We live in a consumer-driven, avaricious society where everything is turned into a commodity, even the gospel, and life is said to be fulfilled only through our choices, our ability to consumer cars and clothes and, even Christ. In such a climate, we must be careful about turning Sunday worship into just another opportunity to say, “Give me some of that.”
…Jesus is not simply about meeting my felt needs; he is also about rearranging my needs, not only about fulfilling my desires; he is also about transforming my desires. Jesus is wonderfully nonchalant about so many of my heart-felt desires. It’s amazing how many of my needs (material affluence, security, sexual fulfillment, happiness, etc.) appear not in the least to interest Jesus…
I recall that great preacher, William Sloane Coffin, telling us Yale students, “I don’t see how you can attract folk to Jesus by appealing to their basic selfishness - ‘Jesus can fix everything that’s wrong with you’ - and end up offering anything like the self-less, self-denying faith of Jesus.”
When, in Seeker Services, do we pull out the cross? When, as we’re touting all the benefits of Jesus, do we also say to them, “By the way, Jesus said that anyone who bought into his message would also suffer and die.”
I believe that today’s “Seekers” are seeking many things, but I am unsure that many of them are seeking a cruciform savior or a cruciform life. That’s fine since the Bible hardly ever, almost never depicts anybody seeking Jesus. Rather, the story is about God’s relentless seeking of us in Christ.
Willimon has really tried to push his agenda of not preaching to felt needs in the past few years. I think that he is beginning to see the end result of such preaching. It comes from the "be all you can be" kind of thinking. This is great for the military and for the business world. In the religious world Jesus came to be all we should have been. Thank God my lack doesn't keep me from a right relationship with God. Thank God that his perfection makes me whole.
4 comments:
Great quote, Bob. Willimon is one of my favorites, as well.
bob-
I like the post. I agree with not preaching to 'felt' needs but that we should preach to 'dealt' needs- we are required to be a certain kind of person in Christ.
How exactly do you see "be all you can be" different from "be all we should have been"?
It would seem they are the same (or I think should be) as a Christian.
Don (Donneyland?), the "be all you can be" mentality makes human strength, accomplishments, and success the criteria by which we judge our Christian life. There are ministry books filled with "steps" on how to do "great" things for God, which means "be successful." God doesn't call us to be successful but rather faithful. If we happen to have success in our faithfulness, that is great. But books are marketed that give us the impression that success and faithfulness are one in the same. I'm not preaching to create good people who are successful but rather I preach to create Christians who are faithful to the end. Just because one church baptizes 100 doesn't make them any better than a church that baptizes 10. Who knows maybe in that 10 someone goes to another church and baptizes 1,000. Yet we glorify the church who baptizes 100 and read their books on how they did it. I'm not against reading books on how to create strategies for evangelism, I just think we need to be careful that we don't trust our strategies over the one who raised Jesus from the dead.
bob-
Thanks... OK
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