Dr. Stephen Crosby

From the May 2006 Sword and Trowel Newsletter download Word doc here

I recently began to think about a common bow and arrow--how utterly dependent each is on the other for unit effectiveness.

A bow has tremendous potential of power. The wood is usually seasoned and processed with heat and moisture, then laminated and cured for extra power. It is often identified by its force: the number of “pounds” it takes to draw the bow to full extension. However, without anything to shoot, the perfected bow only offers its potential. You can draw and release the bow string without an arrow, but the odd twanging sound and imbalanced vibrations which result indicate it is designed for something better. The result is noise and vibrations, but no penetrating reality. It is almost as if the bow itself resents and reacts against an inadequate and frustrated release of power.

Likewise, an arrow alone is of no value. It can be honed to a razor sharp point, be as straight as a prairie highway, fletched beautifully, but if you try throwing it, it is not going to go very far, very accurately. It may scratch or cut something at the end of its ungainly trajectory, but it will never penetrate. An arrow is designed for penetration, but it needs propelling force to be useful.

The bow and arrow imagery applies I think to some current Church circumstances. The Church exists on planet earth to be the permeating and penetrating agent of the kingdom of God, representing Him to the world, and out of the world, turning rebels into sons and daughters. However, by all statistical measures, the facts are that the Christian Church is not penetrating our cultures/communities. In fact, we are not even holding our own, but losing our children and generally declining in both numerical size and cultural influence in the West. I realize there are always bright exceptions, for which I rejoice, however, the overall picture I believe is accurate. We have become all bow and no arrow.

Sunday after Sunday there are twangy noises and odd vibrations in our services where we flex our spiritual bow string: singing, shouting, praying, spiritual warfare, prophetic acts, prophetic intercession, binding the strong man, and other activities abound. Yet in many churches a new convert hasn’t been seen in years if not decades. Oh, there is no shortage of church transfer growth, but very little actual net kingdom increase due to saved souls. We have no shortage of teaching and preaching and other activities and programs in our churches, yet they seemingly yield little or no fruit. We minister to the same crowd, week after week. Why do we do all these things? What is the point in doing them? Something is wrong with this picture.

I am afraid that a lot of our spiritual activities have become nothing more than religious calisthenics of self-absorbed, cultural irrelevancy. It is not that these activities of all sorts are inherently “bad or evil” in themselves. They have just lost their context and mission. Like a bow that has lost its arrow, it is just not effective. It doesn’t mean the bow is “bad,” just missing a vital element. These activities have taken a life of their own and have lost their kingdom context of legitimacy. They are designed to build the participants into effective kingdom extending believers, not just bless them into contentedness in their church environment. When the ethic of blessing and comfort supplants transforming and equipping for service, we are in trouble.

I am also afraid that much so called prophetic intercessory prayer activity has become a spiritual narcotic for inactivity and ineffectiveness. These activities can be highly charged cathartic events, in which we “feel” energized and spiritual, but they do not yield significant, objective, measurable, and discernible kingdom fruit . . . saved souls. We have lost the ability to discern between what is genuinely a move of the Holy Spirit in our midst and what is simply the increased release of endorphins into our blood stream! The former produces converts, the latter produces thrills. The Holy Spirit was “moving” in Acts 5 when He was killing Ananias and Sapphira, but I can guarantee you there was not a “sweet presence of the Lord” in the room. There were no charismatic endorphin rushes going on.

Some of the things we engage in, I think are understandably reactionary to decades of unfruitfulness, discouragement, and disappointment in the conversion of souls. This is exacerbated by heavy-handed evangelistic techniques of the last 100 years. In a typical congregation, mentioning the word “evangelism” is like asking someone to volunteer a kidney . . . . . . .NOW! A congregation turns into an oil painting in a millisecond.

It is like we begin to believe there is a “missing element,” a technique, or spiritual dynamic that if a few really spiritual people were to rediscover and recover it, then “things would happen again” as everyone jumps on the bandwagon of the “newly restored concept.” I understand the motive. I just think it is misdirected and misspent energy. We are doing things in the prayer closet and in the building that need re-evaluation, if not complete stoppage. If they are not stopped they should at least have added to them the arrow of penetration: actually bringing the presentation of the gospel to another human being.

If I am regularly engaged in activities of alleged spiritual warfare, but haven’t had an unsaved neighbor to dinner EVER, haven’t had a conversation with an unbeliever except to condemn him in years, don’t have any unsaved friends, and haven’t led a soul to the Lord in decades, I think my status as an alleged “prophetic intercessory spiritual warrior” is at the best inflated opinion and at worst (and in my mind more likely) spiritual delusion. If we would simply do what the Scriptures have told us to do, God would do the things that we so passionately pray about! This is not a difficult busi-ness. It does require courage, but it is not difficult.

The ultimate act of spiritual warfare is a converted soul. There is not a more cosmically significant event than the transference of a soul from the kingdom of darkness to light. Get enough of these transfers, and a city or a community is changed.

Souls are won by the planting of the seed of the incorruptible Word of God in the heart of a human being, and having it take root and bear fruit there as manifested by repentance for sin. The Scripture (Rom. 10:14) says: “How shall they hear, expect a preacher be sent?” not, “How shall they hear except a prophetic intercessory praise and worship team be sent ahead to do spiritual warfare, so souls can be saved?”

Neither Paul nor Jesus had intercessory prayer teams doing advanced work for him/them. They just preached the gospel in every venue and in the face of opposition. You do not need to bind a prevailing principality to see a city won. If you win the city through the conversion of souls, the principality (whose only legal presence is through the hearts of men) loses its foothold and is broken. Changed hearts change the heavenlies, not the other way around. Like cleaning the garbage out of an alley will cause the rats to leave, so regenerated human hearts “unseat” principalities in the heavenlies. Their seat of authority on earth, the human heart, is removed from them through the glorious converting gospel.

What are we doing and why are we doing it? Being a “prophetic prayer warrior” too often means you get to keep your fingernails clean while someone else does the dirty work of actually relating to and investing in, the broken dregs of humanity. Honestly, it is just easier to pray against and “bind” the “spirit of heroin over our city” than to feed and house a drug addict.

Let’s assure that we actually put an arrow in the bow of all our spiritual endeavors, keeping the target in mind, human souls won to the King. The Word of God, is and always has been, powerful. The seed is incorruptible, and unstoppable. We just have to actually sow it.

Past Articles:

WHAT IS THE CHURCH?

December 29th, 2005

Once there was a successful apple merchant whose reputation for having excellent apples began to suffer through his lack of diligence. He got into the habit of leaving spoiled apples in his cart. In the same town there was a thief, who through the years had regularly pinched apples from the merchant’s cart. After repeated rotten apple experiences, the thief took his bandit skills elsewhere. The good news is the apple merchant was able to maintain his inventory. The bad news is, he was ignored by the thief (and paying customers) and his inventory was rotten. Now, the thief cannot blame his thievery on the rotten apples. But the merchant shouldn’t be surprised when he converts to oranges.

For hundreds of years, the unbelieving culture has taken up the challenge of Psalm 34:8 to: “taste and see that the Lord is good,” by biting into the Lord’s image on earth--the Church. Acknowledging the existence of delightful exceptions, on the whole, the taste has not matched the “as advertised” promise. The Church’s poor representation of Her Lord will never be an individually justifying excuse on judgment day: another man’s hypocrisy, does not establish my innocence. However, we who represent the Lord, and who constitute the Church, should not be surprised when the world ignores us, gives up on our apples, and starts looking for oranges elsewhere. We do carry the responsibility of representation.

For many, The Church (or a church) is synonymous with irrelevancy: an archaic institution inhabited by pallid and wispy clerics mumbling feathery platitudes to an audience of women, children, and the feeble of mind and body. The notion that the church might be something vigorous and vital--a high value necessity--has vanished from the public consciousness like morning fog under the noon-day sun. Paul McCartney captured the sentiment in his song, Eleanor Rigby:

Father MacKenzie, writing the words of sermon that no one will hear,
No one comes near.
Look at him working, darning his socks in the night when there’s nobody there,
What does he care?

Can there be an image more irrelevant than the man who is supposed to be a “flame of fire” reduced to patching his socks, alone, in the dark?. . . an accurate, and painful, artistic metaphor for the ineffectual presence of the Church in the public consciousness. It was true forty years ago when those lines were written, and unlike fine wine, the situation has not improved with time.

How did we arrive at this unfortunate state? That is a short question with a long answer. To catalog the repulsive historical failures of the Church (Her own diseases) and the assaults against Her from foes of spirit and flesh (the wounds of others), would require a few volumes, rather than a few paragraphs. I would like to confine this article to one point: . . .

. . . UNMET EXPECTATIONS

Unmet expectations are the source of conflict and relational breakdown at many levels. The human spirit can only absorb so much disappointment before it instinctively recoils. A good customer is often willing to over look a bad apple or two. A customer that really loves you might even overlook a bad bushel or two. But if your fruit makes people sick over decades or centuries, even your friends will buy elsewhere.

When I was in business, I learned that the best customer is a complaining one. A complaining customer at least gives you a chance to fix a problem. It is the silent customer you dread: he/she simply walks away, never to return.

If a thirsty man comes to a well, he expects water. The well, by its nature, advertises itself as a water source. If the well is just a hole in the ground with a rope and bucket, it should not be surprised to find itself suddenly full of rocks. It is both reasonable and fair to expect of those who profess to possess the Truth, Glory, and Power of God to demonstrate it.

The cultural irrelevancy of the church in our day derives in part from unmet expectations concerning the nature of the Church. A well, by definition and essence, advertises water. A church, in its very existence, advertises itself as “possessing something (or Someone!)” What is that “something/One?” What is the Church?” What should the Church look like? These are questions of expectation. Rather than examining the quality of our own fruit, or the dryness of our well, we too often express indignation that the question should even be asked. We curse the orange merchants and the thieves who frequent his shop as unworthy to evaluate us.

The Church is considered (erroneously) above the evaluations of this world, answerable only to a “Higher Power.” That is a formula for irrelevancy. We must not let the eternal nature of the Church immunize us from critique by those (the unbelieving world) we have supposedly been sent to serve! Those who would be elders are supposed to have a good testimony from those who are without the church (1Tim.3:7). James says that Abraham’s works justified him (James 2:21-24). They did not justify him before God—that occurs by grace and faith. There is no conflict between Paul and James. Abraham’s works “justified” him before humanity. His works legitimized his faith in the eyes of the unbeliever. The Church’s behavior/service legitimizes its message/faith in the ears of its audience. We are supposed to have works (behaviors) that testify to the reality of God and our personal faith. (Matt.5:16). Our behavior is the tray upon which we serve our message and faith. The message must be served. It cannot be thrown across the table.

When trying to explain the Church, the temptation is to rush to the Scripture for definition. What could possibly be wrong with that you might ask!? The Scripture is our source and surely has many wonderful metaphors to describe the Church! Indeed that is true. The only problem is our culture is not asking us if we are “scriptural.” As hard as it is for those of us with extensive Church background to hear and to swallow, they don’t care.

When we rush to the Scriptures we are attempting to answer a question of relevancy from a source no longer considered relevant by the asker. The question the Church is being asked by a skeptical culture is not, are you orthodox, but why should I buy your apples? We spend too much time fighting another generation’s battles, providing answers for questions no one is asking and no one cares.

We seemed obsessed to defend the fact that our apples are all properly in a row in our cart, according to the principles of the universally approved and sanctioned standard of the fraternal order of apple merchants. However, the issue isn’t the tidiness of our rows; it is the rottenness of our product. Our culture is not asking us about the basis of our belief system, it is asking for a taste and a drink! It is a taste and see matter, not a look and agree matter!

I am not saying that Scriptural and doctrinal matters are not important. They are simply not relevant to the people asking the questions. We provide the wrong information to the wrong people. So rather than quoting extensive Scripture, let’s attempt to answer a question or two regarding the nature of the Church at a conceptual level, derived from Scripture. Perhaps we can discover a few points of unrealized expectation and close the gap between advertisement and experience.

The Church is like a coin with two sides. It has two identities: the eternal, spiritual, ideal entity and the practical, historical, and actual reality. How one answers the question concerning the nature of the Church depends on which entity you are trying to describe.

There is a difference, (and always will be) between what the Church is, and what it could or should be. Problems develop when expectations are based in the former and experience is the latter. I understand that from the eternal perspective, God’s Church is destined to succeed. God is not a hand-wringing pessimist about how things are going to work out. I am going to limit my comments to the practical, historical entity—the Church in time and space—your church, and my church, and how we can cooperate in making her the best possible representation of the Lord’s intent and heart that we can.

LIFE

Eleven dead men in a locker room do not make a football team. One hundred dead people in a sanctuary do not make a church. Whatever the Church is, whatever the something it offers is, it must be first qualified as a thing that is alive. The first requirement is always life and life is delicate. It is like a campfire. If it is not regularly fueled, it will expire. A Church is either a living thing or it is not.

What is life? Well, it is not enjoying the company of people who agree with your doctrine share your interests, social status, or geography. That does not constitute a church. Neither is much activity necessarily a sign of that which is alive. Busy-ness is not life, and may actually be a counterfeit for life. The Church is a fellowship of heart. Without shared life and shared heart, you can have all manner of structure, form, and activity, but it is not a Church.

Life in Christ is like the magnetic field of the North Pole. It cannot be detected without a compass. For the genuine believer, the life of God within them as the gift of salvation will “respond” like a compass in the presence of that which is alive in Him. When something is alive, you will know it, and when it is dead, you will know it also.

It is very easy to criticize organizations from a position or distance as if the institution was some how in itself a culpable entity. In reality, the quality of any organization of human beings is simply the net result of the accumulated individuals. If my Church is dead, the language of recovery is not “him, her, and them,” but rather “me, we and us.” I am the Church. The person next to me is the Church. The next person is the Church. Together we are the Church. The group--any group--will be revitalized in direct response and proportion to the revitalization of its individual members, not as a result of some magical climate change.

A CENTER

A Church is a group of people who have a new center of life—the person of Jesus Christ. All of us have a center whether we realize it or not. It may be broken or corrupt, but we have a center. Your life center is the thing or the person to who you devote your time and energy, especially recreational energy or free time. The center for most young people is the trinity of our age: sex, drugs, and rock and roll.

Because of the worldview of the non-believer, it is difficult for them to grasp the objective reality of Christ as a new center. For the modern mind all matters of religion (and life) are subjective and pragmatic: if it works for you, it’s ok, even if it does not have any objective reality, actual existence. That is because the modern “educated mind” has determined there can be no certainty concerning truth and to claim certainty is considered ignorant and bigoted. (Of course the modern mind is certain that there is no certainty—but I will pass on that lest I digress too far and turn this into a philosophy course!)

The notion that Christ is really, factually, objectively, alive and can make Himself known to humanity is considered by many as a neurosis or psychosis. The more kindly disposed consider all things religious to be based on psychological need (if there was not a god, weak people would create one for themselves out of their need) or (for the material determinist) the result of a “religion gene” which some of us possess and some do not. These are philosophical worldviews.

Science is wonderful. Scientism is not. Scientism is the worldview and belief system that all knowledge must be subject to the methods of science to be true knowledge; and furthermore, that the methods of science will ultimately bring us to a complete understanding of all things. It is an attempt to place every dimension of life under humanity’s cognitive domain. Knowledge attained by any other means other than empirical science is not admitted as true.1

Well, the true Church is the gathering of those who have discovered that He is indeed both true and alive. They have been apprehended, netted, caught, by Jesus Christ, and they will never be the same.

BOND AND PLACEMENT

The anxiety of modern humanity is characterized in part by non-connectedness: non-connectedness to self, others, and God. The Church is divinely designed to meet the very primal need in human psychology for belongingness. A healthy church environment should provide individuals with:

• Personal identity-a sense of authentic self (Biblically defined)
• A place of “belongingness”- authenticity with others
• A sense of purpose: “What am I here for and what am I supposed to be doing?”

IDENTITY

The secular seers and geniuses of previous generations promised a day when technological advances would result in more leisure time, releasing humanity into a life of greater ease and happiness. However, the future has become the present and science and technology has failed to deliver this Edenic promise. Depression is epidemic. Our children are drugged. An entire industry (some would say conspiracy!) of pharmaceutical companies psychiatrists, psychologists, self-help gurus, and life coaches has emerged attempting to relieve the gnawing inner pain of humanity, that a better washing machine is inadequate to address. If life is so good, why are we in so much pain? After we have had all the sex we can stand, spent all the money we can, and gone to so many concerts that our ear drums are blown out, at the end of the day, we are left with our selves. . . broken . . . and in pain.

When Christ pronounces over the sinner who believes: “I accept you,” the fragmented, disintegrated, and alienated self is bonded back together by the love of God in a rush of amazing wonder. The “who am I” question is answered by Christ with: “You are mine and I call you by name.” The metaphors of the old hymn writers are accurate: I find the haven of rest. I am His, and I am home.

COMMUNITY

Isolation and alienation (loneliness) is characteristic of the modern psychological state. As a culture we have bought into the western value system of the “rugged individualist” and our personal psychology and our communities have suffered because of it. At its best, individualism serves as impetus to great achievement. In every arena, the most helpful advances to the human condition have been accomplished by great individual feats, not as a result of the work of committees! However, at its worst, individualism is unbridled self-interest, hardly a kingdom value.

We are created for “otherness.” Be it at the level of looking for “the other” (a mate), or just looking for friends, connectedness with others is a deep human longing frequently crushed under the brutalities of life experiences in a dysfunctional individualistic culture.

However, a mere aggregate of people who share similar interests or social status, does not constitute a church any more than a pile of bricks constitutes a building. In order to have a building, the bricks must be aligned (put in place) then bonded (mortared) all according to a plan.

Unfortunately, the Church is often characterized by relational breakdown and separation. The pressures of life that are divinely designed to weld and strengthen bonding commonly cause fracture and separation instead. When relationship and community are lost, the human spirit instinctively reaches out for alternatives. This is why various fraternal organizations and cults become populated. The relational vacuum in the Church sucks people into communal options where some sense of belonging exists. Even if it is shallow, people will choose shallow over nothing. They will choose shallow over religious pretension, and in the worst case, choose what is devilish.

This is why relational breakdown in the Church (at every level--marital, interpersonal) is so serious. When believer’s fail to be reconciled, it must not be dismissed as, “oh well, we just had a difference of opinion.” We must see it for what it is: the dissolution of the bond of love and a demonstration to the observing world that Christ is dead and our faith is not real. For at the very core of Christianity is the message of reconciliation. Our culture’s determination/attitude toward the Church is: if the bricks cannot hold together, the building is not worth owning. They are right. There has been failure in representation and we must admit it.

The Church is the place where individuals are placed according to God’s plan into the fabric of relationship, where God’s love becomes the binding mortar. Difficulties, trials and tests are meant to tighten the weave of the relational fabric of the planting of God.

A PURPOSE

The Church is a community of people who have been shaped by God and fitted together for a collective purpose and mission. Each individual believer has a personal purpose, but each community of faith, the local church, also has a unique purpose in its immediate geography and in the world.

One of the great joys of participation in the Church is discovery of purpose and plan. In a culture that tries to convince us that our existence is nothing more than the meaningless collision of a few atoms (we came from nothing and we are going to nothing—all that there is, or was, or will be is the cosmos as Carl Sagan deftly phrased) discovery of purpose brings an invaluable sense of well-being.

Yet if personal fulfillment and destiny does not have a context of love and service to others, it degrades into simple self-actualization with the same net result on the human soul and in the culture as purposelessness.

The nihilistic material determinist ends up living for themselves, because neither their life, nor the lives of others, has any transcendent meaning. They may appeal to “higher purpose” but in doing so, they are logically inconsistent and using borrowed ethical capital from Christianity. In a purposeless world, self-existence is all there is.

However, the Christian who awakens to “destiny” for their lives, but who lacks the context of service to God and others ( a situation common in many young people’s discipleship groups), likewise ends up living a self-centered existence energized with religion. There is no difference between them and the determinist unbeliever. It is still all about . . . me. If I had to choose between a hopeless self-centered person and a religious self-centered person, I would opt for the former. Both are blind, but the profession of sight in the latter makes the self-centeredness particularly loathsome.

Only where the ethos of Calvary is present, in the New Covenant Church, is destiny legitimately awakened and lived out.

CONCLUSION

What are we to make then of the question: “What is a Church?”

The Church is a state of being, not a place I attend once a week. The Church is the place where God has determined for the eternal to intersect the temporal. It is a place where two dimensions of life meet, and in a spiritual thermo-nuclear fusion, a new creation results, a living thing, centered in Christ: the Church of the Living God.

The Church is a state of belonging, an arena for the expression of life in community: success and failures, joy and pain, happiness and sorrow. It is a place where a person discovers his completeness and incompleteness: individually complete in Christ, yet incomplete without brothers and sisters. In the valuing of others, I discover I am valued.

The Church is simply the community of those who have genuinely experienced the renewing and regenerating life of the Lord Jesus Christ.2 They gather together on the basis of a common living union with the Lord Jesus Christ. Together they experience His bonding, and commit to sharing Him with others.

FOOTNOTES

1 Suttles, William. Spirit and Truth. Columbus: TEC Publications, 2005. p. 40-41.

2 Rumble, Dale. What’s Happening in the Workshop? Lake Katrine: Fountain of Life Publications. n.d., p.6.