on the seemingly endless highways of the USA. A pattern began to emerge, what was fuzzy began to become clear. My wrist would hurt as I began to fill my notebook with what I was seeing. All around me planes to catch, people on the go, the perpetual motion of the luggage carousel, the limitless destinations on the screens of the airport, the hovering horizon staring back at me through the windshield. Everywhere around me constant motion, physical movement but also psychic movement, a fundamental restlessness which shaped contemporary life and faith. Answers were starting to attach themselves to my questions.
Then 2011 arrived alongside my twin boys. The travel was over, home was now the centre of my universe. Life became simple, the hours of sleeplessness, the constant changing, the never-ending washing was achieved with a book in hand. I devoured a virtual library in search of answers to my question, evidence for what I was sensing. I began to test what I was learning with my Church, it began to resonate. In the season of my life when I had the least time and energy to invest in my community of faith we began to grow, something was up.
The threads began to fall into place, the patterns became clear and strong. One day standing by my car, it all became clear, the key was underneath my feet, it was the road.
So at the beginning of 2012 it is time to go public with the answers. 17-18 Feb we will be running here an event based around not only the answers to my questions, but what I think are the implications for us as individuals. At the Road Event speaking will also be friends who have been sounding boards, who understand just how important this all is.
You can register here.
My questions and their answers formed themselves into a book called The Road Trip Which Changed The World, I will be blogging more about it later, but this to say I think it is the most important thing I have written so far.
Date posted: February 8, 2012
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us.”
In Australia we are in the midst of a pivotal moment that is discouraging and yet thrilling.
Ministries are shrinking, less leaders are coming through, conferences are struggling. The number of churches closing far outweighs the number of those being planted. There is less money around to fund mission and ministry. Apart from the over seventies age group people are leaving the Church and active faith in every age group. Attitudes towards Christians in Australia are at best indifferent and at worst antagonistic. If it was not for immigration and the faithfulness of Australian Christians from non-European backgrounds the statistics would look even more terrible.
In such a moment it is easy to become discouraged.
Yet this moment is strangely also thrilling because it presents with a challenge.
Our Australian context is home to a particularly virulent form of secularism. A cultural situation which presents a unique set of blockages to faith. We face;
The Secularism of the Moment: The Christian faith is a historical faith. It remembers the past, and points us towards God’s coming victory in the future. In contrast our nation’s ahistoricalism borders on the pagan. We choose to ignore the pain of our Aboriginal history. We forget the pain of our white history. We turn a blind eye to the pain of our Chinese history. Instead we bow down in worship of the ephemeral. We are a nation enslaved to the moment.
The Secularism of Rootlessness: The Bible is a record of covenants, commitments and connections. Yet these words strike fear into the contemporary Australian heart. We are a rootless people. In contrast to the original inhabitants of this nation we have little or no connection to our land, instead we remain constantly on the move relationally, geographically and psychically. Nomads in a portable bubbles of individualism.
The Secularism of Success: In a time when other countries are struggling economically, Australians are now the richest people in the World. My home of Melbourne, is listed at the world’s most livable city, and Australia is listed by Newsweek as the world’s best medium sized country. Many Australians are experiencing one of the global history’s highest standards of living, yet such wealth presents a clear and present danger. We are materially rich, yet spiritually poor. In our time of plenty, we can forget the poor in our midst, we can forget those seeking refuge at our shores, we can forget God. We have become a content-lite nation, not really standing for anything beyond some platitudes about freedom, fairness and casualness which could easily be as applied to New Zealand or Canada. We are living up to historian Manning Clark moniker – the kingdom of nothingness. We lie reassuring comfort of our warm, scented and candle lit bath, allowing ourselves to be soothed by the relaxing music, unaware that under the water we are spiritually bleeding to death.
The Secularism of Post-Christianity: Go to a conference on mission in Europe or America and you will hear the term post-christendom thrown around. Observers were labeling Australia post-Christian in the 18th century. Our first minister the Reverend Richard Johnson found the colonial government totally unsupportive of his efforts. He asked for money to build a church and received nothing, eventually in frustration he raised the money himself and built a chapel for five hundred people. At the Christmas service only about forty people showed up, not too long after his chapel, our nation’s first church was burnt down, Johnson returned home to England sick and discouraged. We have no history of a powerful and strong state Church to look back to, our nation has never been shaken by a great awakening. Our founding fathers were more disciples of Jeremy Bentham than of Christ. In the Australian imagination the Church and the Christian faith remains a peripheral oddity.
Communicating the gospel and living the way of Jesus in this environment is the great task before us.
This is a daunting challenge, but nevertheless it is a challenge that God has allowed us to face. Yes, there will be less money, but that will mean we will have to work smarter. Yes, there will be less comrades beside us but that means we will have to turn more to God. Yes, we will seem like cultural oddities but this will keep us humble. Yes, as believers in the nation we face indifference and antagonism, but what would you rather, be thrown in a prison cell for your faith, or have the hipster barrista look at you strangely for reading your bible whilst you sip your single sourced, shade grown, organic, relationally traded, perfectly crafted latte?
The future of the Church in this nation is dependent on how we respond to God’s challenge to us to make disciples and live out his kingdom. It’s our watch. Your faithfulness, your obedience, your response to God counts. You are not just some nobody inconsequentially toiling away in the sunny yet lost kingdom of Oz. God has placed you here for a purpose.
I believe that Australia despite being hidden away down under is actually in a strategic position. The form of secularism which is normal to us is springing up all over the West and the developed world. Already Australian leaders such as Alan Hirsch, John Dickson and Mike Frost are applying lessons that they have learnt here in other Western contexts. Our learnings, victories and failures will be instructive far beyond our shores. We are the post-Christendom laboratory for the rest of the West. When you walk out the front door of your house you are entering the cutting edge of secular culture in the West.
Standing before such a gospel resistant culture we may feel like a tiny mountain climber standing before a soaring and seeming unassailable peak. In such a moment our eyes can be drawn to gentle grassy hills in the distance. Yet we have to ask ourselves ‘Who wants to give their lives to climbing gentle hills when we can take on such a staggering peak.’
Besides, look outside, the sun is out.
Date posted: February 2, 2012
Excerpt from my new book The Road Trip That Changed the World.
In 1947 Jack Kerouac set off on a road trip that would reshape the mental landscape of almost everyone born in the West since that date. His cross-country jaunt would change how we viewed the world, processed our lives and interacted with our faiths. It would alter the cultural code of the West, re-orientating our collective psyches around the idea of the road.
Kerouac recorded his road trips in his classic book On the Road. Even if you have never read the book, you have been influenced by it. It. almost more than any other work, laid the foundation for the culture of the road. It would ensure that Kerouac for decades would operate as a kind of template for the cool, brooding, hipster—would be a sort of grandfather for punk, indie, and everything cool that has come since.
It would be read by millions, but its approach to life would be imitated in one form or another, by millions who had never read the book. True, the release of the book did not change the culture single-handedly but tapped into the desire for change that was already bubbling under the surface. Kerouac’s friend, the author William S. Burroughs, remarked, “The restlessness, the dissatisfaction were already there waiting when Kerouac pointed out the road.” Yet it was Kerouac’s motif of the road that provided the spark that would ignite the fire of cultural change.
Before Kerouac changed the life script of the West, life was processed through the idea of home. Home was not just a building in which you lived. It was a place to which you were deeply connected. Home was a family and a community of people to whom you belonged. Home was a unified worldview. This worldview infused every part of your life: it informed your recreational life, your work life, your religious life, even your sex life. This sense of home was held together by traditions and a way of life to which the individual submitted.
Despite these traditions restricting options and personal freedoms, the ideal of home gave the individual a sense of purpose, belonging and place. You did not need to discover who you were. Your sense of rootedness and your communal connections gave you a sense of self, an identity that was set and solid. Sure, not everyone experienced home in this way, but for the culture it was the ideal; a secure home and a loving community was what we hoped for. Journalist Thomas Friedman uses the symbol of the olive tree to describe this worldview of home:
“Olive trees are important. They represent everything that roots us, anchors us, identifies us and locates us in this world – whether it be belonging to a family, a community, a tribe, a nation, a religion or, most of all a placed called home. Olive trees are what give us the warmth of family, the joy of individuality, the intimacy of personal rituals, the depth of private relationships, as well as the confidence and security to reach out and encounter others.”
Today we could not be in a more different space. No longer do we view our lives through the ideal of home. Thanks to Jack Kerouac, our ideal is the road. We view life through the prism of the journey.
An award winning commercial for Louis Vuitton exemplifies this ideal. It features lush, cinematic shots of attractive individuals in deserts, cities, and exotic locales. There is a deeply sensual tone to the commercial. A suited man takes off his shoes and walks barefoot on the Saharan sand. Another man stands before the vista of an exquisite river, exhaling a cloud of visible breath in the cool morning air. A young female traveler sleeping in the alcove of a Tibetan village is awakened by the wind moving through her hair. Pages rustle in a journal; a young man drinks in both his tea and the sight of Shanghai at dawn. Across the screen come a series of statements and questions:
What is a journey?
A journey is not a trip. It’s not a vacation. It’s a process. A discovery.
It’s a process of self-discovery. A journey brings us face to face with ourselves. Does the person create the journey, or does the journey create
the person?
The journey is life itself. Where will life take you?
It is easy to see why this commercial is award winning. It is beautifully shot, drenched with evocative images. Its romanticism resonates with us because it reveals one of the great values that our contemporary culture holds dear—that life is a journey. That true meaning and happiness are found on the road
The contemporary self does not have to literally be on the move to be on the road. Being on the road is primarily a state of mind, one which constantly is dissatisfied, looking for the next best thing, living in incompleteness, always engaged in a quest for a sense of significance. This search for meaning becomes even more problematic in a culture which flees from objective truth, which fears authority and the holding of belief too strongly. The contemporary person finds themselves engaged in a quest for a truth they are told that they cannot find. In which the act of questing itself is given more importance than the completion of the quest. In such an environment the worldview of the road is triumphant.
The road has made us fickle. It has made our faiths weak. It has made us spoiled. To state it in its most brutal and blatant form, the road is ruining our lives and it is ruining our culture. It has left us lost and directionless, consumers not followers of God. When we open the pages of Scripture we find a different kind of person from the person of the road. A person of the way. The way of Christ. A pilgrim of a road that does not lead to the tantalizing potential of a future destination but instead to a wooden cross. A way that promises life eternal but that also demands total obedience, complete surrender and death to self.
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If you would like to explore what it is to live out a Christian faith in a culture of The Road make sure that you get along to our event The Road. Just click on the image below to find out more.
Date posted: January 24, 2012
Wow. Lots of responses to my last article on masculinity and evangelicalism. A number of people have asked for some further clarifications. I noticed also that a number of people slightly misunderstood what I was attempting to say.
I was saying that evangelicalism of the 18th century saw one of its missions as challenging the aggressive, arrogant and violent code of machismo that dominated the public imagination of what it was to be a male.
By the beginning of the 20th century the public consciousness of what it was to be a male had radically altered, the code of machismo was on the whole consigned to the past. This is evidenced in the way that fascism in the early 2oth century saw contemporary modes of ‘the soft male’ as an obstacle to its goals of recreating society. Hitler lambasted the state of pre-war German masculinity, accusing it of passivity, weakness and effeminacy. Thus Hitler took a page out of Mussolini’s book and reached back into history for an alternate model of masculinity that predated Christianity’s softening.*
So what I am saying is that evangelicalism softened masculinity and that was a good thing. I think this re-envisioning of masculinity can be counted as one of its great achievements. This move created much of the social spaces of freedom in our culture today that we take for granted.
Yet in our day this softening has intensified, moving beyond the place of balance into passivity and indifference. The social dislocation of contemporary society and the aimlessness of secularism alongside numerous other factors have contributed as well.
I believe that Genesis teaches us that masculinity moves to two extremes in sin. Adam’s silence while the serpent tempts Eve points us to the sin of passivity. Cain’s murderous rage towards his brother illuminates the sin of violence. Masculinity in different cultures will move from one extreme to the other. Sometimes both extremes will be on view. All around us in the comfortable West is the sin of male passivity. The danger is that when we ignore history we attempt to solve today’s sins by ignoring the sins of the past. To return to a mode of machismo to rectify today’s passivity will only again open pandora’s box of violence, anger and arrogance.
What we need more than anything today, is not a new or old model of masculinity, but a biblical model of masculinity. One that is balanced, that does not fall into the extremes of passivity and weakness or it’s polar opposites of arrogance and violence.
Where do we find that balance? Well I think that the last word should be left to one of my readers, Jono Smith a pastor from Melbourne who wrote the following comment after reading the original article.
“Jesus was tougher and more tender than me. I need the Spirit to grow me in both directions.”
Amen Jono.
*(Of course the death of the code of machismo would see the reduction of individualist and small scale outbreaks of violence in the West, but sadly as history progressed the state would become main arbiter of violence. This transition from the medieval code of machismo to the modern mode of state sponsored violence is powerfully communicated in Tolstoy’s War and Peace which begins with aristocratic duelling and ends with total Napoleonic war.)
Date posted: January 19, 2012
There is a line of thought that currently floats around the evangelical world that goes something like this. Within the Church there is an absence of manly men. Young men are dropping out of the church, and dropping out of life. Instead of taking new ground, forthrightly stating their opinions, planting churches and getting the biz done, they find themselves drowning in a sea of passivity and metrosexuality.
Therefore the thinking goes, someone or something must take the blame for this current predicament. The usual suspect named is feminism. Although also often brought in for further questioning is a whole motley crew of suspects ranging from postmodernity, theological liberalism, the absence of male role models, or the death of male initiation ceremonies. But what if the true suspect has never been called in for questioning? What if like all good crime mysteries it is the guy that we least expect? Who is the real culprit?
(Cue dramatic music and shocked expressions please.)
The original culprit behind the softening of males in our culture is evangelicalism.
Ok I am being slightly dramatic. Evangelicalism did not create social passivity or a market for male moisturisers. Yet at one time it did see its mission to soften and pacify masculinity. Evangelicalism came of age on the new frontiers of Western culture during the eighteenth century, a time period in which a new set of challenging social situations confronted the Church. Whole populations were springing up outside of the traditional boundaries of Christendom. The industrial revolution saw millions move from the countryside to the city. New frontiers were opening up in the Americas, the Caribbean and Australasia. Evangelicalism came of age in these emerging and challenging mission fields. The dislocation of cultural change created a dislocation of masculinity.
This dislocation created an epidemic of alcoholism which gripped the Western world. Huge percentages of the male (and female) population were addicted to spirits. From the aristocracy to the working poor, adultery was a way of life. Cohabitation in the new frontiers was commonplace. Staggering numbers of women were caught in the trap of the sex trade. One in five women in London in the eighteenth century was involved in prostitution. The first missionary to Australia the Rev Richard Johnson was confronted with a colony in which historian Robert Hughes estimates that 98% of the female population was involved in some form of prostitution. The levels to which men were caught up in a cycle of addiction and adultery make our current society look tame. Yet one male error overshadowed all other vices, the sin of violence.
The modern world was being birthed, culture was morphing, yet masculinity still operated upon older outdated modes. Modes based on honour, saving face and violence. Evangelical church planters, ministers and missionaries found themselves sharing the gospel in post-Christian societies ruled by a code of machismo. Places and spaces in which the violent alpha male was king.
Whether it was the new urban poor of the UK, the convict settlements of Australia, the Western frontiers of the US and Canada, or the slave plantations of the Caribbean; social life was mediated through male aggression and violence. This violence permeated every strata of society. Between individuals murder, assault and rape were commonplace and domestic violence acceptable. Even amongst the well heeled, disputes were settled through duelling. Gangs were widespread, and mob violence normative.
The ‘terror’ of the French revolution put paid to the rules and restrictions of ‘gentlemenly’ warfare, as the new army of the Republic erased the line between civilian and combatant thus creating the idea of total warfare. Colonisation saw incredible violence unleashed upon indigenous populations. Slavery was widespread. The legal system delivered its own forms of violence. In Britain, female counterfeiters were hung and burnt, Irish rebels charged with high treason were submitted to the almost unthinkable punishment of being hanged drawn and quartered. Violence was endemic to life in the West.
If the evangelicals were to fulfil their mandate to share the good news and make disciples they had to confront violent secular models of masculinity. Historian John Wolffe notes that what was created was a new evangelical concept of manliness. One based on calling, and moral virtue rather than honour and machismo. One shaped by the fruits of the spirit, rather than the code of violence.
The language used to usher in this revolution in masculinity seems quaint to us. There is much use of the term ‘morality’ and ‘manners’, words completely out of vogue today. We all know that William Wilberforce gave his life for the abolition of slavery, but he was as equally passionate about the reformation of manners. What he and countless other evangelical stalwarts of the time understood was that they had to model a new mode of being male. One which was gentle yet forthright, active yet peaceful, dedicated yet humble.
The creation of this new evangelical model of masculinity would in turn create a new social space for women. Evangelical colleges would be amongst the first to offer higher education to women. The family was also transformed, the previous modes of masculinity saw little point in fraternising with females and children. The new evangelical mode of masculinity placed affection over aggression as the dominant mode of relating to ones family. Within a century evangelicals transformed how much of the Western world understood what it was to be male. How did they do this?
The key was pride. Pride is where everything goes wrong. Pride is linked to the idea of honour. For when honour is challenged in the world of the alpha male, violence is the only thing which can satiate. The evangelicals of the eighteen century understood that concepts of pride and honour were key in reshaping what it was to be male, and only one thing could achieve this reshaping, the gospel. Church Historian David Bebbington notes that the idea of conversion was central to evangelicalism. In their communication of the gospel on the new frontiers of the West, the evangelicals, stressed repentance, rebirth and regeneration. In coming to Christ, hardened men were forced to leave their pride at the foot of the Cross. They were invited to follow a Messiah who shunned all of the world’s ideas of honour, who could have struck back with the force of an army of angels, but who chose to die a death that was shameful in the eyes of the world but that brought eternal glory. A Messiah who was a warrior, but a warrior who fought his war in the upside down reality of the kingdom, who declared war not on flesh and blood but on death, corruption, injustice and sin. When a man of the eighteenth century frontiers of Western culture truly followed ‘the Messiah who turned the other cheek’ in open view of his peers, there was little he could do to prevent his machismo being eviscerated in an instant.
In our current crisis of masculinity it is tempting to ignore the past and instead look towards models of being a man which carry the scent of the alpha male. The danger however is that we create a new evangelical concept of maleness, a kind of Christian tough guy, one which attempts to fuse Christlikeness with machismo. Such a re-imagining of masculinity makes the mistake of replacing passivity with pridefulness. This new mode of Christian machismo paves the way for a new climate within evangelicalism marked by abrasiveness, authoritarianism and arrogance, a swelling of the male ego that blocks out others view of the Cross.
To rescue masculinity in the West we must remember that we stand on the shoulders of giants. One such giant was John Newton. A man whose debauched life as a slave trader ensured that he had inhabited the old world of male violence. Yet Newton was thoroughly transformed by his encounter with the truth of the gospel. Newton operated as a template for the new evangelical mode of masculinity. He chose to champion others rather than simply build his own empire. A committed calvinist, he collaborated with and encouraged other believers who thought differently to him, maintaining a warm friendship and working relationship with John Wesley.
Newton was not a prim and proper Georgian dandy, often he was described as uncouth. Newton was passionate and dedicated, his communication of the gospel was uncomprimising. Yet what entranced his contemporaries was that his gospel communication was described as having an almost ‘womanly tenderness’. Newton was pointing the way forward to a new mode of being male, one shaped by the Gospel not the code of honour and violence. Newton would act as a father figure to a whole generation of evangelical leaders who would not just transform culture’s idea of masculinity but culture itself.
So what are we to do with our current crisis of masculinity? What advice should be given to young men who find themselves looking for male role models, who wonder what it is to be a Christian man in today’s culture of passivity and indecision. I think that if you want to be a man, stop trying so hard. Instead look to Newton’s advice, understand that you are a wretch who has been transformed by a grace that is amazing. Allow yourself to daily mediate upon and live out of that reality and one day you will get up to shave and the face in the mirror looking back at you will be the face of a man.
Date posted: December 2, 2011
I pulled up, parked the car, and headed for the door of the Church. Behind the stage whole teams sweated and slaved to ensure a high quality event. The band visibly under pressure rehearsed, their conversation strained. The Pastor was stressed, and moved about the auditorium checking that his leaders were discharging their various duties. The media team buzzed around in a funk of sweaty annoyance.
A giant clock appeared on the screen and began to count down to start time. This device did not seem to affect the punctuality of the attenders who dribbled in over the next fifteen minutes. The next forty minutes was a combination of phenomenal music, amazing media and a lighting and sound system that most secular venues would have been jealous of. The video announcements offered attenders a virtual cornucopia of options, programs, and activities.
I turned around and looked out into the audience as the last song before my talk was being played. The front row comprised the Church leaders, all of whom were engaged enthusiastically in the worship but as I looked deeper into the congregation I noticed that the rest of the congregation stood, at worst not singing, at best half heartedly mouthing the words. Almost every expression was blank as the colored lights flashed across their faces. Arms were crossed, gum was being chewed, the audience were the epitome of passivity.
They were not participants but consumers of a spectacle, not disciples but spectators. In that moment images of Jesus poured into my mind. Jesus walking through the silence of the desert, Jesus walking the dusty paths of Israel, announcing the kingdom of God. Shaping, disciplining and teaching his disciples. Jesus on the Cross giving up his life for the world, Jesus rising on the third day to inaugurate a new world. Instantly I was back in the auditorium, now myself staring at the show on stage like a deer caught in headlights. I shook my head and the disparity of the images in my mind and what I had just experienced.
In the past I would have blamed the Church. I would have with coldness deconstructed the service. Looked down at my nose at the methodology. The problem is that I now have seen the same look of detachment in Reformed gospel preaching churches, hip emerging churches, and polished Pentecostal services. I have seen the same bored eyes in liturgical heavy high churches and casual, organic house churches. The people who were running this church were great people, they were passionate about Jesus and sharing his mission with the world. They were dedicated to creating disciples. Yet something had fundamentally shifted. The balance of power had moved, but everyone was too busy trying to get the punters in the door to notice what had happened. My friends at the Church faced an almost impossible task, satiating the hungry beast that is the twenty-first century citizen of the West. Church was not the problem, we were.
FAITH HAS CHANGED
Listen to how differently we describe faith today. Yes, we still adhere to Christianity but our language has changed. We use terms like journey, feeling, and experience. The word awesome is everywhere, not so much describing a transcendent idea of God, but a transcendent experience; which in the current language of faith can be used interchangeably between a worship service and an skiing tour of New Zealand. Our language exposes a new way of holding to faith. One which is short term, feelings based, and fragile. Something has fundamentally changed.
REFUGEES OF FAITH
Today our religious lives are dominated by a kind of traveling, a search to find the right church, right expression of faith that delivers the right lifestyle. To contemporary sensibilities it seems ludicrous, but in the past people attended Church through a sense of duty and responsibility. A decision to attend Church was not made with individuals wants, desires and needs in mind. Rather Church attendance was part of the fabric of spiritual discipline. Today people without an ounce of shame admit that they are ‘church shopping’. Like good consumers we compare the various attributes of Churches, looking for the Christian community which will best assist us in achieving our predetermined life goals.
Some will note that the culture of transience that we find both in the Church and in the wider culture is caused by an economy in which many move jobs and thus homes regularly. Yet its real engine lies deeper in the human soul. Philosophers Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly explain, ‘To say that we live in a secular age in the modern West is to say that even religious believers face existential questions about how to live a life.’
Ours is a culture in which a constant searching for happiness is the ultimate goal, this means that believers find themselves constantly reevaluating their faith. Anxiously reassessing their beliefs, testing faith’s ability to deliver our cultures vision of the good life.
CHRISTIANITY IS NOW JUST A LIFE STAGE
One religious sociologist I heard interviewed, noted that for many young adults Christianity is now just a life stage. An experiment of adolescence explored in the way that many flirt with recreational drugs or promiscuous sexual activity during their early twenties. Christianity then is reduced to just one of many tools that the individual tries during their life in the quest for the good life. These heightened expectations of faith and radical individualism, presents an incredible challenge to faith. Sociologist Wade Clark Roof has observed that, “The real story of American religious life in this half-century is the rise of a new sovereign self that defines and sets limits on the very meaning of the divine.”
Rabbi Shmuley Boteach commenting on the religiosity of contemporary culture, notes that in the West we now have “a generation whose principal desire is to feel G-d rather than worship Him.”
In such a climate, faith becomes just one rest stop on the highway of life. The culture of the Road has subverted Christian discipleship in the West.
Next Time in Part 2 What is the Culture of the Road?
Date posted: November 25, 2011
The Jerusalem Advertising Journal. 33Ad.
By Avram Ben Haim Chief Brand Strategist of the Haaretz Group.
Just over four weeks ago outside of Jerusalem the Roman authorities executed the man known as Jesus of Nazareth. There were no riots, no public uproar, even the majority of his followers stayed away from what was a humiliating end. However this was not just the death of another Messianic pretender, this was catastrophic public relations disaster of the highest order. Thus the purpose of this article is to learn from the mistakes that Jesus and his handlers made, mistakes which ruined one of our nation’s strongest brands.
In an already crowded market of Messianic pretenders, radical Rabbis and Elijah-esque wanna be prophets, Jesus had star power. His emergence around three years ago was like a shooting star in the night sky. There was something magic about him, a point of difference that agents, marketers, sponsors and brand managers like myself see only once in a lifetime.
I remember sitting in a focus group sponsored by the Jerusalem Times, and having to pick my jaw up off of the floor at the responses from the group. Never before had I seen such brand recognition, such identification with a public figure. He cut across the major demographic groups, even appealing to notoriously difficult market segments such as the Samaritans. When I heard the numbers that he was polling amongst the Goyim I knew that we had a sensation on our hands, marketing lighting in a bottle.
Jesus dodged some bad publicity and numbers in his home town to roar into the public’s consciousness like a modern day Maccabee. His message had cut through, amongst his audience could be found liberal Sadducees, socially conservative Pharisees and your run of the mill rural aspirationals. His association with the already strong brand of John the Baptist gave him a sense of authenticity that money cannot buy. A number of brilliantly conceived psuedo-events such as a giant public festival come picnic, some very public healings and his sermon on the mount moved him into top of the Messianic charts. No one appeared more ready, more able, more publicly positioned to usher in the Davidic Kingdom that the prophets had promised. Yet just as we were expecting to see the streets running with Roman blood, and Israel established at the centre of world government and trade, the Jesus brand turned into a car wreck.
The crowd screamed, grown men cried as Jesus headed towards the temple. Riding on the Davidic donkey was sheer genius. It was all going to happen, even this cynical old brand manager stood in the crowd that day felt goose bumps, but then the most public of meltdowns, a temper tantrum of the highest order. The turning of the tables, the yelling, the assault against the poor working people in the temple. Something had gone horribly wrong.
In fact something had been very wrong for a while. It was the usual cocktail, I have seen it countless times amongst those cast into the public glare. Of course everyone has heard the rumours of the parties and the drinking. Yet I believe that the real issue was a power struggle amongst Jesus’ advisors and media handlers. The sensible business acumen of Judas Iscariot seems to have been challenged by the weapon carrying thug Simon (who also goes by the alias Peter), the boy from the country seems to have preferred hometown hoodlums to the wiser, sensible heads. Like so many before him, Jesus seemed unable to handle the fame, the usual signs of mental illness were there, the isolating of himself, the running from the public, the constant talk of death. The morbid and restrictive demands put upon those following him. The last public polling of Jesus conducted just hours before his death produced numbers that were as painful as the execution he was just about to endure.
So the sordid affair ended with a heretic enduring a justified death. In the coming years Jesus will be forgotten, (apart from a small lunatic fringe who have already begun circulating rumours of ghostlike visions and appearances). The man I feel most sorry for most in this horrible saga is Judas Iscariot, who tragically took his own life. I believe that Jesus’ early success was attributable to his careful brand management, then regrettably the lunatics took over the asylum. Prayers and best wishes to his family, he was one of us.
So what can we learn as brand managers? If you want to learn how to massage fame, to position celebrity, to create a much loved brand, study what Jesus of Nazareth did and then do the opposite.
Date posted: November 18, 2011
Woody Allen once made the observation that ninety percent of success in life is just showing up. Today there are a thousands of other things that you could be doing instead of the thing that you should be doing. There are those weekends away, that music festival that you might check out, that party, or even just the comfort of staying in bed.
Great leadership is built on a habit of turning up when you really don’t want to, of pushing past the FOMO (fear of missing out) and standing by your commitment. God will entrust you with a greater mantle of leadership when you have shown dogged persistence in the most simple, uncool and mundane things.
The other day I watched a thirty second clip of an incredible goal scored by a footballer in a crucial match. The goal was watched live by tens of millions, and will be replayed for the next twenty years. What most people will miss however is the backend. We forget that the thirty sublime seconds of skill was built on a decade and a half of practice and perseverance. In the thirty second clip we don’t see the blood, sweat and tears, the tens of thousands of hours of practice. We love the ‘yes’ of the goal, but don’t see the thousands of ‘no’s’ that proceeded it, no to a social life, no to doing what you want when you want, no to sleeping in, no to anything else but utter discipline.
People look at the author holding their new book in their hand, and wish that they could do the same, but fail to see that behind that book is a sea of hard work, of research, of handling rejections from publishing houses, of torturously wrestling with a manuscript, the thousands of hours of writing, the excruciating essays at University where the writer honed their skill, the bad reviews and misunderstandings of readers. Young leaders must understand that the public victories are built upon a backend of sacrifice, hard work, and frustration.
Great leaders are hesitant. Not because they are not prepared for leadership but because they truly understand the cost. Before his triumph on the Cross, Jesus sweated blood in the garden understanding what was before him. His view of ministry was sober. He was not drukenly caught up in viewing ministry through the lens of celebrity. Many young leaders today simply ‘want it’ too much, because they don’t really understand what ministry is. They mistake Christian leadership for celebrity. They have not grasped the idea that God humbled himself to stand amongst us, that he was spat upon, tortured and killed.
Many when they envision Christian leadership imagine their favourite Christian speaker or author, instead we must look to the suffering servant to truly understand what leadership is. A Christian leader is one who understands the cost of their calling. The Christian leader must be ready for pain, loneliness and opposition. They will not seek out influence or to be known. God will sometimes grant this, but to those whom are spiritually ready for it. The leader who has gained influence too early or by their own hand without understanding the cost of leadership is in a very dangerous position.
Good leaders know their weak spots. They are aware of the way that they might fall. Often our weaknesses are known to us, our bruises and cuts point us to them. Yet it is often the short comings that we are unaware of that do the most damage. We can understand our blind spots by prayerfully bringing ourselves before God, by allowing Him to shine his light on the dark crevices of our souls. We must invite Him into the rooms of our heart that we have left locked and uncleaned.
We also become aware of our weak spots by making ourselves open to correction from our loved ones, from those we work with and with our mentors and leaders. It can be a painful, humiliating, process, yet it is utterly vital. The best way to start is to ask those around you ‘What is a weakness in my life that I need to be aware of?’. Feel a bit queasy about the idea of doing that, it is probably a sign that you need to do it.