Remembering Dallas Willard

Some years ago my friend, Todd Hunter, invited my wife and me to join him and a few other pastors for lunch with Dallas Willard. It was during a conference in Phoenix that Todd and Dallas were leading, and I was excited to meet Dallas and spend a little time talking with him.

The conversation around the lunch table touched on a number of interesting topics. I asked Dallas if he thought that the concept of formal church membership was dying in the US. He said, “If we don’t give people a way to belong, then we leave them to the ravages of consumerism.” How does someone come up with a statement so memorable over a club sandwich and iced tea?

After a while, a young church planter at the table told a remarkable story. He was working with a team to plant a church in Beirut, Lebanon. They had two kinds of gatherings: One for Muslim inquirers who wanted to engage in conversations about faith, and one exclusively for their small group of Christians, where they could talk, pray, and worship freely.

One of the members of his team had become acquainted with a Muslim woman who was a high-profile Lebanese journalist. She expressed interest in hearing more about Jesus, so he invited her to a gathering.

But it was the wrong gathering.

When she arrived on the appointed evening—an evening reserved for prayer and worship—the young pastor was understandably nervous. What would be the consequences of this well-educated Muslim woman experiencing Christian, charismatic worship? It was too late to make any changes in the agenda, so a CD of worship music was popped into the player (no one apparently had a guitar), and the time of worship began.

He said that, initially, the woman just watched the others as they stood, kneeled, lifted hands in the air, and worshipped Jesus with abandon. He closed his eyes and prayed that the Lord would protect them from trouble. When he opened his eyes a song or two later, he saw the woman standing on her feet, hands raised in the air, and tears streaming down her face.

Most of us thought this was a great conversion story. But then the young pastor asked a question that revealed his purpose in telling the story in the first place. He said,

“The thing is, Dallas, that this woman now considers herself to be a Muslim who follows Jesus.”

Before anyone else could respond, Dallas firmly declared,

“How could she be anything other than that?”

After my head quit spinning, I was able to give deeper consideration to his statement. He wasn’t, as some might assume, allowing the woman to conflate Christianity and Islam, creating her own private mix of religions. Nor was he diminishing the lordship of Jesus. He was opening our minds to something that I’ve come to understand a little better over the years: That religion is, for many people, as deeply imbedded in culture as it is in a formal belief system.

For the woman in that story, to stop being Muslim might have been the equivalent of turning in her Lebanese citizenship. It is very likely that her relationship to Islam was tied as deeply to her relationships with family, friends, and culture as it was to her system of belief.

When you stop and think about it, we in the Christian world have our own versions of cultural embeddedness. Perhaps we can understand how our faith becomes much more to us than adherence to a creed. We have traditions, practices, memories, language, and relationships that are deeply entwined in our belief systems.

I continue to be grateful to Dallas for his gift of time on that day. I’ve shared this story many times over the years, especially with my seminary students, and most have found it helpful.

Sometimes I’ve wondered about the intellectual and spiritual loss that occurs when someone like Dallas Willard leaves us. Where does it all go? I’ve decided that it goes into those of us who remain, and our responsibility is to be, to even the smallest degree, that same kind of person for the benefit of others.

Worship Revisited

My friend Jason Clark presented a brilliant paper at the Society of Vineyard Scholars conference last week in Anaheim. He shared it with me and I’ve been thinking about it for the last couple of days. The title of the paper is:

Worship as re-narration: The unique problems and possibilities of Charismatic Evangelical Worship in late capitalist society.

Jason is British, which means that it took me a long time to read the paper because there were very long words that replaced the American Z with a British S, causing me to stop and stare, making vain attempts at re-interpretation, and then falling asleep and waking hours later, wondering where I was. But I finally got through it.

Recognizing that Evangelicalism (including the charismatic brand) has fallen on hard times, he takes a look at the deep structure of it and suggests that we might be throwing out babies with bathwater if we jettison evangelical worship because it sometimes appears shallow and consumeristic, and assume that authenticity can only be found in alternative ecclesiastical settings (or lack of setting altogether).

I’ve frequently lamented the trend to link the word evangelical with various American voting blocks or with bands of anti-everything lunatics. I also think that to reduce evangelical to a hard-edged proselytizing movement or as cousins to fundamentalism are insufficient characterizations (although sometimes deserved).

We get the word evangelical from a biblical Greek word that means good news. It comes from ancient military language that describes the message and messenger that brings the announcement that a battle has been won. But in relation to God, good news is about God’s rule and reign. So, Isaiah can say,

How beautiful upon the mountains
 are the feet of the messenger who announces peace,
who brings good news, who announces salvation, who says to Zion, “Your God reigns.” (52:7)

And Jesus can say, citing Isaiah 61,

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor.” (Luke 4:18)

The word evangelical, when linked to the biblical concept of good news, moves away from claims to cultural, political, and religious power or pragmatic instrumentalism and moves toward authentic worship of God and witnesses to the present reality of his kingdom.

When the word charismatic is added into the mix, there is an expectation that this is not about mere information or function—it is about the ongoing work, presence, and power of the Holy Spirit—the Spirit of God, the Spirit of Christ (see Romans 8:9-11).

The problem with worship in the evangelical/charismatic context is that it has often been limited to music or to particular ecstatic phenomena. But in other contexts it has been limited to the Eucharist, the sermon, or detachment from organized religion altogether.

I think what my friend Jason (which, in America, would be spelled Jazon), is communicating is not that evangelical/charismatic brands of worship have it all together, but rather that there is imbedded in the essence of that shared ecclesial life and theology the potential for reframing the holistic, expansive, and truly spiritual nature of worship.

I would love to see worship expressed in corporate gatherings in music and song, reflection on the scriptures, prayers of the people, ministry of the Spirit, prophetic utterances, confession and thanksgiving, fellowship and friendship, generosity and care, Eucharist, blessing, and sending.

The only problem with my idea is that church services would last four or five hours each week. I’m not sure our cultural embeddedness would allow for that, not to mention the tragedy of missing lunch. Although, if the Lord’s table became a table of a true, shared meal, where all would come at the invitation of Jesus, then everything would work out just fine.

I’ll get back to you on that one.

Going Crazy about New York

When I recently heard about New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s effort to ban the sale of sugared soft drinks of more than 16 ounces in certain venues, I was irritated that something so ridiculous as regulating soda intake could not only waste people’s time and energy, but also require the rest of us to talk about the subject as though it deserved being talked about in the first place. I was convinced that the world had, indeed, gone insane.

However, I then heard a psychologist on the radio talk about the other side of things. He pointed out that the world of marketing tends to continually reset the standard of normalcy for consumers. At one time, an 8-ounce glass bottle of soda would have been considered a reasonable serving. Today, 32-ounces in a large, plastic, refillable cup is the baseline for consumption. If a small plate of food at one time satisfied human hunger and provided sufficient nutrition, food marketers then reset the standard to a plate twice the size with more fat, salt, and MSG. We consumers tend to accept those new standards without question.

It occurs to me that we often find ourselves living between two external forces. On one side is the formation that we experience through marketing. We are told that we need soda, chips, electronics, luxury cars, etc., and we allow our standards to be set for us, often without reflection, critique, or resistance. On the other side is legislation that seeks to limit the seemingly boundless power of marketing by requiring the printing of nutrition facts, hidden costs, estimated gas mileage, or limits on purchasing (as in the New York proposal). We live between those forces and let them have their way with us.

Do we really have no choice here? Must we succumb to the siren song of marketing over here, and then trust that legislation will save us from ourselves over there? Please, say it ain’t so, Joe.

For we who, in particular, are interested in the possibility that our lives might actually be formed by the ongoing life of God, can we not learn some new disciplines of critique and reflection? If we are told that we must drink this drink, or watch this show, or drive that car, or eat certain foods in certain volumes, can we not stop and reflect on the potential effects on both our inward and outward lives, and then act in ways that resist the promises of marketing and then render the machinery of consumer legislation unnecessary? If people had resisted the intake of massive amounts of sugary soda, then Mr. Bloomberg’s proposal would have been irrelevant and probably never offered in the first place.

We are not batteries that fuel a giant profit-making machine. We are humans, made in the image of God, called to care for and participate in the world that God loves and intends for his good. That includes caring for ourselves.

The Biggest Threat to the American Way of Life

I’ve just discovered a very dangerous group of subversives who threaten the consumer demand, free-market capitalism system that makes America great. Forget the Socialists, the Communists, the Green Party or any other group that seeks to undermine all that is great about western civilization. This group is more potentially devastating than any other.

They are called followers of Jesus.

I avoid the terms Christian, Protestant, Catholic, or any other moniker that seeks to create a definable and predictable category. These people can be found throughout those faith systems and probably wouldn’t be accepted by their own religious tribes if their values and actions were popularly known. They are clearly a minority group, but one whose potential influence could undermine our preferred way of life.

Here’s why they are dangerous.

They are refusing to buy things without knowing their origin. If a shirt at a megastore has a label that says “Made in ¬¬¬¬____________” (fill in the blank with any country in the southern hemisphere or in Asia), they want to know the conditions of the factory and the quality of the treatment of the workers. They claim that these invisible weavers of expensive clothing are kin to them, co-humans made in the image of God, and the relationship between production and consumption matters. If they don’t get a satisfactory answer, then they won’t buy the product. Such activity limits the power of consumer shopping and potentially diminishes corporate profits.

They do the same thing with food. They see some strange connection between their faith and the natural (or as they call it, “created”) order, and have either started growing their own fruits and vegetables, buying only from local producers, or at least only buying from larger markets that guarantee to have “fair trade” products.

One the most potentially deadly plans of this group is to stop spending large amounts of money and refusing to dive deeply into credit card debt during the holidays—especially Christmas. A diminishing of holiday binge spending would have a disastrous effect on retailers and their end of the year numbers. The stock market would reel if the trend expanded to larger groups, such as the Evangelical voting block or Roman Catholics.

There is more, of course, such as caring for the poor (an obvious bleeding-heart, socialist move), shunning violence (a potential threat to national security), loving one’s enemy (a denial of the nation’s manifest destiny and sovereignty). But it’s the financial impact of this group that is the most immediate threat.

These people are our enemies (of course, they are difficult enemies to have since they claim to love us) and cannot be ignored. They seem to have forgotten what happened to their namesake—Jesus—and the way he was dispatched for attempting to disrupt the dominant culture. The same thing could happen to them. They probably never factored in suffering and death in their commitments to follow their Messiah.

Let’s hope this never catches on with other religious people. Keeping things as they are is the highest priority.