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.

Engaging with the Reality of God's Work

I have been reading Mark Noll’s very helpful book, The New Shape of World Christianity. As he describes the character of the global Christian church as decreasingly European and North American, and increasingly African, Asian, and Latin American, he asks the question, “How much are the supernatural events that fill the pages of Scripture to be considered normative examples for what happens right now?” (p. 36) This is a question that is often answered differently in places like Africa than in Europe or the US.

Theology in the western world often remains abstract. For example, people still argue (to a lesser degree than in the 1980s) about the “inerrancy” of the Bible. People who stand for use of that word in relation to Scripture are seen by their detractors as narrow in their thinking, while those on the other side are often characterized as having a low view of Scripture.

But the debate isn’t typically about whether or not Scripture is authoritative; it’s about what language best describes that authority. The problem with our use of language is that it can only approximate reality and can allow us to remain abstract in our thinking.

When the view of inerrancy is examined, it is usually a claim that only the original manuscripts of the Bible are inerrant—without any errors regarding theology, distances between cities, number of soldiers on the battlefield, and so on. Most people recognize that the ancient manuscripts we have today show variances in them, so the focus is only on the original documents—the ones with the fingerprints of Moses, Isaiah, Matthew, John, Paul and all their friends on them.

Except that we don’t have those documents.

So “inerrancy” can remain only a theory. It is not possible to verify the claim. Yet, most of us still believe in the authority and inspiration of the biblical texts. Some of us just don’t think that “inerrancy” is the right word to describe the character of those texts.

But we can get really tangled up in the abstractness of the conversation, separating ourselves into camps based on theory, debating about the character of Scripture and missing something that our brothers and sisters in other parts of the world seem to grasp: That Scripture tells a story that is living, and we live today in the ongoing reality of that story. The language that describes that story doesn’t alter its character or its effect.

And many of our non-western friends claim that supernatural occurrences still happen—things like healings, exorcisms, the raising of the dead, and so on. For them, the Scriptures are not, for the most part, abstract at all. Noll comments,

“With only some hyperbole, we might say that although some of the world’s new Christian communities are Roman Catholic, some Anglican, some Baptist, some Presbyterian and many independent, almost all are Pentecostal in a broad sense of the term.” (p. 34)

Pentecostal and Charismatic folks in our culture have also made claims about the ongoing activities of the supernatural world, but in our theological work most of us can stay in the world of theories—whether about the nature of Scripture, proper images of the Atonement, creation and science, etc.—and never move into the work and activity of God in the world. Our brothers and sisters in the south and east haven’t separated theory from purposeful practice.

The rest of us have a lot to learn from them.

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.